Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic MySpace Hoax Leads To Child Suicide.

Who needs high-school bullies when you have adults who get their kicks from screwing with their kid's friends' heads on-line? Some people should just not be allowed to procreate.

Megan Meier, age 13, committed suicide earlier this week because of a vicious MySpace hoax.

Just when I thought the human race had finally found rock-bottom, it finds a drill and gets busy with it. I can't believe that there is no law in place to punish these people.

And you know what made me seriously homicidal? The fact that that woman said that she 'felt less guilty' about what she had done when she was informed that Megan had had problems and tried to commit suicide before. I mean, it wasn't HER fault that the kid was mental in the first place, was it? She would probably have offed herself sooner or later anyway, right?

I hope that woman and her husband gets driven out of the country.

Horrible, horrible, horrible. I do think this is reminiscent about the questions that have been raised in the thread about Paris Hilton. Today it is so fun and popular to take cruel pokes at young girls and women because they are stupid, because they are fat, because no one likes them... And this hurts these young women so terribly. Then when they fall down, when things go down the drain for them, people can point at them and laugh. Or they can shake their heads and nod sagely, telling each other that they knew right from the start that this is how it was going to end. That girl, she was no good. And then the tormentors can say, who me? Not me. I didn't do anything.

Ann

I don't know. I mean I get that the older folks who posted mean stuff, bullying stuff were jerks, and maybe it's because I happen to have a level headed mature teen that I don't get why someone taking their own life is someone else's fault.

Most normal people are born with an inherent(sp?) sense of right and wrong. Most people have the mental fortitude or should have been brought up with the ability to shrug off words or the logical sense to avoid places where you may get hurt. Seems lately this generation of victimhood is now reaping what it has sown, that has wound up creating mental instability when faced with perceived verbal/written abuse, ie: people who are too dadgum sensitive.

While I feel bad for the girl herself, I gotta wonder why her parents were letting her go online without their supervision. If she was already having issues, why weren't they doing a better job of watching over her? Again, the folks picking on her were big mean jerks, but do you think my typing that is gonna make them kill themselves?

You're kind of missing the point, shimuamua. For one thing, the girl's parents WERE supervising her very closely - she was only allowed access to her MySpace account when it seemed that she was genuinely doing fine, and well-adjusted, and even then she was under constant supervision. During the day in question, Megan became so upset about what was being said about her that she deliberately disobeyed her mother when she was asked to log off. In fact, it was all a case of unfortunate timing, according to Tina. The only reason Megan was unsupervised that day was because Tina was running late for a doctor's appointment. I honestly don't see how her parents could have monitored her any more closely unless they had locked her up and put surveillance cameras in the house.

Secondly, we are talking about an intricately planned psychological assault on a young girl by a pair of adults. Girls in their early teens are always especially emotionally vulnerable to things like self-image and public opinion. Even if Megan had not been suffering from depression, this sort attack could have had serious psychological repercussions. I remember a certain incident that happened when I was 13, where all my friends got together and jeered at my dancing at a party behind my back. After I found out about it, I developed severe self-confidence and trust issues and never danced again in public for the next five years. Since then, I've grown a very thick skin with regards to barbs like this, but I wouldn't call what happened to me at 13 an over-reaction. at that age, at that vulnerable time of my life, things that seem trivial to me in adulthood were real and critical to me. We laugh and ridicule the antics of 'teeny-boppers', but this sort of drama is a necessary part of growing up. We can't measure other people's emotional response by our own personal yardsticks, especially not that of a child's. Sensitivity is all a matter of perception. Who's to say what exactly constitutes 'over sensitivity'? Our emotional responses are each unique and equally valid.

However, I get what you say. It's highly unlikely that the impersonators would have anticipated Megan killing herself as a result of their hoax. However, as I have pointed out before, it would certainly have messed up even a normal 13 year old to a serious degree. These people were parents themselves; they should have known that. And it was no random attack. It was a carefully, strategic and single-minded attack on the girl, premeditated for months beforehand, designed to have maximum impact at a significant time in her life. In my book, adults screwing with a vulnerable little girl's head in this way is as bad as sex-talking kids on-line.

I wonder whether you understand the nature of depression. I know that a few of the members of these boards suffer from it, and they will be the first to tell you that this condition entails that they are not in full control of their actions. I myself came close to suicide once, and that was not even with clinical depression - I was severely stressed. And what triggered it was, on the face of it, a completely trivial incident. One minute I was peaceful and enjoying myself, next minute I'm hovering at the brink of an abyss so painful and frightening it was beyond comprehension. Now that I am completely recovered, I look back at that time and can barely believe that was me. But it was me, and in that time, at that place and in that condition it was very real. To say that it's your own fault for not being rational in a situation such as that is completely laughable.

America has a phenomenally high number of sufferers from depression, as I understand it. The thing about mental illness is that you never know whether or not you have it, or somebody else has it, or what will trigger it in someone. Now, it's true that we can't walk around on tip-toe our whole lives hoping we won't set somebody off. It's one thing to crack an inappropraite joke, voice an opinion or say somethng spiteful in the heat of the moment and watch unintended consequences unfold. You can't help being human - it isn't your fault. But bullying, online flaming, hate campaign s and trivializing people's emotional sensitivity are serious issues which act as triggers for tragedy. For things like these, people should be made to take responsibility. It's like waving a hand gun around and saying, "well, I didn't MEAN to!" when it accidentally goes off and hits somebody.

I wonder how many tragedies and hate crimes could have been prevented in this year alone, if people took the concerns of 'oversensitive' people seriously. The Virginia Tech Shootings, for one.

A tragedy to be sure. The mother involved in the 'hoax' seems to be a particular unpleasant individual and obviously a bully. I thought the fact that her first action on learning that Megan had killed herself was to phone the other girl in an attempt to cover her tracks and the veiled threat to the newspaper about being careful what they wrote were very telling. She is obviously completely aware that she has culpability in this matter.

Were they solely to blame? No. Could they have foreseen the drastic consequences? No. But as adults their behaviour was shameful and they would have known, at the very least, that they were distressing a young girl who was vulnerable. That in itself is appalling.

Ann, I think there's a huge difference between this case and Paris Hilton. When you put yourself out in the glare of the media and beg for attention then you have to expect that not all of that attention will be positive. Especially if your behaviour and public persona are ones that invite criticism. Paris Hilton made a quite deliberate choice to make herself famous and she can hardly complain therefore that sometimes that fame brings her attention she doesn't like. When you grab the media tiger by the tail and court it, you can end up getting bit. And if you can't stand the heat...well it's easy enough to get yourself out of the kitchen if you really want to and lapse into obscurity. Let's not fool ourselves here. Paris Hilton loves the attention and courts it every chance she gets. And, since the criticism of her behaviour hasn't led to her making any changes in her life - minor or major - then we can only assume that she isn't too devastated by the negative attention either. It would be simple enough to do if she really cared what people thought of her.

Megan, however, was simply engaged in chatting with (so-called) friends on a networking site.

LabRat

You are right, LabRat, there is a huge difference between this case and any bullying of Paris Hilton. But for all of that, I'll insist that there is something about women that makes them easy and tempting targets.

This kind of collective turning on and bullying of one individual was what happened during the European witch hunts in the 16th and 17th centuries. By far most of the victims were females. I have read a few interesting books about the witch hunts in Sweden. Often the whole things started when young children, usually ten to thirteen years old, accused a particular woman of being a witch. The rumours spread like wildfire among "ordinary people", and the first people who spread the children's tales were quite often these children's parents. Suddenly "everybody" knew that the woman in question was a witch, so she was apprehended and tortured until she confessed. And because she had confessed, she was executed.

In this modern case a child's grievance against her "enemy", a thirteen-year-old girl, made her parents start a horrible (and anonymous) smear campaign on the internet against their daughter's "enemy". I have to say that this does remind me somewhat of the witch hunts. The victim's gender certainly fits the pattern.



Ann

No, I don't think I'm missing *your* point. Your opinion is that the adults who picked on the girl should be held responsible. My point/opinion is that with all the bad rap My Space has gotten, a 13 yr old's parents still let their mentally unstable daughter participate in chats with strangers/"friends" online. It is a sad tradgedy that a 13 year old girl decided that someone had written something so mean that her life wasn't worth living anymore.

Please don't ever question whether I *get* things. I've lived 37 years on this planet, have had "life experience" and I am raising two kids. I get things all too well, in that people are being raised up looking for the easy way out, or the easy way to blame outside events on their own mental attitudes and they label their thinking with a name and make it somebody else's problem.

It wasn't because this kid was an impressionable girl that her life ended so badly, for whatever percentage the bullies were culpable, this young lady was in a situation that she hadn't been mentally trained up or prepared for and she made a horrendous decision. Should her parents have been watching her round the clock surveillance? I suppose if my kid had tried to commit suicide once, I suppose I wouldn't be leaving her side for a minute, at least until she could legally get away from me on her own.

If I knew that it was my on line connection that was giving her problems, there goes the connection. I've gone a whole year without being online, I promise anyone else can do it as well. And don't bring up to me that people need it, they don't, you can do all your stuff at the library or at work. Heck, the parents could have a laptop they kept with them and only hooked up when they were home. I've got a ton of practical solutions before any "it just won't work" retorts are presented.

The fact is the higher percentage of "mental disability" in any country is simply matter of high population, and the minute one of these folks starts a tantrum it seems like the whole population has to slow down to that level. Is it a wonder if things are getting worse when this is what kids are being raised up to believe?

And I only bring up this point because it's been mentioned, and that is if there had been a couple hundred other students during the Virginia Tech shootings with the legal and resposponsible ability/skill to carry a firearm around, the "mentally disabled/over-sensitive" student in question would not have gotten any farther than his own demise.

And before any assumptions are made,I've experienced 37 years of life and my experiences have led me to develop my own thick skin and a logical/practical pattern of thought. I'm not an uneducated rube who hasn't thought things out (and I'm certainly not going to commit seppeku if anyone thinks that way)

Shimuamua,

I am very sorry if my post sounded condescending or offensive to you, that was not my intention. I simply wanted to clarify what my perspective of this was. Nor do I think you are an uneducated rube. (what's a rube, anyway?) However, I think it's a bit unreasonable to say that you would never misunderstand a point someone is trying to make just because you are 37 years old. That would imply that seniority indicated perfection, and is also a bit of an 'ageist' statement.

I admit, two points that you made in your earlier post struck two of my societal pet peeves. One is the tendency for society to blame parents for their children's suicides out of hand. (I don't mean that you WERE blaming them out of hand, but you were blaming them more than the people who triggered the suicide itself, and I couldn't agree with that.) The other is the notion that people with depression are culpable for their own suicides. A girl in my school once took a swan dive out of the fifth storey gym while suffering from acute bi-polar. The staff and the priests that came to sermons thereafter kept saying that she was a misguided sinner and that basically, she was silly little oversensitive girl who had thrown her life away. To this day, I have never forgiven either my school nor my society for that attitude. So, yes, I am a little 'oversensitive' to what I perceive as likewise implications.

You make contradictory points, however. You advocate that children should be made used to the rough-and-tumble of the world, and yet you condemn the parents for letting Meghan have access to a site frequented by most of her peers. At the time this incident happened, Meghan had seemed to have got over a lot of her problems and had appeared to be healthy and normal. Also, Tina denies that her daughter ever tried to commit suicide before, despite what the woman has alleged in the police report. In such a circumstance, I don't see that it would have been reasonable to deny the child a MySpace account, as long as she was being closely supervised. I don't approve of sheilding children over-much from the world either, and her condition should not have left her out from sharing a fun activity with her peers, as long as she was being monitored. To date, I have yet to see a blogging community which can regulate the age group of its members if they choose to lie about them. To be sure, a community such as Livejournal or Facebook would have been more ideal but choosing another blogging community would have defeated the purpose for Meghan, as MySpace would be the site frequented by all her friends.

Parents don't expect their children to be the target of concentrated, out-of-the-blue, internet bullying while they are on-line with her own circl e of friends. The occasional on-line spat with a friend, perhaps, but certainly not such a vicious attack. I don't see how the Meiers could have predicted this, and I don't see how they could have shielded their daughter more. Perhaps, we shall simply have to agree to disagree about this.

The Virginia Tech shootings is another point on which we will simply have to agree to disagree on, as I am strongly pro-gun control. In my view, if the shooter hadn't had access to guns in the first place, nobody need have known how to defend themselves from them. In Sri Lanka, we have firearm laws so strict that civilians would barely have access to them, and gun-related crimes are excessively low as a consequence, and at one point, unheard of. (Of course, that doesn't mean that our crime rate is low too, but while you can rob a person at knife-point, you can't commit mass murder with one.)

And regarding the question of oversensitivity, you kind of make my point for me - we simply cannot trivialize other people's reactions as 'oversensitivity' out of hand. Now, if I were to hold you to a certain standard of sensitivity, I would have said that the amount of offense you took to my post made you oversensitive. However, as I accept that different people are have varying levels of sensitivity to different things, I don't judge your offense as an over-reaction, and I don't trivialize anything that I may have said to offend you.

Okay, you weren't trying to offend me. I can accept that. I must admit straight up, when I perceive that my intelligence is being questioned, my hackles get raised, but here's the difference between me an a person with a "mental disability".

My response.

All I did was write an opposing viewpoint. I'm not going off myself or shoot up a building full of people in retailiation. And I will reiterate once more, if there were more upstanding citizens with the responsibility and skill around allowed to carry a firearm, mass murders would NOT happen either simply because the instigator would not live long enough to kill a lot of people.


Now as far as contradictions there's one right here.
But the day in question she obviously wasn't, so somebody in her family dropped the ball for what ever reason. And worse it was mentioned that the girl disobeyed her mother in staying online.

If the girl had been taught not to disobey her parents, she might still be around. It is in fact the duty of every loving parent to teach children to avoid harmful elements if possible. They must be trained to make smart decisions. Raising a kid to think rightly, practically and logically and still closely monitor their behavior doesn't seem contradictory at all.

Children can have all sorts of self defense training (rough and tumble as you said) and social life experience with bullies and such, and still be expected to do exactly what their parents tell them, in fact moreso, because rigorous and constant training/correction teaches discipline.

Now another thing I know about me is that when I'm certain of my opinion, no amount of written debate is going to change that, so it's my decision/response to leave off this thread, 'cause I know where it's going and I just don't feel like sitting up with a bottle of Rolaids all night long.

Laters.

TEEEEEEJ

I’ve finally decided to post, as I fear that saying nothing could be construed as tacit agreement with some of the thoughts expressed. I personally disagree with some of what TEEEEEEEJ has written, so I thought I would express yet another viewpoint on a couple of things that she said, even though she has made it clear that she will not be revisiting this thread.

I will not comment on the gun control issue, because A) that would be pulling the thread off-topic and B) although many people thrive on political debate, I don’t.

From all accounts that I’ve read, Megan’s computer time was being closely supervised. But no, that wasn’t the case on that particular afternoon. But that’s not a contradiction, it simply is a circumstance. If every time you leave the house you remember to lock the front door, yet one day you forget, would it be fair for me to say that you never do it? No, it means that one day you made a mistake, and hopefully there were no serious circumstances because of it.

Should Megan’s mother have made her daughter turn off the computer immediately and taken her with her to the orthodontist’s office? Perhaps – and in hindsight, I’m sure that she wishes that she had done so. Again, an error in judgement, but it probably didn’t seem so at the time. A simple – yet ultimately tragic – mistake.

What reason do you have to think that she wasn’t taught that?

I have a teenager. Fortunately he has never dealt with the emotional problems – low self-esteem, weight issues, depression, ADD – that Megan had. My husband and I have taught him to obey the rules that we, his teachers, and society have laid down. He is a good kid. Yet he has disobeyed us, more than once. It’s been little things – fortunately – and he’s had to suffer the consequences of his actions. As I said, he has been taught not to disobey, yet he has. He’s made a mistake. I believe that is the case with Megan too. Based on the children that I know, all of them have disobeyed at one time or another. If anyone has the secret of making their children obey – all the time and every time, no matter what – please share it with the rest of us, because that is a skill that many of us don’t seem to possess.

So perhaps the parents aren’t blameless here. Perhaps mistakes were made, where, if a slightly different path had been taken at that moment, Megan would still be alive today. I have never had to deal with the death of a child, but I’m pretty sure that her parents are kicking themselves every day, wondering if they had just given a different answer, reacted a moment sooner…

But in my mind this in no way relieves the culpability of the woman who opened the fake MySpace account. Although her identity has been revealed on a number of internet websites, I’m not going to use it since it has not been reported by the mainstream news. Mrs. X has not talked publicly about her role in all this, but in the filed police report she stated that she started the fake account to find out what nasty things that Megan was saying about her daughter behind her daughter’s back. If I had been the woman and believed that something like this was going on, I would have tried to talk to Megan’s parents first before taking any other action…but maybe that’s just me.

Mrs. X chose another route. She deliberately created a profile of an attractive young man who told Megan he thought that she was pretty, in order to quickly gain her confidence. After a number of weeks, did she have any evidence that Megan in fact was saying nasty things about her daughter? It doesn’t appear to be so. For whatever reason, Mrs. X decided that the charade had gone on long enough. Suddenly terminating the connection would probably have been devastating for Megan no matter how it had been done, and perhaps with the same results. But rather than “Josh” telling Megan that it was over because his mother was cutting him off the internet, for example, Mrs. X chose to close it out in the most hurtful way that she could, by having “Josh” insulting Megan, calling her fat and a slut, and telling her that the world would be a better place without her.

How can we have any sympathy for a woman who would do this? And this was a woman who personally knew the girl, knew of her depression and self-esteem issues. How can any self-respecting adult do something like that to a young girl? I don’t understand it. Maybe someone does, but I don’t.

Thanks for letting me vent.

Kathy

Well, as someone well familiar with depression myself (been there, *not* done that, got to live), I can only say this: I don't see how it was the fault of Megan's parents. They did monitor her, everything (apart from one strange message the day before) seemed to be fine, and Megan seemed to be all right, too. It's true that Megan's mother should have done something while she was at the orthodontist's, but what? She was talking to Megan on the phone, telling her to log off. Why Megan didn't do that is another story. Of course, we might say that Mrs. Meier could have rushed home to make her log off, but would that have changed anything? I honestly don't think so. Most of the damage had already been done by that time, I'd say.

The only blame I can find with Mrs. Meier is that she only scolded her daughter for *not* logging off instead of trying to comfort her.

The parents (or mother?) of Megan's former friend though acted viciously, I think. And that's exactly why I think so:

• They *knew* that Megan was treated for depression. If they had taken the time to find out what that means, they should have known better.
• They created the fake account with the sole purpose of spying on Megan, gaining her trust. I mean, just imagine creating a persona to infiltrate somebody's most private thoughts! Or, worse, imagine that same thing happening to you! How vile can it get?
• They made sure to even grant other people access to "join the fun", as one girl who declined the invitation phrased it. That alone shows that the purpose of their online spying (or whatever you want to call it) was not benign and not only meant to protect their own daughter from harm (as might be assumed).
• After they made sure that Megan trusted "Josh" and took his opinion to heart, they started a flaming campaign of the worst sort. Not only by saying really bad things about her, but also by implying that her real life persona, the *real* Megan, was known for all sorts of bad things. Being on the receiving end of a flaming campaing alone is bad enough, but being made aware that your whole neighborhood knew about all your (imagined?) bad traits... How must that girl have felt? I mean, if you're being flamed on mySpace, you can easily decide to leave it. But how is a thirteen-year-old supposed to leave her neighborhood?
• Bear with me and read this final message once again: Everybody in insert hometown here knows how you are. You are a bad person and everybody hates you. Have a shitty rest of your life. The world would be a better place without you. Do I have to say anything else?

TEJ, it's good to know you have nothing else to do. No making money, no sleeping, no nothing. Believe me if I say this, but you can't keep up 24/7 surveillance of anybody, not even your own child, much less for years.

The point is that the Meiers didn't know that MySpace was giving Megan her problems. At least not until the very same day she committed suicide. Thus, your tons of practical solutions are strictly beside the point. (Forgive me for asking, but did you actually read the whole text, or did you only skim it?)

Well spoken, but does it work all the time? Do your children always obey you? Do they do so *at once*? Even when they feel they only have to 'finish up' defending themselves, even if they're in emotional turmoil like Megan? Really? Well, if they do, then congratulations.

As a matter of fact, I can understand how Megan felt in that very situation. She was trying to defend herself against unfair accusations from people she considered her trusted friends, and she badly needed someone to be on her side, to tell her how to cope. Sadly, she didn't know how.

My two cents.

God bless that poor family. After reading all the discussion, the one thing everyone seems to hit on is just trying to do the best you can as a parent. How do you cope with your own child's death by their own hand? Elsewhere, I want to beat the crap out of the mother who made the fake profile. How do you screw with a child like that for *any* reason?

JD

I believe that is shimauma's entire point right there. You start giving your children the coping skills that they're going to need later in life from the very beginning. You don't wait until they're older and suddenly decide to start parenting them.

Maybe you're right, Sue. But the way she inserted the "obeying" part, I don't know. This whole "command and obey" thing just raises my hackles whenever it comes up, no matter the circumstances. Might be the case because I'm German. Things have definitely changed here.

Sue, I don't dispute that particular point of TEEEEJ's either. I didn't disagree with everything that she had written, but tried to concentrate on the areas where our opinions differed.

I agree with that, too, and I assume that is what most of us are trying to do every day as parents. But I'm a bit confused and not sure why you wrote that. Is there any indication that Megan's parents had come up short in that area? Yes, the thought of Megan talking about suicide in the third grade is most disturbing, and it sounds as though she started seeing a therapist immediately after that. Is there evidence that neglect or lack of parenting skills caused Megan's thoughts to head in that direction in the first place, and that Megan's parents were suddenly playing catch-up?

If a young person commits a crime/is abusive/commits suicide/a number of other choices, often the seeds of disturbance leads back directly to their childhood, and how they were raised. But is it always the parents' fault? Can we always point fingers and say, "If you had done that, then this wouldn't have happened?" I don't know that it's always that easy.

*****

ETA: When Sue posted with a quote and referred to TEEEJ's argument, I assumed that she was quoting from TEEJ. I did not bother to check that, but confirmed that I wasn't arguing against everything that TEEJ had written. I have since realized that in fact Sue was quoting from Lara's excellent post. I am in complete agreement with Lara's quote and, if that is also TEEJ's viewpoint, then agree with her as well.

Not that anyone but me probably cares at this point, but I did want to set the record straight.

While I appreciate the points Kathy and Lara have made in this thread, I don't see that it would do any good to continue posting them here. TEEJ has made it clear that she doesn't give a damn about what any of us thinks, as disagreeing with her implies we question her intelligence and she has no need of differing viewpoints given her seniority and life experience.

And since everyone of us on these boards have probably disobeyed their parents once in a while (not being mindless drones, after all) we have all obviously been very badly raised. Thank you, TEEJ.

Yes, this is me being very offended. It's one thing to respect that the other person disagrees with you, and a whole other issue when you are summarily shut down in such a high handed and peremptory fashion.

I had a friend commit suicide a few years ago, and the only thing more painful than losing him was the finger-pointing that went on afterward. So blaming-for-the-suicide aside, the parents who instigated the hoax infuriate me. Merely spying on your daughter's friend is one thing -- pathetic, to say the least -- but probably the least of her transgressions. Even if the parents thought Megan was saying mean things about her daughter, why be mean in return? Why not just spy, learn what you want to learn, etc. -- why be cruel as well? Sounds like those parents are still 13 at heart and thought being involved in a teenage hatefest would be good for kicks. Or maybe they're just crazy, I don't know.

Here were are debating whether a 13-year-old girl should be allowed to have a MySpace. If it's a maturity issue, there are plenty of *adults* who should not be allowed access.

I really feel for Megan. I had a falling out with an online friend a while ago, and while I chose to keep my gripes to myself and to people who were not personally friends with this person, she chose to smear me on her LiveJournal, an audience which consisted of several of our mutual friends. I didn't take me long to stop reading her LJ altogether, but she kept at it (people told me.) Eventually I stopped letting it bother me. Let her do what she wants, I have better things to do than get upset. Online drama is rampant, and it doesn't stop with teenagers -- this person is old enough to be Megan's mother -- and that's why I have no trouble *believing* that a teenager's parents could be capable of such things. Still, it's just so pathetic. Plus, it was providing their own daughter with a terrible lesson -- that spying and trickery (not to mention cruelty) are somehow the norm. Whatever demons/drama issues they were facing in their own lives, they were wrong to attack a child.

I remember junior high as being an emotional battlefield, and as someone else said up there, you're so sensitive at that age anyway, about your looks especially. Plus you're trying to figure out relationships and you have so little life experience to go on. Even at 27, I find it difficult knowing who to trust and dealing with friends who turn into foes.

In conclusion, what those hoax parents (and apparently their daughter also) did was sick, and the fact that they feel no remorse (for at least being jerks if nothing else) makes me wonder what else they're capable of.

Parenting is hard. In the house next to my mother's live a now-retired couple, who have - or had - three children. Twenty years ago on December 23, me and my parents were invited over to this family for a neighbourly get-together right before Christmas. But it was the worst "party" I have ever been to. The neighbours' middle child, their youngest son, a 23-year-old young man, was missing. My family knew that he had been suffering from bouts of depression that fall, and he had spent time in hospital being treated for it. Just ten days before or so he had been released from hospital, and he had gotten a temporary job delivering things for Christmas. Well, he and his delivery van had not returned home the previous evening (he still lived with his parents).

You can imagine the awful mood as we were all trying to be nice and neighbourly. We were all thinking that the young man had killed himself, but no one dared mention the word "suicide". The woman in the family served us chicken stew, where big pieces of slimy chicken skin were drenched in a thick sauce, and trying to swallow that thick slime and thinking about the young man's probable fate made me almost throw up several times.

The next day they found his van. Then they found him. Yes, he had killed himself. It was Christmas Eve.

The thing is, those neighbours have two other children, a son and a daughter. They are both doing very well and have jobs and families.

My point is - if the parents of those three children raised their kids more or less the same way, then it worked for their oldest and their youngest ones, but not for their middle child. And the only explanation I can think of is that children are different. What works for one child doesn't necessarily work for another one.

I was born in 1955, a very different time from today. I know that as a small child I was very obedient, no doubt partly because of who I was and partly because of how I was raised. For example, when I was six years old and my brother was four our parents left us every night for weeks in a row to go and work on the house they were building. They put us to bed at seven, told us not to get up, explained that they were leaving, turned out the lights, and left. We had no baby-sitter. That was okay. I wasn't scared. My parents had told us that nothing bad would happen to us, so of course nothing would. Admittedly my brother was a bit scared, so he would come over to my bed and sleep next to me. That was okay, too. Our parents would come home at around ten or eleven and find us asleep in my bed.

Later, from the time when I was ten, my parents left me unsupervised in another way. In the summer, when I didn't have school and didn't have any particular chores to do, I was allowed to leave home and not come back until dinner. This was long, long before there were any cellphones. There were a few pay phones around, and I would always have a few coins on me for emergencies. But the only time I can ever remember that I used a pay phone to call home for an "emergency" was when a friend of mine and I had taken our bicycles and cycled away too far, and we were just too tired to cycle all that way back home again. My father came and picked us up. Apart from that, however, we never asked for help, and our parents had absolutely no idea where we were, and they had no way of tracing us. They had told us when we had to be home for dinner, that was all, and I was never late.

If something had happened to me or my brother when we spent all that time unsupervised, would our parents have blamed themselves? I don't think so. Make no mistake, they would have been absolutely devastated, but I don't think they would have blamed themselves. I'm sure it never occurred to them to forbid us to spend our summer days outside and on our own and go wherever we wanted. All the other parents allowed their kids to do that, so why shouldn't my parents do it? None of the kids I knew of ever came to any grief, not during our lazy summer days anyway. And I was always home for dinner.

But in some ways I think my parents raised me wrong, nevertheless. In some ways, they made me too obedient. A towering figure of my childhood was my maternal grandfather, and my mother never understood the role he played in my life. Any chance he got, he talked religion with me. My grandfather was a Pentecostalist, but my mother had left that church in her youth and joined a liberal church instead. My grandfather probably wanted to bring me into the Pentecostalist church instead, as a sort of compensation for losing my mother. He told me about fervently religious children, about children who lay dying and thanked God for taking them up to heaven, about children who happily cut their own birch-rods so that their parents could beat them up with them, so that the children would be even better and more God-fearing children than they were already. I had used to feel like a relatively good child who almost always obeyed her parents, but my grandfather's tales made me feel how utterly sinful and inadequate I was. And when my grandfather told me that the world was coming to an end any day now, or any night, and Jesus was going to come and get all his true followers and leave the rest behind, then I lay awake many nights and listened for Jesus. I knew that there was no chance at all that I would be allowed into heaven, not in view of how bad I was compared with the children that my grandfather had told me about, but at least I was going to scream when I heard Jesus and wake my mother, so I could plead with her to stay with me.

I still have an anger inside me, when I think of how terrified I was a child because of what my grandfather told me. And if I hadn't been raised to be such a good child, I might have refused to listen to my grandfather when he told me all his religous horror tales. And if I hadn't been raised to be unquestioningly religious I might have dared to tell my mother that my grandfather scared me. As it was, the fact that I was scared only made me feel even more sinful and doomed, and I was deathly scared of telling anyone.

Raising children is hard. How do you do it? How do you know what is right for every child? And should you blame the parents when things go wrong for their kids?

Not in the case of Megan Meier, in my opinion. I doubt that her parents were perfect for her, but then again, being perfect is almost impossible. I really do think that Megan's parents did their best for her. The other set of parents, however, did their best to bully Megan. Let's put the blame on them.

Ann

There is one little word that does make me wonder. As a matter of fact, it kept coming back to me in my sleep. Here's a quote from the article where megan herself explains who she is:

Why did this girl feel *neglected* of all things? If we are to believe the article, she was well cared for. Maybe there was something wrong in the family, after all.

It's a dicey thing to assume, Mellie. She was thirteen years old and very sensitive. When I was 13 years old I absolutely hated my parents, or thought I did, anyway. I can't quite remember why, but early adolescence was a rather nightmarish time for me when I felt awkward socially and confused emotionally. It was a lot easier to pin my problems on my parents than try and figure things out for myself. It was a trend to feel victimized by our parents at that age. There were months when I completely avoided my parents and could barely hold a civil conversation with them. I felt that they didn't understand jack abut what I was going through and they didn't care. I'm sure my poor parents were as baffled about me as I was, and I'm sure they made a few mistakes in handling my behaviour, but I also know that it was just me going through a phase in my adolescence. I started growing out of it by the time I was about 16 and by 18 I was very close to them again. Looking back, I wouldn't lend much credence to any of the accusations my confused adolescent self hurled at my parents. (I still have my old journals. They're filled with angsty, self-pitying declarations like the acronym Meghan made up.)

I'm not saying that Meghan was a typical teenage drama queen who shouldn't be taken seriously. I'm not even saying that I shouldn't have been taken seriously at that age. (Well, not too seriously, obviously. ) My problems were as real to me then as they are to me now, whether most of them were imagined or not. Adolescent confusion is not something to be trivialized - it's very dangerous if allowed to develop unchecked and very painful when you're going through it. What I am saying is that what Meghan wrote seems typical of the drama I see in the autograph book of an average 13 year old, myself included. There's certainly a chance that she really was neglected by her parents, but all we can really tell from that acronym is that she FELT neglected at the time she wrote it. Given that teenagers aren't always grounded in reality, we can't use it to indict her parents of neglect.

However, I do believe that maybe the Meiers COULD have been less focused on discipline and more on being sympathetic. Two of the points that struck me was that when Meghan called her mother and cried about how the other kids were flaming her on-line, Tina's response was to order her to log off right now. (Yeah, right!) And then, after rushing back home, Tina took Meghan to task about being disobedient rather than sympathizing with her about the terrible flaming attack she had just endured. Ron had clearly been more inclined to do the latter, but I have a feeling he thought he should stand behind his wife while she was disciplining their daughter, and talk her later, after they had all calmed down. Neither of them had clearly understood what a traumatic experience this had really been for Meghan until after she committed suicide. If they had just held off the confrontation for a bit of initial sympathy, Meghan would probably not gone over the edge. So in that way they are culpable, and I'm sure they are kicking themselves over it.

And yet, I still don't feel like blaming them. Why? Because their reactions were exactly like the reactions of an average parent - Punish first, then commiserate. If I had to blame them for it, I would have to blame my own parents, who punished me first, and after I had raged and cried myself out, would sit me down for the love and sympathy. Meghan, unfortunately, was simply too far gone for this standard parenting method to work.

So while I can't find it in myself to blame them for something they must be devastated with guilt over already, it does cement the fact that parents should respect their children's sensitivity more, and realize that their problems are very real and very painful to them.