In a landmark decision, the parents of a school shooter were found guilty of manslaughter. This case, involving the Crumbleys’ negligence in addressing their son’s mental health struggles, marks a pivotal moment in our collective consciousness. As one victim’s parent poignantly remarked, “gross negligence is not acceptable in society.” This sentiment, I hope, will bring substantive changes to our legal and regulatory systems.
The conviction reflects a growing societal demand for parental responsibility, particularly when neglect has dire consequences. Jennifer Crumbley’s claimed ignorance of their son’s plight —perhaps plausible given her preoccupation with horses and extramarital affair —does not exempt her from the duty of guardianship over their son’s wellbeing.
A Parallel
This tragedy finds a parallel in my life through Michael, whose neglect and lack of empathy, rooted in his own troubled childhood, have deeply affected our son ever since he linked up with the Potechins.
Abandoned and neglected as a child, Michael has never gained an insight into his maladjustment from his childhood trauma or acquired empathy to make up for the absence of it in his upbringing.
In his bestselling book, The Body Keeps the Score, Dr. Kolk explains, “Traumatized people become stuck, stopped in their growth.” Consequently, Michael has passed the effects of his family trauma to our son and persisted in denial despite the glaring evidence to the contray.
Growing up on packaged frozen meals with the television as his parents, companion, guide, and window to the world, Michael was molded by superficial, fickle, scrappy, skewed, and dramatized television programs.
Deprived of consistent and informed parenting and positive role models, he drifted in life’s choppy current without a core value system to guide him towards a destination, bobbing and turning by whatever bumped into him and sustained only by a primal instinct to survive.
The necessity of learning the sport of social interaction and the intricacy of relationships was never apparent to him as he played a solo game of Survivor with only his ego for resource. Unsurprisingly, he never developed empathy – a crucial social faculty, or realized its absence- and remains perplexed about his repeated relationship failures. Instead of seeking truth from defeats and pursuing personal growth, he drew false conclusions and became even more self-absorbed and insular, qualities diametrically opposite to the imperatives of being a parent.
“It Doesn’t Start with You”
Being a parent means choosing a life of sacrifice. One’s self-interests must get back in line to prioritize the children’s needs and best interests. Losing sleep, cutting back on self-care, and giving up favorite pastimes to care for a newborn are the starting points on the sacrificing scale, the minimum threshold for entering parenthood. Michael didn’t even pass that.
Suspending personal aspiration to devote one’s heart and soul to rearing a child who often tests the limit of one’s sanity is the next trial. One’s childhood dreams may remain dreams forever as a result.
You forego interests irrelevant to parenting or preferences unessential to your child’s health and growth. Your world undergoes a complete reorganization – your ego is removed from the center of the universe and yields its place to your child’s wellbeing. The once annoyingly complicated decision-making process – weighing the pros and cons of multiple choices is suddenly simplified to just one touchstone – your child’s welfare. Your happiness is amalgamated with your child’s, and you will never feel whole when your child’s health and happiness are in question.
In the quiet of the night, the gossamer of unrealized dreams may stir up a groan, but you make peace with your choice because you have in your charge the life or death of a fragile living being, its successful completion of a life cycle, or its untimely demise, its joyful blossom, or pitiful withering. You are the nurse, teacher, provider, and guardian. You are your child’s God.
Other animals, at least the moms, possess the same innate devotion to their children. What distinguishes human from animal parents is an advanced consciousness upon which special care is developed to protect the integrity and health of our children’s psyches. This is the highest order of parenting, and not every parent can appreciate or achieve it. The Crumbleys failed spectacularly, and so did Michael.
The challenge resides in a parent’s inherited traits, upbringing, and social environment. Mark Wolynn, in his award-winning book It Doesn’t Start with You, explored the lineage of family traumas, “identifying inherited family patterns—the fears, feelings, and behavior we’ve unknowingly adopted that keep the cycle of suffering alive from generation to generation.” In a sense, we can be our children’s worst enemies.
Parental Capacity
To protect children from ourselves – the injured, malformed, and underdeveloped parts of ourselves that carry the pathogens of family traumas, we must have humility, insight, spirituality, and empathy.
It takes humility to acknowledge that we didn’t overcome childhood trauma unscathed. Our failures throughout life cannot all be attributed to external factors; they reflect the deleterious impact of family trauma on our cognition and behavior, which inevitably influences our parenting.
It requires insight to understand that our limitations and biases can profoundly curb our children’s potential. Our beliefs and knee-jerk reactions are, in part, the products of our family traumas that bear no validity to the present situation.
Such insight necessitates advanced cognitive functions. Those who were abandoned or neglected without social support as children and missed out on professional or self-help as adults face unique challenges to fully develop such functions and reach a higher level of consciousness.
It takes spirituality to love our children without claiming ownership of them. Parents are enlisted to care for God’s creations. Our only prerogative is to exercise the utmost diligence to protect these creations’ health, integrity, and promise before returning them as independent adults to the Creator’s keep. We are not entitled to repayment in the form of our children’s filial service as we get old and enfeebled. Our only reward is their love and respect, which cannot be demanded, coerced, pilfered, robbed, or swindled but earned.
Empathy conducts all the above to create a parenting symphony that provides care and nurturing responsive to a child’s uniqueness. Parenting is not a rigid, one-size-fits-all formula but a dynamic input-output feedback loop. The process breaks down when parents are insensitive to their children’s needs and uniqueness.
Children often don’t have the vocabulary to express their needs, particularly emotional ones, if they aren’t taught to recognize their feelings. Therefore, parents must be observant and able to read their minds, a capacity rooted in empathy.
Parents fundamentally shape their children’s self-concept, purpose in life, and relationship with others. Everything parents choose to do or not do for their children has amplified significance in the children’s minds, for those are the data points they use to weave the web of connections to, and locate their place in this world. When children’s needs are consistently ignored or denied, they grow to believe they are undeserving and the world is a chilling place.
The communication loop between abused or neglected children and their parents becomes dysfunctional, for the children no longer express their needs but instead, submit to or gingerly guess what their parents want them to want or not want, perpetuating a vicious cycle of deprivation and suffering.
Generally, the partnership of two loving parents can provide checks and balances to safeguard their children’s welfare with the added benefit of complementary skills and perspectives that enrich the children’s experiences. The children are the first casualty when that partnership breaks down, regardless of whether the parents are physically separated.
Intergenerational Trauma
When Michael smashed the bond between Al and me, he didn’t just strip Al of a mother’s love and nurturing; he destroyed Al’s secure attachment to his support system, the foundation of his wellbeing and connectedness to the world. As psychologist John Bowlby in his seminal work illuminates, the breakdown of secure attachment produces in the child anxiety, fear, and disconnectedness, the kind of trauma Michael himself also suffered from his parents’ tumultuous marriage and his father’s abandoning the family. He has never recovered from it.
His anxiety manifested in his avoidant behavior. Living beings face conflicts daily; they are part of life. Michael would rather hide behind a closed door than address conflicts maturely through communication. Avoidance is his default reaction. As a corollary, he never stood by me against injustice or stood up to protect Al from the abuse, neglect, and exploitation by the Potechins.
His fear, fueled by the lack of perspective, ballooned into paranoia, leading him to adopt an unnecessarily malicious approach to our divorce, inflicting long-lasting suffering on Al and extraordinary distress on me. His irrational self-protective regime during COVID drove Al to the verge of sanity. His refusal to communicate with me continues to exacerbate Al’s suffering.
His disconnectedness ossified into reclusion, making him vulnerable to deceptions and manipulations by predators – con artists and homewreckers like the Potechins who schemed to trap the straggling prey for the demented Deborah Elaine Potechin.
As a child, day after day, Michael returned to an uninviting home where there was no mother’s embrace, no family gathering around a home-cooked warm dinner, no one to share his experience of the day, and no solace for the crashing loneliness.
Growing up in such a desolate condition, he resolved to never find himself in the same situation again. Little did he know that his troubled childhood had left him incapable of connecting with others and developing healthy relationships without considerable, vigorous psychotherapy.
Unfortunately, Michael didn’t reap the benefits of psychotherapy. Instead, he resorted to infidelity and promiscuity to relieve his emptiness, continuing the cycle of disconnection.
When romantic relationships failed to deliver him from loneliness, he grasped our son as his last straw. His lifelong fear of being left alone motivated him to cultivate a co-dependency in Al by fostering and perpetuating his gaming addiction, or Internet Gaming Disorder by its medical term (IGD), at the cost of Al’s wellbeing.
My sympathy for Michael’s childhood trauma enables me to make allowance for his inflicting pain and suffering on Al and me. Still, his refusal to educate himself about parenting and the severe health risks of IGD is inexcusable.
To lessen his burden on research, I shared with him medical literature and video clips about IGD and its adverse effects on a developing brain. Amazingly, he perceived my sharing information as a personal attack on him and demanded I stop sending them! His inability to step out of his ego and feel my agony for Al’s suffering and his oblivion to Al’s angst are inexorable, as if there is a black hole in his brain where empathy should have been.
Before purchasing an automobile or a home appliance, Michael diligently researched product reviews and compared different options. Yet, he wouldn’t bother to read relevant literature that informs his decision-making critical for our son’s life!
While I have read over forty books and enrolled in two programs on behavioral health subjects, Michael stubbornly remains ignorant and continues perpetuating Al’s struggle. He flaunts his indifference by proceeding on a collision course with Al as his passenger.
His appalling apathy cannot possibly be explained by childhood trauma; it must be manifestations of undiagnosed mental impairment, unless he is ruining Al on purpose. Something on the neurological level must be seriously wrong with him, for no parent in his right mind will poison his child to death while shutting out the only person with the antidote.
A Broken System
My son’s suffering could have been prevented if it wasn’t for the gross miscarriage of justice perpetrated by a family court judge, a self-important man infested with bias and prejudice. His decision to entrust a child to an unfit parent’s care made my nightmare a reality.
The Crumbley verdict underscores a breakthrough in public sentiment towards parental accountability; the law must catch up. Families must be provided with effective legal tools to hold parents responsible for sacrificing their children’s well-being for personal gains. Family court shouldn’t be a place where a judge can cavalierly destroy a child’s life! We must institute an effective system to root out rogue judges, for if we don’t, data-based artificial intelligence will be a welcome replacement for judges.
The current law won’t allow young adults to consume alcohol until they are twenty-one, yet it grants eighteen-year-olds exclusive control over their mental health care, even though the executive functions of one’s brain aren’t fully developed until twenty-five and most youngsters aren’t financially independent until twenty-two or older. These inconsistent, arbitrary, and ill-advised laws have undoubtedly contributed to youth homelessness and addiction epidemic.
The tragic case of the Crumbleys, my ongoing battle with Michael, and the silent suffering of countless children highlight the urgent need for legal and regulatory reforms to protect the most vulnerable among us. The establishment of California’s CARE Court is a step forward, yet it’s merely the beginning of what needs to be a comprehensive overhaul of our approach to mental health, family law, and parental accountability.
Wailing Mom 
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