Thanks. I would appreciate if a mod could fix that.
You do know, I hope, that just posting here doesn’t magically summon a moderator. You need to actually report your own post.
I’m wondering about this. I know a family with a severely autistic child who is sometimes violent. He’s only five right now, and they’re, my gosh, doing everything they can, early intervention and all that. And yet… sometimes it seems like he’s doing better, and sometimes it seems like he’s getting worse.
At what point do you accept that it’s not enough, that the child isn’t going to get better, and that you have to institutionalize the child?
I was reading an article about Adam Lanza the other day. It contained an interview with his dad who described how he and the mom got divorced (like in the Sky Walker case, too) and in the wake, the Mom got isolated with the kid. In both cases, the moms showed obvious signs of physical abuse but they insisted that everything was ok. They’d say that it was all their fault for disturbing their sons and if they could just manage his routine perfectly, he’d be fine. But of course, no one can ever be perfect so they’d fail, triggering another round of violence.
I think two things. We need to have a loud and public discussion that makes it clear that domestic violence includes parental abuse along with child and spousal abuse. The state should have stepped in and prosecuted Adam and Sky for assault even if the moms wanted to press charges. Neighbors should call the police if they think assault is happening. Family members need to step in even if it pisses the Moms off.
As a society, I think we need to say loudly that no parent should be expected to receive violence from a child and it’s ok to call the police if the child hits you.
The other thing is, I think we need to be loud that it’s never ok for half the family to just abandon their children. Adam Lanza and Sky Walker’s fathers both got divorced and moved away. They knew their sons were damaged individuals. They were terribly remiss to leave it all on their wives shoulders - yes, even if that meant they’d have to see their ex wives more, even if it interfered with their job plans or their new families. They should have helped with the heavy lifting of getting the boys the help they needed.
OP, you’re in CT, right?
Contact someone at Ädelbrook (I’d recommend Julie or Beverly given their work - I know them professionally) to see if they can help you. Not with funding, but they’ll probably know someone in your area who can help you get treatment for your son aggression issues at the very least, which will make it easier to have him at home.
I don’t know how I feel about this.
Let’s say Adam’s mother, fed up with being abused and whatever, finally threw up her hands and told Adam’s father, “YOU take him! Cuz I’m fucking going crazy with this kid!!” And then washed her hands of him for awhile. It would be hard for me to render judgment on “abandonment” in this situation.
Seems to me the mother and Adam were being taken care of by the father monetarily. Adam didn’t really seem to care that his father wasn’t in the picture, and it’s possible that the mother didn’t either. I’m not sure the father’s can be blamed for not taken a more active role given these two things.
In Sky’s case, his father didn’t abandon him – he stuck around and DID see him regularly. And at one point, when he knew Sky was so bad that Trudy could no longer handle him, he had him placed in a facility where he could get the help he needed. Trudy took him out, because she couldn’t accept that Sky was beyond her control.
It’s a tragedy, but it wasn’t his fault.
Re the kids-
You’re going to prosecute autistic/developmentally delayed kids with emotional control issues for inter-family violence because their mothers choose quite deliberately to keep them close at hand in the home, and they act out?
If you keep a grown male chimpanzee in the house are you going to prosecute the chimp if he gets violent and injures someone? Both the chimp and the autistic kid have about the same capacity to learn from their mistakes. These kids have broken brains and their mothers are rolling the dice. You think an autistic kid is going to be able to appreciate the gravity of his crimes and agree to sin no more?
Your notion of aggressively prosecuting them as if they were wife beaters is foolhardy and oblivious to the realities of the situation.
Re the dads -
As a divorced dad I know how the game works. I will assure that dads being at a distance is often very heavily influenced by how difficult the mother makes it to see the child and some ex-wives will pull every string they can to keep the dad from seeing the kids just out of spite. Re the cooperative “heavy lifting” good luck with that if the mother and dad are at odds about the best course of care.
The mother, Trudy, was the daughter of a psychiatrist who for some years was the head of a state facility for the MR/DD population (and she said that many of those people were probably autistic). She was afraid her son would end up in a state-run home and didn’t want that for him. That’s why she kept him at home long after she knew she couldn’t care for him on her own. Sky’s father didn’t live in the same area (IIRC, she was the one who moved away, for a better job) but you are right, he did see him regularly and Sky lived with him during school vacations.
By all accounts, Adam Lanza was the one who wanted nothing to do with his father, not the other way around, and Nancy had very serious mental health issues herself, which I’m sure contributed heavily to the divorce.
Yes, because it would help create a paper trail which the kid will need in order to apply for state and federal assistance and placement in a residential treatment facility.
It would also get the kid out of the house so he couldn’t terrorize or harm the other family members. Sky’s mother once wrote about huddling in the closet with a younger child while Sky pounded and kicked the door. We haven’t heard anything about Sky’s siblings, really, but it’s a damned shame that Trudy didn’t show the same concern for her other child’s wellbeing that she showed for for Sky.
No, you’re missing the point. I don’t care about punishing people like Walker or Lanza. (I don’t care about punishing criminals even if their brains aren’t broken.) I care about getting them out of the house where they can’t hurt themselves or their family members. I care about getting them into an institution before they start killing people.
If there’s a chimp in your house - I care about getting the chimp out of the house even though the owner will be sad to lose their friend.
Again, you miss my point. I’m talking about the response of the victim not the motivations of the abuser. Parental abuse and spousal abuse both rely on codependent parties who agree to keep silent from guilt and grief and overdeveloped concern for the violent individual. One of the hardest things about addressing domestic violence is getting the victims past their embarassment and feelings to understand that they don’t deserve to be treated like this.
What I was saying is that we need as a society to recognize that the victims of parental abuse deserve our love and assistance the same way that the victims of spousal or child abuse do. When a child attacks a parent, the decision to prosecute should be taken out of the parents’ hands, just as it is when a parent attacks a child. That will help take some of the guilt and difficult decisions off the parent’s shoulders.
And again, in addition to getting the violent party out of the house, this begins the documentation for when the time comes that a violent child needs to be institutionalized.
I have precisely zero fucks to give for all that. People who have a hundred excuses about why they just have to move a hundred miles away from their frighteningly ill son? They are shitty people. People who have a hundred reasons why it’s all someone else’s fault that they don’t see their kids? Shitty people. People who think they can waltz off and not participate in the heavy lifting just because it’s hard?
Shitty. People.
Lanza and Walker’s dads should have not gotten a divorce and moved hours away. They should have stayed in the house with the boys who needed them. Yes it’s hard. It’s unfair. It screws up his plans. Tough shit. The boys needed a dad and the moms needed help.
RE: Sky Walker - his mother stayed around the Akron/Kent area. His Dad moved to Wisconsin when Sky was fourteen. Two years later they got divorced. Initially, the dad took Sky for a month every summer and the occasional weekend. (This is all spelled out in the article I posted above).
Adam Lanza’s dad separated from his mom when he was 9. He moved an hour away but saw Adam on weekends. In the later years, while still a minor, Adam hated to see his dad for reasons he never really articulated. After turning 18, Adam stopped all contact with his dad. The Lanzas’ divorce was finalized during those last few years.
Here by the way is the Lanza article I was talking about -
All that said, I’m not blaming the dads directly. They didn’t break the poor kids’ brains. That was just bad luck. The dads didn’t help but they should have seen that proper arrangements were made for the boys.
“Try not to irritate him and hope for the best” is not a workable longterm plan for a severely violent and mentally ill child. What I was trying to say up thread was that steps need to be taken sooner to get the state involved so that a place can be found that will keep everyone safe.
I’m pretty sure Sky was his mother’s only child. There was a step- or half-sibling (I think step) on his father’s side.
And as for getting divorced, “staying together for the kids” benefits NOBODY.
You are living in a dreamworld.
The part you are missing in this scenario is what really happens when the the nuke of the law is dropped on these families. You seem to have this impression that you go straight from the police dragging the kid off the jail and then magically the social service fairies come in and make everything all better. That’s not the way it works in the real world. The mother is likely to spend every last dime she has paying for legal representation for the kid. Whatever thin emotional ice the autistic kid is skating on is likely to collapse when the police taser him and take him away screaming and howling in cuffs and dump him in the lockup.
Beyond this you are betting he’s going to be treated by the police like a mentally damaged soul they need to take pity on and not a howling, screaming, kicking, resisting, acting out massively irritating perp they will use as a punching bag when subduing him.
An autistic kid is not a rational actor nor is the mother’s behavior if she fears losing her kid to an institution. Your stated compassionate goal of getting the family help at the end of police baton and taser will not play out the way imagine. The mother will spend every last dime and do anything she can to get him back in the house, and at the end of this little scene he will be back in the house and emotionally wired like a terrified feral animal more dangerous than ever, and she will be hugely impoverished by the legal bills she has taken on make this happen.
The Chicago Tribune just ran a story on the difficulty of finding funding for residential theraputic schools:
Uh, you need to be registered to read that story.
Sorry; didn’t realize. Try this:
(won’t show reader comments)
Thanks.