Moms killing kids not nearly as rare as we think - Yahoo! News
NEW YORK – "How could she?"
It's the headline du jour whenever a horrific case emerges of a mother killing her kids, as Lashanda Armstrong did when she piled her children into her minivan and drove straight into the frigid Hudson River.
Our shock at such stories is, of course, understandable: They seem to go against everything we intuitively feel about the mother-child bond.
But mothers kill their children in this country much more often than most people would realize by simply reading the headlines; by conservative estimates it happens every few days, at least 100 times a year. Experts say more mothers than fathers kill their children under 5 years of age. And some say our reluctance as a society to believe mothers would be capable of killing their offspring is hindering our ability to recognize warning signs, intervene and prevent more tragedies.
And so the problem remains.
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I agree, communities ought to be more responsive to signs of trouble. The government ought to support communities in being responsive, but it should fall first to the people closest to the issue, and they need to be able not to fear seeing someone they love who's already having some kind of a hard time given a worse time by overreaction on the part of the powers-that-be. We need to be able to address the people around us and give them space to be honest about what's happening and how they're feeling without such a small gap between admitting they have a problem and having their families torn apart, risking jail if they've already done something for which the law would require that as punishment, and to have people they love and respect help them find their way to better choices and the security that would reduce their stress and help them to act and react more appropriately. A lot of people are desperate right now, and a lot of people would rather die than fail their children, and would rather their children die than go into the system, which should tell us everything we need to know about how well that system's working, or how badly it's failing. I hear soldiers tell stories about mothers throwing their babies under tanks with bombs strapped to them, and I wonder what it takes for a mother to feel that's a better fate for her child than to live in a country you can't be driven out of. There are cultural differences in how children are viewed and treated, yes, but the biological drive to protect them is always there, and when it isn't anymore, when low estimates are that it's happening at least once every three days in our 'advanced' nation, we have to stop pointing fingers at the aberrations and find ways to address whatever's perverting our senses so badly that it's 'not uncommon'. Or, we have to accept the natural science's contention that some women will never be good mothers, but even in that case it's better that they be allowed to admit that and be okay with it, and if they get pregnant make choices based in balanced reason and emotion, than that they make choices based upon social consciousness or the fear of rejection or stigma.
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