Money, Drugs and Partying: Is This Why Kids Kill Their Parents?

Seventeen year old John Granat kills parents for throwing away his home-grown marijuana plants. High school Florida teen kills parents for not letting him host a Facebook party. Twenty year old Dennis Markov, still living at home, kills his parents over $5 in gas money. These are the conclusions of three news stories that have covered parricide this year.

And what's the moral of these stories? I don't know; the first two that pop in my head are a) we'd better watch our teens like a hawk because you never know what might set them off, or b) it's time to show those spoiled brats who's really in charge.

Of course, I know you're too intelligent to fall for the media hype. There's a big difference between a motive, i.e. what causes a person to do a certain thing, and a triggering event, i.e., the spark that sets the smoldering fire ablaze. Long before John beat his parents to death over a few pot leaves, you can bet there were problems in the home.

Are Today's Teens Budding Psychopaths?

No. Parricide is, and always has been, a statistical rarity. About the same number of teens kill their parents today as they did back in the 1970's and you can find examples of parent-murdering offspring in every decade.

In the thirty years ending in 2007, fewer than 2 percent of all homicides involved children killing their parents. An even smaller number involve the murder of both parents. Throw in the young age of the offender, and the odds a child will kill a parent is even lower. Violence-wise, kids have much more to fear from us than we do from them.

So When Does it Happen?

Because parricide by a teen is so rare, it's hard to draw any definitive conclusions about potential perpetrators. Certainly, there is no clear profile that we can use to lump these offenders together. Research does, however, suggest that young parent-murderers tend to have three motives:

1. "You/re not going to hurt me anymore." Approximately 70% of teens who kills their parents are abuse victims who have finally reached their limit. These are kids who have unsuccessfully gone to others for help, who may have witnessed other family members being abused, and who feel trapped in a really bad situation. If the abuse wasn't there, the risk of the teen becoming violent wouldn't be there either.
2. "You're standing in the way of something I want." This is the teen we need to worry about; the cold, calculating, manipulative youth who has little if any capacity for empathy. This view of the world can evolve from a variety of sources - gang involvement, attachment disorder, extremely permissive or indulgent parenting, or just an inborn lack of some fundamental human quality.
3. "You're not who you say you are." The rarest of the rare parricidal teen is one who is severely mentally ill. This may be a teen in the early throes of paranoid schizophrenia; perhaps he begins to hear voices telling him that the person who looks like his mother is really the devil in disguise, or develops the delusion that his father is controlling his mind.

Conclusion

Here's what I've concluded about teens who murder their parents: Most are terrified victims who've suffered more harm from adults in their lives than they will ever dish out. Some have been brought up to expect the world to revolve around them and have no qualms about taking revenge when it doesn't. Sometimes, for no reason, bad kids happen to good parents. And, rarely, a treatable mental illness turns into a life-altering tragedy.