Blended families??? Feelings of plotting murder is pretty common? I have a feeling Ms Papernow has been smoking something she found in one of the outlying cow pastures.
“You just hope there’s not a loaded gun around.”
Huh. I have been mad plenty of times with a loaded gun around, yet I have never thought of shooting anyone.
It’s a tragic case but I do find it ironic that Dem judges face being struck off for incarcerating youths for minor offenses while this murderer is freed.
The idea of charging this kid as an adult is just insane. He’s ELEVEN, for God’s sake (and in the mugshot he looks like he’s about 7). He can’t begin to understand or control his own feelings towards his father’s very pregnant live-in girlfriend, who has presumably replaced his mother. And then he hops on the school bus like nothing is wrong, accompanied by the dead woman’s 7 year old daughter, who apparently didn’t see any reason to raise an alarm about a gunshot that just went off inside the house. And from the dead woman’s brother-in-law: “’He actually told my son that he wanted to do that to her,’ Houk’s brother-in-law, Jason Kraner, said Saturday. ‘There was an issue with jealousy.’” So there was advance warning that this little boy was harboring some serious anger, but he was still left alone at the house with some younger children, the object of his anger, and a loaded gun??? They’ve got the wrong person in jail here.
Call me old-fashioned, but I thought marriage had to be involved in being a “step FAMILY.” We certainly are defining “family” downward when a father shacking up with a girlfriend becomes a “blended family.”
Many children growing up in these hideous arrangements will not be well-adjusted.
Then put the little devil in a padded room in the closest maximum security mental hospital.
Enough with the “kid glove” treatment of criminals — EVEN kids! PUNISH THEM. MAKE THEM UNCOMFORTABLE. DEMONSTRATE TO THEM THAT THERE IS A PRICE TO PAY FOR BLOWING SOMEONES HEAD OFF.
"Blended family" hell, that 11 year old was living in a "hodge-podge." His "bio-parents" (isn't that a phrase guaranteed to chill your sh!t) and the knocked-up girl friend did it to him.
When deviancy becomes the norm, the envelope gets pushed further and further out.
People have been living in “blended” famalies for thousands of years. We forget that prior to the 20th century life expectency wasn’t vary long (like on 30-35 years.) It was pretty common for one parent to die before the children were grown, and the remaining parent to remary.
So is this psychologist speaking out to try to get no-fault divorce laws changed, or trying to get adults to work harder on their marriages instead of jumping ship and trying the next 'sweet thing' to come along? No?
Didn't think so.
Hidden in this story of an 11 year old sociopath or psychopath is an appeal for gun control. How tiring.
The biggest surprise in this statement, is that Ms. Papernow's name isn't hyphenated.
“Patricia Papernow, a psychologist from Hudson, Mass., and expert on blended families, said tensions from combining families, as Brown’s father and Houk were doing, were “pretty normal in a new stepfamily.”
“It looks awful from the outside and sort of unspeakable, but these are the kinds of feelings that are pretty normal in a new stepfamily,” Papernow said. “You just hope there’s not a loaded gun around.”
I beg to differ.