Over the weekend, a blog post entitled "I Am Adam Lanza's Mother" went viral. The author, Liza Long, described the extremely dangerous behavior of he son and worried that he could some day become the next mass murderer.
The many responses to this blog post have also gone viral. Some criticized this woman for publishing her son's name. Others have gone through her blog posts to find supposed evidence of bad parenting. Others have said that she has created a hysteria about autistic children.
Liz Long's post was most striking not for the description of her son, but for the solitude that she felt. She had to handle a very difficult children entirely on her own. She needs a community of support and a team of professionals to assist her. Her blog post was written entirely from a first person perspective. I would like to have heard more "we" and less "I."
I'm quite certain that Long's son won't become the next mass murderer, because 99.9% of even very troubled individuals like Long's son don't end up as mass murderers. They usually just end up doing hurting themselves in the form of drug abuse and more conventional acts of violence. But this poor woman is still handling an enormous burden by herself.
If everybody is searching for answers, maybe one positive change is to keep those families safer and to help those with bigger burdens than our own.
Apt. 11d 
I could not agree more. The shooting is a senseless, horrific tragedy and I do not take anything away from everyone’s suffering about that. It is a uniquely terrible thing.
But mental illness (and neurological differences) and violence take many lives every day, as well as impact on families, and access to really expert help is so critical for youth and families…and so hard to achieve. I heard an interesting thing on a talk show up here where someone said we (in Canada) help people get treated for the flu, even if they turn up in emergency and they are unlikely to be one of the people for whom the flu is catastrophic. But “minor” mental health issues are often left to private insurance and GPs to treat.
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From the press reports, I wonder about Nancy Lanza. The instruction to multiple baby sitters never to leave her younger son alone, not even to go to the bathroom, is beyond peculiar. How many divorced mothers own five guns? The primary social contacts the press have found are family, drinkers at the local bar, and members of her bunco group (note the connection with alcohol.)
How does one notice mental illness in a young man who has been diagnosed autistic or asperger’s? If a young man rarely speaks, and spends much of his time playing violent video games, how easy will it be to detect paranoid schizophrenia (for example)? It’s very unusual for a teen not to have a Facebook, Twitter or MySpace account.
We have a male relative who doesn’t speak much. It’s a distinctive pattern. He does have friends, he did complete high school, but it’s very hard to know what’s going on in his head. If he were isolated in his bedroom, and his mother were isolated as well, who’s to know?
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I am concerned about a shift in our culture. When my high school senior was young, I tried to find little green army men, out of a bout of retro nostalgia. I finally found them at KMart, in a plastic bag, hanging with air fresheners and cigarette lighters. This was the era of Zany Brainy, which promised “no violent toys.” Remember Zany Brainy?
Then 9/11 happened. Now, I can buy pink camo. Many teens are playing violent video games. A teacher told me they’re careful to monitor the release dates of the hot games, because the boys will play them through the nights, i.e., they can’t schedule tests for the days immediately following the release, if they want the boys to pass.
I wish the media would stop talking about Columbine. So many of the teenaged shooters, or wannabe shooters, mention Columbine.
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I have yet to hear anyone really speak ill of the father of Adam Lanza, which proves the point that “No one is sympathetic to the mother of a psychopath.” See:
For what it’s worth, the President’s unforgettable speech yesterday gave me a renewed sense of hope that something will be done.
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The father of Adam Lanza did not live in the same town. Some press reports stated his wife initiated the divorce at the end of 2008. Although they had joint custody, his son lived with his ex-wife. It’s hard to monitor a child from a different town.
I do not envy Adam Lanza’s brother and father.
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I share all of Cranberry’s questions about Nancy Lanza. The mother of the “I am Adam Lanza’s mother” article hides sharp objects, while Adam Lanza’s actual mother apparently took him to the shooting range regularly.
I also think it’s worth noting the in this article, and in the Lanza home, Dad had left. A father leaving the family can cause unspeakable hurt and rage, especially in young boys who are already troubled, bullied, or ostracized. No rejection hurts like a Dad who doesn’t want to live with you anymore. Who knows, maybe Lanza thought this would finally get Dad’s attention, or be some sort of monstrous punishment for the divorce and remarriage. IMO, Penelope Trunk has done a good job publicizing all the research that shows how devastating divorce is to kids. More people should be aware of that. We need to work on strengthening marriages and convincing people who would not otherwise stay together that it’s worth staying together for the kids’ sake.
I feel badly for the Mom in the article, but the situation seems downright abusive for the other siblings who have to lock themselves in the car. “Michael” in the article needs to be in a some kind of institution before and not after he hurts mom, his brothers and sisters, himself, or somebody else.
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BTW, having read Liza Long’s blog, it does seem possible that she is the crazy one. I admit that it’s possible that a hundred bad things, all caused by evil others, can happen to one person, but it’s very unusual and rightly provokes skepticism.
That is one of several reasons why data is not the plural of anecdote, especially anecdotes on the internet which might not be true.
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Still, what could a sane parent of even average financial means really do if they feared physical harm from their own child? Wouldn’t the child have to either threaten or commit a serious crime or have a serious crime committed against them by their parents/guardians in order to be placed in any type of long-term state-ordered non-parental custody? Even assuming the anecdotes aren’t true, isn’t that the reality of the lack of support and options parents of dangerous kids face today?
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“The mother of the “I am Adam Lanza’s mother” article hides sharp objects, while Adam Lanza’s actual mother apparently took him to the shooting range regularly.”
That’s a false dichotomy. Just because one child’s behaviors make his mother treat him as a foreseeable threat, it doesn’t mean Adam Lanza’s criminal behavior was necessarily foreseeable to his mother, or to anyone else.
Why isn’t anyone reading Peter Lanza the proverbial absentee dad riot act?
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“Why isn’t anyone reading Peter Lanza the proverbial absentee dad riot act?”
Because it wasn’t his guns that were used?
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I have been questioning this. Where’s the dad?
One view of the Lanza family is that the dad bailed, the brother bailed, and the mom was left with the unstable kid. Even if the mother was herself not in any shape to handle him, she’s the only one who didn’t bail on him.
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I wouldn’t call financial support and visitation rights of a near-adult “bailing.”
As the brother is 24, he did the normal thing. He finished school, attended college, and got a job. All normal and proper for a young adult.
There are many introverted high school students, or community college students, living in their divorced mother’s basement playing Call of Duty. Some of them may have had learning disabilities in school.
There’s a huge difference between a quiet, shy teen and a psychopath. We have had no indication so far that anyone considered Adam Lanza a danger in any way. So far, there’s been no interview with his psychiatrist. Did he have one?
Wouldn’t the child have to either threaten or commit a serious crime or have a serious crime committed against them by their parents/guardians in order to be placed in any type of long-term state-ordered non-parental custody?
In our state, parents may declare a child a “child in need of services.” They must relinquish parental rights in court. A friend did this to get her child placed into a foster home. Her child was bipolar, but it took a long time to get the diagnosis. I don’t know if Connecticut has similar provisions.
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Did the dad have visitation? Reports I’ve read said he and the brother had not had any contact with Adam since 2010. That qualifies as bailing in my book.
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What cranberry said. I certainly can’t agree that the brother “bailed.” He has his own life to live, and one hardly owes a brother the lifelong obligations one owes a child. As to the father, it seems to me a plausible reading that he, very reasonably, gave primary custody to the non-working spouse, while he worked the hours necessary to pay $250,000 in support. It would be nice if he visited on occasion, but I don’t know that he didn’t.
You know, not everything is someone’s fault. Luke 13:1-4.
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I personally don’t blame either parent. However lots of people are inspecting Nancy Lanza’s parenting and finding it comes up short. As you treat the mother, so should you treat the father.
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“However lots of people are inspecting Nancy Lanza’s parenting and finding it comes up short. As you treat the mother, so should you treat the father.”
I don’t think we really have enough information (or at least we didn’t as of a couple days ago). Do we know yet what the school plan for Adam was that made his mother bail on the school? That might clear things up.
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I’m not sure how reliable this is, but it makes sense:
“The gunman who slaughtered 20 children and six adults at a Connecticut elementary school may have snapped because his mother was planning to commit him to a psychiatric facility, according to a lifelong resident of the area who was familiar with the killer’s family and several of the victims’ families.
Adam Lanza, 20, targeted Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown after killing his mother early Friday because he believed she loved the school “more than she loved him,” said Joshua Flashman, 25, who grew up not far from where the shooting took place.”
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/12/18/fear-being-committed-may-have-caused-connecticut-madman-to-snap/
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The person I blame is Adam Lanza, full stop. I raised the question of why folks aren’t assigning blame to his father as they heap it on his late mother because I’m interested in critiquing the social structure of care – how it is privatized and gendered. The unspoken premise is that care for a child is still not generally seen as a father’s responsibility. The other unspoken premise is that if a young man commits suicide and multiple homicides then he cannot have been mothered well, forget the father.
No one blames Peter Lanza (nor do I) because the guns weren’t his, and he was not part of Adam’s daily life best we can tell. I don’t blame his mother “even though the guns were hers” – though my anti-gun self can’t resist saying I’m actually encouraged that this seems to be the dominant social view being discussed now – like all of a sudden there’s a public intuition that we could have accomplice liability for the gun owner whenever their lawful gun is used in a mass murder.
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