>>>No idea how accurate this is and only posting it due to conversations here on the mental illness aspects of the tragedy:
>>>
>>>http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/12/18/fear-being-committed-may-have-caused-connecticut-madman-to-snap/
>>>
>>>Even if the reporting is accurate, the view is that of someone on the outside looking in, who may or may not have had some information on what his mother was planning for the future.
>>
>>A Fox News "exclusive " with sketchy sources. A.K.A. most likely a bunch of b.s.
>>
>>One thing that hasn't come up with all this is that it seems that all of the children in the USA now seem to have some sort of mental illness that requires medication. This new culture we have where we start pumping children full of mood-altering drugs is insane. I hear my girlfriend's friends talking about how hyper or unrulely their teenagers are so they take them too a shrink and get them put on some drugs. Personally I think it's just a bunch of lazy parents who can't deal with raising a teenager ... and rather than doing some actual parenting the solution seems to be dope the kid up. Who knows perhaps its an evil conspiracy designed by the corporate pharmaceutical companies to get a whole new generation of customers before they even hit puberty. I'm not one to believe conspiracy theories but frankly I think that's more likely than all these kids needing psychotropic drugs. I know that prescriptions of psychotropic drugs written to teens shot up 250% between 1994 and 2001...who know's what those numbers are like now.
>
>Kids today are spoiled. Back in my day we had to dope ourselves up ! I do recall we were pretty sure we needed psychotropic drugs.
>
>( I do agree with your serious point to a point but I think that while the diagnosis and prescription is often just lazy medicine - and quick fix parenting - properly used things like Ritalin and some anti-depressants and more serious drugs for bi-polar disorder etc can prevent tragedy. My personal cause, from my own experience, is the problems of extremely high functioning children with ADD who are usually never diagnosed but whose lives can be extremely negatively impacted nonetheless )

(emphasis mine)

There have been a number of recent books with the common theme that American parents are guilty of overparenting. They (we) are so focused on giving our children the best of everything they often grow up without the necessary coping skills for successful adulthood. The parents do things for them that they would be better off doing themselves. An example in one of the books describes an 8 year old girl in a primitive tribe who is responsible for stacking the leaves that are the family's crop and for making the family dinner every day. It isn't that American kids are not capable of doing the same, it's that they are so seldom asked. Give them everything so they know how much they are loved. And yes, I think I was guilty of this myself (although IMO both my daughters turned out well).

UPDATE: Here is a link to the article. And I see the girl was not 8 but 6.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/07/02/120702crbo_books_kolbert