<p>Adam was <em>given</em> authority over his relationship with his father then. </p>
<p>All human beings, let alone sons and fathers, have a duty to be civil to one another; not ignore their existence. That is what Adam was allowed to do to his father, by his father (and mother). </p>
<p>This is getting silly, now. Sadly, there are probably millions of adult children who have no relationship with one parent or the other. Blaming anyone is pointless.</p>
<p>True, but JHS was apparently not speaking about Adam as an adult because he used the custody arrangement as the reason Peter didn’t see Adam. </p>
<pre><code> There comes a point that every parent should step in and try to help their son or daughter if they feel that they are in serious trouble. The son and daughter might not like it but it may save their life. I am thinking addictions, eating disorders, suicidal thoughts etc. Any disorder where that person is no longer capable of seeing things clearly.
Adam was in trouble. To allow your son to deteriorate to the point of his inability to help himself is inexcusable. Adam was drowning and everyone just stood by and watched.
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<p>I would do everything in my power to intervene, everything. You are the only advocate in this persons life. You must act.</p>
<p>His father, as would anyone, desperately wants to believe he had no other choices but to follow along. He cannot possibly allow himself to believe that he could have helped. That would be too much guilt to bear. He left the marriage and in the end had not seen his son for two years. </p>
<p>Would anything have helped? No one knows. </p>
<p>I think someone earlier mentioned the proverbial frog in the pot of slowly heating water. He never jumps out as he didn’t realize he was slowing boiling to death.</p>
<p>Adams family had shut off all means of helping Adam by hiding behind closed doors. They effectively left him alone to deal with his own demons. </p>
<p>No one was seeing clearly. They were all in the pot.</p>
<p>I guess it’s just hard to accept that sometimes (often) parents are powerless. I have a niece who died of anorexia at around age 20. Her parents had all the experts, doctors, and hospitals in town involved and nothing helped. Do they blame themselves? Probably. But, universally everyone will tell them there is nothing more they could have done. We don’t know in this situation who exactly knew exactly how bad things had gotten and it’s just useless projecting in hindsight to assume that someone else who saw him would have had the magical cure. I doubt it.</p>
<p>Adams family did not have anyone around to help (including dad). Big difference from your nieces situation. So sorry about that. </p>
<p>I think that another factor here is that, if I am not mistaken, they had received the diagnosis of Asperger’s rather late, after many years of wondering what was “wrong” with Adam and trying to deal with his needs. So it appeared that they were viewing what went on with him through a strictly Asperger’s lens. It does not appear that they considered that he might be suffering from a mental illness also. And, quite likely, he wasn’t until again, quite late in the process. After all, he was at the age wher such illnesses commonly emerge.</p>
<p>As harsh as it sounds, there is an element of truth to Mezzo’s Mama’s post upthread. While allowances have to be made when mental illness is involved, Adam’s illness was permitted to totally encompass his immediate world at the expense of everyone else. This happens to some extent with all mentally ill individuals and their families, but with Adam it seemed to occur in the extreme. It seems his mental illness was accommodated to the point where even he believed the world was warped and he was o.k.</p>
<p>But the tape that Consolation linked is really quite revealing. This is a highly intelligent individual who clearly understands the distinction between right and wrong. He spent quite some time justifying the actions of the chimpanzee - he understood it was wrong but he justified the behavior by blaming it on the environment in which the chimpanzee existed.</p>
<p>My background is crisis intervention and suicide prevention. I was front line. Manning the suicide hotlines and going out to police stations, hospitals, private homes and yes…bridges and water towers to help people in crisis. </p>
<p>People need to be hooked into the system. They need someone who is not emotionally involved to evaluate their loved ones. </p>
<p>Often times getting through the immediate crisis is the most important step in a lifetime of ups and downs.</p>
<p>There is no magic cure. Lives are lost. But lives are saved, too, and those people will tell you they are thankful for your insistence to help and not giving up.</p>
<p>Here is a story of the man who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge in a suicide attempt and survived</p>
<p><a href=“He jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge . . . and lived!”>http://nypost.com/2013/06/30/he-jumped-off-the-golden-gate-bridge-and-lived/</a></p>
<p>I spent the last week on the couch with the flu and had time to read this whole thread. I have to say that all of you are pretty persuasive with your arguments and I found myself flip flopping on this issue with each well well thought out post. The poster who called it the “perfect storm” expressed my perception of this sad situation. </p>
<p>There were so many unhealthy and neglected factors that combined to create the circumstances that occurred. Mezzo mama’s post (honestly, WHY are there no post numbers?!) really resonated for me. Nancy Lanza was being held hostage by her son’s illness. It seems that she allowed that out of fear. It is something that we see all the time in family situations and not just with mental illness. We see it when parents allow themselves to be intimidated by their teen so they “let things go” to avoid confrontation. We see it in families where alcoholism is an issue when family members walk on eggshells to avoid setting off a rage. </p>
<p>This is not an uncommon coping strategy. It looks to day to day survival. Problem is, it compounds the issues and makes them worse. In this case, the result was unbearably tragic. Most families that employ this type of reluctant limit setting will never have this kind of outcome, thank goodness. I feel that Nancy’s day to day reluctance to confront the problem, combined with the availability of weapons was the lethal brew that led to the massacre.</p>
<p>That’s an incredible story, Sax.</p>
<p>EPTR, did you listen to the chimp call-in?</p>
<p>OK, I went back and listened to the call. Are you suggesting that anyone should have AT THE TIME realized that Adam Lanza was contemplating mass killing? I don’t see it. Not at all. And apparently, this was broadcast on the radio and no one did think that the caller was contemplating mass killing, or if they did we have no record of it. Certainly the call did not prompt anyone to try to find a potential mass killer.</p>
<p>For others who haven’t listened, Lanza brings up the case of Travis, a chimpanzee who was raised as a human child, and who, all his life, led more or less the life of an unintelligent human: sleeping in a bed, watching TV, eating human food. After a life of nonviolence, suddenly Travis attacked his “mother’s” friend and killed her. Lanza says that most people dismissed this as the act of a wild animal, but instead it should be interpreted as the act of a civilized being who snaps. He says that we should think of Travis as being like a “teenage mall shooter.”</p>
<p>Lanza talks without much inflection, the way Aspies typically talk. Friends who had talked to him say that’s the way he always talked.</p>
<p>It’s 20/20 hindsight to say that we should have realized what was going to happen. At the time, no one realized what was going to happen. </p>
<p>I don’t think anyone is saying the call should have tipped someone off. It simply provided some insight into Adam’s mind. I found it a bit creepy that Adam didn’t express any empathy for the victim in the call. Wasn’t this the chimp who literally tore off a woman’s entire face and hands? So gruesome, yet Adam doesn’t acknowledge it.</p>
<p>Someone I read somewhere I can’t remember, theorized that Adam chose to kill the children (with himself), because he was doing it to “save” them from a future miserable adult life, like he had, and apparently like he thought Travis had. </p>
<p>Consolation, yes I did listen to it although I don’t think I heard the whole think because something funky happened with the link while I was listening.
I don’t think that it is reasonable to conclude that somebody listening to it should have guessed what he was capable of. It is only relevant in retrospect.</p>
<p>I can think of three families (wait, 4) off the top of my head who demonstrate(d) an example of the kind of avoidant parenting that I suspect was the norm in the Lanza household. Two of them were in my neighborhood growing up. Situations where the parent or parents allowed the child to control the dynamic of the family. Whether out of fear or guilt or a combination of both, these parents had kids who displayed, in some way, anti-social behavior or out of control anger or some other characteristic that needs attention. In two of these cases the child has grown into an unhealthy adult. One is a recluse. The other is unable to hold a job, has had trouble with the law and cannot maintain healthy relationships. I was close enough to these situations to see a lot of what went on. I’m not speculating about the parenting. </p>
<p>The third and fourth example is in my extended family and one still going on as the child is now 14. Time will tell on that one.</p>
<p>In all of these situations I have witnessed the parents allow behavior that they know they shouldn’t so that they can avoid conflict. I have seen them allow themselves to be treated disrespectfully so as to avoid a scene. I have seen them allow siblings to be verbally and even sometimes physically abused and passed it off as “normal” so that they won’t have to deal with the rage. </p>
<p>This is “cross my fingers” parenting. They just hang on tight and pray that everything will turn out all right. Often it doesn’t and now and then it goes really, really wrong.</p>
<p>I do not blame Nancy Lanza. I actually sympathize with her situation and think that it must have been infinitely easier to just meet the delivery man at the bottom of the driveway. Or answer Adams texts and emails rather than put up with his (rage, crying, breakdown). What parent hasn’t taken the low road and given in to the pressure when they know they should fight the fight for the long run gain?</p>
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<p>No! That never crossed my mind!! I simply think that it provides an insight into Adam’s thinking and sensibility at that time. It seems clear to me that he to some degree identifies with the chimp. It is interesting that he feels such empathy for the chimp. </p>
<p>I found it fascinating, but I never suggested that anyone should be able to predict his later behavior based on that call.</p>
<p>Many of us know kids who are raised in a manner different from how we might have done if we were in similar situations. Our pediatrician said we were raising our kids very differently than he would have (and I would never raise my kids as he did his), but all our kids turned out, so it’s OK. It’s only when things don’t turn out and folks are trying to find fault and point the finger that different parenting styles are WRONG. </p>
<p>Of course, crossing the fingers and looking the other way doesn’t seem a very helpful long term strategy, but sometimes that is what families opt for. I have seen it and am hoping hard that it will work out (but I do worry, though I try to stay out of it, since not my kid). Raising kids involves so many variables–what if this parent did THAT at point A and SOMETHING ELSE at point B, then kiddo may have turned out to be better/happier/more successful, or not.</p>
<p>I think that it’s more than just looking back after the fact and saying that it was the wrong kind of parenting because look how it turned out. I don’t think it’s just a different parenting style. It’s just not really parenting at all, IMO. That is not to say that many kids don’t come through that kind of submissive parenting to become normal, well-adjusted adults but I think that the odds become stacked against that if they have never had a parent confront their behavior (whether willful or not) with reasonable and appropriate consequences.</p>
<p>I was listening to NPR’s “This American Life” on Saturday and the segment was called “Bad Baby”. It dealt with several different stories about difficult children and how to deal with them etc. One of the interviewees was a researcher that had an interesting take on child rearing. He said that in his estimation all babies are born “bad” and it is the parents job to teach them to be “good”. What he was getting at is that children are inherently self absorbed, short sighted and impulsive. It is our job as parents to teach them selflessness and self-control.</p>
<p>It was an interesting concept. He obviously did not mean that babies are evil but rather, if the parent doesn’t do the job of parenting, the “baby” will never lose some of those traits that are hallmarks of the very young. It brought home the idea that parenting is an ACTIVE pursuit not a passive state.</p>
<p>It may very well be that all of the active parenting in the world would not have changed anything for the Lanza’s. But if what happened was the result of the perfect storm, then I think that storm might have lost some of it’s potency if if his issues had been dealt with in a more direct and decisive way.</p>
<p>As Consolation suggested he clearly identified with the chimp.</p>
<p>the chimp “knew that she was trying to coax him back into his life of domestication,” the caller added.
“He couldn’t handle that, so he attacked her and anyone else who approached him,” he said. “And dismissing his attack as simply being the senseless violence and impulsiveness of a chimp, instead of a human, is wishful thinking at best.”
That primate’s story can inform how humans act, and sometimes snap, the caller speculated.
“His attacks can be parallel to the attacks, the random acts of violence, that you see on your show every week, committed by humans which the mainstream also has no explanation for,” he said. “An actual human, I don’t think it would be such a stretch. He very well could be a teenage mall shooter or something like that.”</p>
<p>We’ve read that Adam was obsessed with violence/mass murders, and this story among others intrigued him. He noted that the chimp had never been violent before, and talked about it’s “parenting” which actually parallels some of our own thinking on this thread. While of course no one could have predicted he was a mass murderer, there were clear signs that like the chimp, he was feeling desperate, trapped, and probably thought about how to escape the life he was experiencing. Chilling.</p>
<p>And we get that from just hearing his call-in to a radio station. I just cannot believe that his mom did not have any indications of where his head was at. If she had survived the rampage, would she have been at all surprised that it happened?
And yet, I agree with those that say that even if you know something is terribly wrong and going in a bad direction, there is only so much that you can do to intervene.
If Nancy Lanza had been my friend and she had HONESTLY confided her fears about Adam to me I would have told her to get a therapist for herself to help steer her through this. Somebody who could help to clear the fog that she was clearly in and who had knowledge of options that she may not have had. And I would have told her to get rid of the guns. All of them.</p>
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<p>One very easy, logical thing she could have done was enlist Peter’s help, but she didn’t do it.</p>
<p>Given the conditions under which Adam was living (no job, no school, no friends, no siblings around), there were really only two people in the world at the time who had the ability to make changes in Adam’s life, and that was his two parents. Nancy didn’t do enough, and Peter obviously did nothing. </p>