Over recent years, we have heard again and again that parents always know what’s best for their child. And so we have vouchers and home-schooling because “parents always know what’s best for their child.”
No, they don’t.
Read this story and ask yourself whether this parent knew what was best for her child.
I wish I had saved the many stories of this kind that I have read over the past decade. Thank God, they don’t happen every day but they do happen.
Whenever I write about abusive parents like the one in this horrific story, I get inundated by angry letters from advocates for parents’ rights, especially homeschoolers. Let ’em write.
The state should have had someone to look after this boy. They should have had the authority to take the child away from his mother, who hated him, to save his life.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Very few parents know what’s best for their kids and the ones that do generally agree with the teachers and the school. Corporate privatizing reformsters depend on sewn mistrust that public schools don’t know what’s best to keep parental doubt alive in order for sustain vouchers, homeschool, etc. The plain simple fact, as uncomfortable as it is, is simply this: so many parents have abdicated their responsibility to be parents to, you know, actually parent their child. In this Me-Me-Me hyperconnected hyperconsumerism-all-the-time and in the palm of our hands with a thumb swipe, so many parents have regressed to adolescence, especially alongside their high school-aged children. It is an abomination and a tragic consequence of the Digital Age. A large majority of the time, it’s up to teachers to parent the little things that make the biggest difference: teaching manners, politeness, courtesy, comportment, composure, etc. Another uncomfortable fact for the neoliberal corporate privatizing reformsters: in this 43-year-old Reaganomic economy that has destroyed the American middle class with its now-propagandistic American Dream to haul in more suckers, both parents work, sometimes more than two jobs apiece or one parent working two jobs while the other keeps one. How the hell are they supposed to fully raise a child properly? Let the corporate reformsters BP & M here all they want: THEY ARE AND HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AND WILL ALWAYS BE IN THE WRONG 100% OF THE TIME.
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“Very few parents know what’s best for their kids”
What percentage of parents would you say know what’s best for their kids? 5%? 10%
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He looks like a happy little boy – why did he have to suffer? My heart breaks reading this accounting. That is a concern about some homeschooling environments. If children are being abused there is no accountability because everyone is so isolated. She deserves to spend the rest of her life in jail! At least he is now in the loving arms of God!
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Liz, it broke my heart to read about this child.
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If parents always knew what was best for children, there would be no need for Children Protection Services. At least in a public school setting, professional educators are required to act if they suspect a child is being abused. In a home-school setting there are no such guardrails that can protect vulnerable young people, and children are at the mercy of the adults in the home, sometimes with tragic consequences.
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This is horrific story and I’m sorry I read it. That said, I don’t think “vouchers are bad because parents don’t always know what’s best for their children, as exemplified by this monster who tortured her child to death” is a great argument.
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It is tragic when abuse is so obvious, and it seems nothing is done. It is also true that there is parental abuse on a much less obvious level. I think of a kid I knew who had 3 bouts with Covid while her father prevented her from getting vaccinated. I think of parents who burned textbooks because they thought that learning was irreligious.
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Look what it takes to be an immigrant who wants to become a citizen, or for anyone to get a driver’s license, register to vote, get a passport, et al.
The only thing it takes to become a parent is to have sex and there is no paperwork involved for that unless they want to get married first.
“In the United States, 39.8% of births were to unmarried women in 2022, up from 18% in 1980. This is a notable increase in nonmarital childbearing, which has also been seen worldwide.”
No classes required. No tests to take. They don’t even have to be married to be a parent. They don’t have to have health care, a job, a house, an education.
There are no qualifications or training required to become a parent. NONE!
The results:
“Experts estimate that 1 in 10 children are sexually abused before their 18th birthday. 30% of children are abused by family members. As many as 60% are abused by people the family trusts. About 35% of victims are 11 years old or younger.”
“Approximately one in four children experience child abuse or neglect in their lifetime. Of maltreated children, 18 percent are abused physically, 78 percent are neglected, and 9 percent are abused sexually.”
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I think that our society is invested in the idea/myth that parents will ALWAYS love a child and that parents want to care for their children.
JMHO, but a lifetime of reading articles about children who were abused and/or killed by a parent has led me to believe that there are people who do not want to be parents, and who, regardless of intervention, parenting classes and the efforts of experts, are not good parents, and who actively, resent, dislike and harm their innocent children.
I recognize that foster care has problems, but this little boy should have been lived and cherished, not tortured and killed.
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As mandated reporters of child abuse and neglect, I’m sure many teachers here have had to deal with similar situations, hopefully not as often as I had to for the 25+ years that I taught kids –who were mostly the same age as Elijah when he was abused, neglected and killed. But this poor child’s life was more heartbreaking than words could ever express. In fact, I broke down and just couldn’t get through the entire article. Did they say anything about whether or not he attended school, was seen by a pediatrician or was ever taken to a hospital? I can’t help but wonder where all the mandated reporters in his life were…
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Sorry, I meant to say that I wondered where all the mandated reporters were who “should have been in his life” because since he was just 5, maybe he didn’t go to school yet (or child care). But he should have been seen by a doctor regularly and for emergencies, and health care providers are mandated reporters, too.
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FYI, The compulsory education age that children are required to begin their schooling varies by state and where Elijah lived, it’s at age 6. Here’s info about that for all states: https://legal-info.lawyers.com/research/education-law/chart-age-requirements-for-compulsory-education-in-all-50-states.html.
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ECE,
My impression was that she hated this child, and he never had access to a doctor or child care.
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A very long time ago, I read that the leading cause of death of children under the age of four was murder, and that was before homeschooling was so widespread. I asked my pediatrician about this and she confirmed that kids who aren’t in some kind of care outside the family are indeed at high risk.
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Thanks for the info, Diane.
Besides mandated reporters, what could have also helped that child and his family was their awareness of a hotline, like the National Parent & Youth Helpline, which they could have called to share their frustrations and vent to non-judgemental counselors who would listen, provide support, give advice and refer them to further resources that could help them.
I volunteered to take the Midnight to 6am shift for a year at the Parental Stress Services Hotline in my state and found it very rewarding to be able to provide intervention BEFORE parents flew off the handle and kids got too damaged. (Needy parents often became regular callers.) So some individual states have their own hotlines, like MA, and the national helpline is located here: https://nationalparentyouthhelpline.org/
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I think it’s important to address kids directly, on their level, about this matter. For 12 years, I taught all day Kindergarten (5 year olds) in a city and state licensed child care center and I also taught school-age kids (6 thru age 12) who came to my classroom daily after their public schools let out, as well as when there were holidays and vacations. So I talked to all of my students there about how people should be treated, and issues around abuse and neglect. I also taught them all how to use the telephone to dial 911 or call my state’s phone number for reporting abuse and neglect, so they could get help themselves in an emergency situation. (Of course, I encouraged kids to self-report to me, too.)
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The boy was only five years old when he died. He had been tortured and starved until he died. He weighed only 19 pounds. Who could have called a hotline? Who cared?
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To me, he looks like he was about 4 in the picture, which means his weight must have severely declined over the last year of his life. If he sat outside on the stairs again then, he probably wouldn’t have appeared to be healthy and normal. It’s hard to believe that absolutely no one knew how much this child was suffering, that other family members, friends, neighbors, the mailman, passersby etc did not hear the fury in his mother’s voice when repeatedly screaming and attacking him, as well as his cries –though in the end, he would have been very weak.
To subject this innocent child to such horror, trauma and pain –and now there’s a possibility the mom may not even get life in prison for what she did?! It should not be so hard for justice to prevail in this country today!
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Such a sad story. This woman and her boyfriend did not deserve “parental rights.”
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Perhaps this may seem tangential, but eliminating access to abortion care will put more children at risk. Some people are quite aware that they aren’t capable parents. Forced birth harms parents and children.
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Yet another factor, though it does not seem to be one in this case: mothers are often held more culpable for a child’s abuse than fathers or a mother’s partner. Even in cases where the woman is a victim of domestic abuse, the court system often brings charges and hands down sentences to the female than the male.
One example: https://www.aclu.org/news/smart-justice/father-abuses-his-children-somehow-their-mother-goes-prison-30
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I had to deal with child abuse beginning in my first teaching position, at a new Head Start program that was situated in a public school, in 1968 — which was a year before my state enacted the first law making teachers mandated reporters. This meant that when I told my head teacher that when I asked the child, who had a black eye, what happened and she told me, “Mommy said I fell off the toilet,” a Social Worker at a world renowned university in our area was contacted, who came out to speak with me. She asked me to write up a report and address whether I thought the parents of the child should be referred to a Community Mental Health Center. I asked if the parents would be required to go and if there were any alternatives, because at the time, I had just turned 16 years old and that sounded rather ominous to me. The answers to both questions were No. I feared the parents wouldn’t go and the child would just be treated worse because of what she said to me, so I included all of that in my report. Thank God times have changed!
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It seemed like my post was way too long, so I eliminated the folllowing and I think it might have made the situtation more understandable:
Even though Head Start has always been for Preschoolers, this was a 6 year old girl. She was allowed in my class, along wth her 3 year old brother, because she’d had problems in Kindergarten. That gave me many opportunities to witness how the mom treated the little brother by comparison. I thought she showed a lot of love, playfulness and kindness in her actions with him, while with his sister, she seemed very impatient, judgemental and dismissive. Akthough I was young, this really stood out to me because I was very involved in raising my little brother at the time, who was 2 years old then.
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Obviously, there was no hotline in my state to call and report child abuse and neglect before they passed the law making teachers mandated reporters.
Decades later, my mom told me that, not long after I worked in Head Start, which was just a summer program here then, the primary newspaper in my big city called her to ask for permission to write a story about me and my work in Head Start for their Sunday Magazine. My mom said she declined because she was afraid I would get a swollen head as a result of that. I never knew exactly what they wanted to write or why, but it did make me wonder whether I had anything to do with my state passing the law making teachers mandated reporters the following year (and the installment of a hotline –which anyone can use to report in good faith).
Head Start was also the last program where I worked in classrooms with kids (mentoring/coaching their teachers). Then health problems prevented me from working in the field anymore & I decided to just stick to training teachers in college because I could work there online.
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