Guest Author - Vance Rowe

History is full of children who kill their parents. Some cases are famous and spend months in the news and some are not so newsworthy. Newsworthy or not, it doesn’t take from the fact that parricide is a spreading cancer within today’s adolescents and has been for over a century. From Lizzie Borden to the Menendez brothers, there are many reasons why kids kill their parents.

Although Lizzie Borden was acquitted of the murders, it is said that she suffered from petit mal seizures during her menstrual cycle and may have killed her parents unwittingly. The Menendez brothers claimed that they were physically abused. It is reported that there are actually three types of children who commit parricide. One type of child suffers from mental illness. Another is the physically and emotionally abused child that is pushed to the breaking point and the third type is the precariously antisocial child.

Unlike adult children who kill their parents, the adolescent child who is abused is basically trapped in the home with the parents. Adult children can move away or just simply leave their abusive homes but adolescent and preadolescent children cannot. They can run away but to where? The streets? A relative’s house? Running away is against the law and when caught by law enforcement, the children are usually return to the abusive home and since they ran away, the abuse will likely to increase because they are disobedient. It’s this constant abuse that could cause a child to snap and commit parricide.

What about the mentally ill child? How can a mentally ill child be held responsible for parricide if they are not in their right mind and don’t know what they are doing? It is said that Lizzie Borden, if she did indeed kill her parents, did so while suffering from petit mal epileptic seizures. These children may not be held legally responsible for their actions, so to speak, but they can be institutionalized or hospitalized for the rest of their lives as they are deemed mentally unfit to stand trial or be held responsible for their actions.

Then there is the antisocial child. One who kills their parents because they are not allowed to drive the car or cannot access their trust funds until the parent is dead. This is the most dangerous type as they have no regard for human life and are only concerned with how they can benefit from something like parricide. They are also the type that the media loves to write about and sell their mediums with, case in point, the Menendez brothers. Lyle and Erik Menendez spent many, many months in the news and are household names today because of it.

A Psychology Today report states that parricide is almost a daily event and in fact, between 1977 and 1986 more than three hundred parents were killed by their children every year. The report also stated that this typical killer is a white male between the ages of 12 and 17.