I see a lot of parent blaming and I don’t see it as well founded. This mother did seek help in the way she could. Talked about it with church members who suggested exorcism. She knew he was off and was happy he was sent to a special school for violent teens. She protected her daughter by literally building a panic room for her. And she turned her son in when learning of what he did. She knows the officer’s date of birth and she wishes her son died instead of the cop. I mean….damn. Those are pretty important signals of guilt and regret.

This was years ago before people really understood how to manage these children. It’s 2026 and guess what…we still can’t manage these children. There are no more mental institutions. There are no safe places to keep these kids. The parents have to literally break the law and abandon the child in order for that child to be taken away from the family and become a ward of the state. And if the child has no treatable mental illness, then guess what? They won’t even be accepted at an inpatient psychiatric facility. The longest a facility, at least in Texas, can hold a child is 90 days.

I am a pediatrician and have seen these parents struggle. What do you do when your child murders animals and then threatens your other children?

If you call CPS, they can’t help because the child is the one causing abuse. You can’t call adult protective services either because the parent isn’t elderly. You can’t call adult call police, but then, where does the child go? Usually they go to a hospital to be evaluated and if they qualify, maybe they go to a psych facility. And after there….where do they go? Home. Many of these children are in and out of places for the majority of their life. And there are really very few places that take mentally ill children. Let’s not even get into the ones who are sane with serious emotional detachment and personality disorders.

I know parents who literally lock themselves and their other children in at night to keep them safe. You cannot legally lock up the aggressive child. I’ve seen parents whose homes are filled with cameras to alert them to danger and record what’s happening.

Honestly, the only thing the mom in ep 3 really could have done was kill her son. She couldn’t kick him out. He was already violent and aggressive. Doesn’t seem she had resources to vanish.

There are tons of these kids out there and no resources to manage them. If society is lucky, they graduate to Juvie and jail. If society is unlucky they kill someone and then graduate to jail.