7/30/2019 Household Hazard. Infanticide by Amy Pagnozzi

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Household Hazard: Infanticide

You make the time for breakfast with the kids. The milk carton reminds youthey can be snatched up in a heartbeat.

They're at the computer doing their homework when you return from theoffice. You plop down beside them, dog-tired -- Internet perils, you know.

You read the papers. Watch the news. Go to public hearings on sex offenders. Checkevery nameon every registry, lest you miss the pervert lurkingnext door, becauseyou know what'sout there.We alldo.

Too bad we're clueless about what can happen at home.

Take the case of Texan Andrea Pia Yates, a suburban mother suffering from postpartum depressionwho admitted drowning her five kids in the bathtub. Or right here in Somers, Kristin Anderson,accused of beating and stabbing her 15-month-old to death.

Do these parents shock you? They shouldn't. Infanticide can and does occur in the best of homes.

From 1976 to 1999, of all children slain under the age of 5, 31% were killed by their fathers, 30% bytheir mothers, federal Bureau of Justice Statistics show.

Though it may seem as if there is a greater incidence of parents killing their kids than ever before,that isn't so. We're just getting around to talking about it, because, well, we're like that sometimes --remember when incest seemed new?

Anybody near and dear showing signs of being about to snap? Maybe outright saying, every now andagain, ``I'm about to snap'' or, ``I can't go on like this anymore,'' or, ``I feel like I'm going toexplode''?

Or how about telling one of the little ones: ``You do that one more time and I'm going to breakyour neck?'' asks Dr. Philip J. Resnick, author of ``Child Murder by Parents: A Psychiatric Review of

Filicide.''

Resnick's article, published by the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1969, is considered a seminalstudy of parental infanticide -- a crime as old as mankind.

On occasions when the masses are roaring to exact revenge on the homicidal parent -- take theSusan Smith case, for example -- Resnick's thought is ``that many, many parents have had impulsesto kill their children.

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7/30/2019 Household Hazard. Infanticide by Amy Pagnozzi

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``Most don't of course,'' he adds. ``But knowing they've had these feelings themselves makes parentswho do this more upsetting to them. And I think they want to see these parents punished

Resnick, a professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve, may well be right about this. He's aleading expert on filicide, having evaluated at least 50 mothers charged with killing their children,

including Susan Smith, and who knows how many fathers.

Of course, there will always be a case in which a mother or father snaps for no apparent reason.

But it seems to me many of the recently publicized child killings followed fairly obvious warningsigns -- if anybody close enough to the troubled parent would have taken the time to see them.

This is an unkind observation, no doubt, given her husband is standing by her.

But in light of the Texan woman's first postpartum depression and the fact that they often recurwith a vengeance, you'd imagine that someone who cared for her might have urged her not to havemore children -- or at least questioned whether she really felt up to home-schooling them.

Given this is a culture that never ceases to tell us that parenthood is the toughest job in the world,shouldn't we expect the odd breakdown at the job to occur and be on the lookout for it?

Resnick says we should.

He came to his specialty by accident, serving in the women's ward at Valley Forge General Hospitalin Phoenixville, Pa., when he was a U.S. Army captain. There he encountered two women who hadkilled their children and made unsuccessful attempts to kill themselves. Both were cases of what hecame to call ``altruistic filicide'': killings committed ``out of love,'' either to relieve a child's real orimagined suffering, or because the parents intended to kill themselves and didn't believe the child

could go on without them.

``These women are much more frightening in the abstract than in person,'' Resnick insists.

Resnick's greatest lesson for doctors is one the rest of us should learn. Though a woman (andsometimes a man) may be outwardly bright and cheerful because that's what society expects of newparents, the ``joyful arrival'' may be causing untold inner despair.

``It is not uncommon for mothers to seek psychiatric help because of obsessional filicidal thoughts,''Resnick wrote. ``Filicide may be an exception to the general belief that obsessional ideas are notcarried out.''

Listen without judgment. Let a troubled parent pore over his or her feelings, possibly admittingsuicidal thoughts. Ask the parent this question: ``If you were to take your own life, what plans wouldyou have for your children?''

If the answer is, ``My husband (or wife) would care for them,'' that is cause for concern. If theanswer is, ``I could never leave them behind,'' that is a call for immediate action.

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