Recently The New Yorker published an article about filicide. It focused on one case in particular – and it was not the case of Lindsey Clancy. This was the case of Nakira Griner, a New Jersey mother accused of killing her toddler in 2022.

I would like to make three points regarding these two cases – and the many others like them that occur with frightening regularity.

1. Color matters.

One of the points made in the article is that everyone is focusing on Lindsey Clancy while no one is talking about Nakira Griner.

Lindsey Is white. Nakira is black.

2. Interpretation matters.

When a white middle-class mother murders her children, we talk about mental health. When a black mother from an impoverished background is accused of killing her toddler, no one talks about anything except murder.

This is important – and obviously, egregiously unfair.

In both cases a crime was committed. And in both cases, it is likely that psychosis played an important part. And when it comes to filicide, as is true with many brutal crimes, it is hard to know where to draw the line between severe mental illness and criminality.

3. These deaths have to do not just with the difficulties of diagnosing postpartum psychosis but also with the failure of our society to support parents and families.

The deaths of these children occurred within a specific context – and that is the context of a society in which parents are left completely alone to fend for themselves.

In the US in particular, and in the developed world in general, more parents live further away from and are more cut off from their families of origin than ever before in history. And being a parent, and especially, in many cases, being a mother, is not a job that should or can be done alone.

A great deal of research has been done by sociologists and anthropologists demonstrating that human primates require community support in infant and child rearing. For example, Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy writes that humans are cooperative breeders, meaning that mothers have historically relied on a network of helpers to raise infants. She calls these helpers, “allomothers”, and defines these as those group members such as grandmothers, older siblings, aunts, uncles, fathers, and non-kin allies who actively help hold, watch, and feed infants.

So, where are the allomothers these days?

in what we sometimes call “primitive” societies as well as in many countries where traditional family groups are maintained, allomothers are still available. But in our country, as in most developed nations, this not the case.

Most mothers in developed nations either have no helpers or they have very few – and those helpers who do present themselves often have very limited availability. And these same  helpers are there to take care of the infants or children, not to help the mother herself or to provide for her needs.

Overview

The fact is that postpartum depression and/or psychosis DO need to be paid more attention to; psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, primary care physicians, police detectives, lawyers, etc. DO need to be trained to recognize postpartum psychosis and to find appropriate treatment for mothers experiencing this condition. More Light DOES need to be shed on this problem, and more education does need to be provided not only to the professionals who might be involved, but also to the general public.

But postpartum depression/psychosis is only one part of the problem when we talk about infanticide.

Lindsey was very ill. Nakira was very ill. AND, crucially, they were also alone. For hours and hours each day.

As it turns out, Lindsey had been ill for quite some time, but apparently no one knew exactly how psychotic she had become.

Nakira was not just ill, she had also been severely abused and neglected as a child and was being abused as an adult.

No one knew all the details of either of these women’s inner lives.

As any parent knows, spending hour upon hour with infants and children is difficult, sometimes tedious and occasionally infuriating. When a mother’s stability is tenuous, whether due to a life of abuse and neglect or a current period of disordered thinking, the strains of parenting can become overwhelming and impulses usually kept in check can be difficult to control.

And we must ask ourselves what we can do to help mothers in these situations before they or their impulse control breaks down.

As a society, we alternate between idealizing all the wonderful mothers out there (sometimes including our own) and knowing that mothers have frailties and foibles and need help and support.

We know that mothers need someone to trade off with. They need someone – an allomother perhaps – to give them a break, to hold or feed their babies, to give them time to eat a meal. But more than that, we know that mothers need companionship while they mother, they need others with whom to compare notes and share responsibilities – and they need someone, perhaps a number of someones, to make sure they are OK, and to provide for some of their needs.

But we do very little to see that our society provides for these needs.

Perhaps we prefer to stick with our view of the idealized, all competent mother.

When I was child I had a friend who told me that her mother had not been allowed to be alone with her when she was a baby. I found this very odd. But reflecting on this as an adult, I recognized that her mother was no doubt suffering from postpartum depression or psychosis, which 70 years ago, had not yet been named. This mother was seen by her obstetrician or her pediatrician as not being stable enough to be trusted with her baby.

It is possible that this child lived long enough to be my friend because of the common sense of those around her – as well as the fact that she came from a family with sufficient resources to hire a baby nurse.

This brings me to a point that no doubt was talked about in the media – but which I did not see. And that is the very simple, very basic question of WHY Lindsey Clancy was left alone with her children when she was clearly in horrible distress?

Well – I suppose it was no different from what usually happens to mothers – as a society we leave them, especially new mothers, completely alone. We have nothing to offer them. No free mothering groups, no universal daycare, no drop-off centers for infants or toddlers when a mother has a medical appointment or when she is ill…or when she has reached the end of her rope. We do not have a decent community mental health system – or even a health care system where a doctor can spend more than 15 minutes to listen to their patient. We abandon mothers and parents in general.

And what’s more, I suspect that the media seized on the Lindsey Clancy story not only because, of course, we all love some drama in our lives, as well as a bit of schadenfreude, but also because we are all living in a time and a place where we, to one degree or another, feel quite abandoned by our society, and in particular by our government as well. On some level, we cannot imagine being Lindsey or Nakira….but on another level, we can. We have all felt rage with our children, we mostly did not act on it, but at those moments we all felt alone in our parenting and our personhood.

And these days many of us feel quite alone in our lives in a society and in a time that does not prioritize social support, relatedness, or connection, all things desperately needed by mothers – as well as by the rest of us.

References

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/a-mother-on-trial

1984: Hausfater, G. and S. Hrdy, eds. Infanticide: Comparative and Evolutionary Perspectives. New York: Aldine Publishing Co. (Selected as one of the 1984-85 “Outstanding Academic Books” by Choice, the Journal of the Association of College and Research Libraries.) ISBN 0-202-36221-3.

1999: Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection. New York: Pantheon. A BOMC Alternative Selection; selected by Publishers Weekly and by the Library Journal as one of Best Books of 1999 and a finalist for PEN USA West 2000 Literary Award for Research Nonfiction. Won the Howells Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Biological Anthropology. (Published in UK as Mother Nature: Natural selection and the female of the species. London: Chatto and Windus); also translated into Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean and Polish. ISBN 0-679-44265-0.

2009: Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-03299-3.