The Families We Don’t Know What to Do With
The first thing to disappear is anonymity.
A last name becomes searchable. A childhood photo becomes evidence. Ordinary moments—holidays, school memories, a parent’s voice on a voicemail—are suddenly reinterpreted through a filter of a single catastrophic act.
For some families, grief arrives not with a death notification, but with an arrest headline.
They wake up in the same bodies, in the same homes, yet find themselves living in a different moral universe—one where silence is suspect, speech is scrutinized, and their relationship to someone they love is mistaken for responsibility for the horror of what that person has done.
This is the terrain families of the accused or convicted are forced to navigate. It is not a role they sought. It is not one they can step out of. And it is one our culture has very little patience for.
Is proximity the same as culpability?
Mel Kohberger
When Mel Kohberger spoke publicly about the impact of her brother’s crimes on her and her parents, she did not attempt to minimize nor reinterpret the harm done. She did not ask for sympathy over and above the families who lost their adult children in student housing in Idaho that fateful night.
What Mel described instead was secondary trauma—the psychological injury that occurs not through direct exposure to violence, but through sudden, overwhelming association with it.
Her family experienced shock, disbelief, social scrutiny, and the collapse of ordinary life structures. Employment opportunities were disrupted. Online speculation filled the absence of information. Grief became something to manage publicly rather than privately.
What emerged was a familiar but rarely acknowledged dynamic: families of perpetrators are often treated as morally porous, as if guilt travels through bloodlines.
But it does not. And here is why.
Development Is Multicausal, Not Moral Theater
There is a reflexive question that follows most acts of extreme violence: What kind of parents raised someone like that?
It is an understandable question—but also a deeply incomplete one.
From a developmental and clinical perspective, human behavior is shaped by many things (so-called “interacting variables”) over time. Not just one. This so-called “multicausal influence” includes (but isn’t limited to):
- Genetic predispositions and neurobiological factors
- Temperamental traits, including impulsivity, rigidity, or emotional reactivity
- Attachment patterns, especially disruptions during early development, such as long hospitalizations
- Peer dynamics, including chronic bullying or social marginalization
- School environments, teachers, coaches, scout leaders, priests, and other authority figures
- Sibling and extended family relationships
- Core stressors such as parental divorce, relocation, illness, or loss
- Traumatic or isolating experiences, particularly in childhood
- Digital exposure, including harassment, predation, or ideological grooming—now increasingly implicated in adolescent distress and suicide
Parents are influential, certainly—but not omnipotent. The idea of a “perfect family” is not only unrealistic; it is a cultural fiction that serves our need for control rather than our understanding of human development.
Poor Parenting = Poor Adult Outcome of Kids (Sure About That?)
While inadequate, inconsistent or abusive parenting is a known risk factor for adult outcome, it is not by itself determinative. Millions of people thrive despite traumatic upbringings. My mother was such a person. Clearly there is more going on than parenting to explain later adult behavior.
In fact, data suggests that even in cases of very inadequate parenting, the presence of just one stable, caring adult—a grandparent, a teacher, neighbor, or a coach—can almost entirely negate the predictive risk of a dysfunctional home.
So while early parenting cannot explain later violence in grown children, it still influences how a child develops. Parenting is a stronger predictor of internalized traits. Parenting has a stronger influence on
- Attachment Styles: How a person relates to romantic partners.
- Emotional Regulation: How a person processes stress or anger.
- Self-Concept: The “internal monologue” or sense of worth an adult carries.
But bear in mind, however, that while parenting influences internalized traits, it does not do so in isolation. Other factors, such as biologically influenced temperamental traits, exert a role also.
So, parenting is not a stamp that leaves the same imprint on every piece of clay.
Clark Fredericks
Consider the case of Clark Fredericks, whose promising life was derailed not by a lack of parental guidance or love, but by a calculated infiltration of his family’s trust. Fredericks was groomed and abused starting at age eight by a man who was a Sheriff’s Lieutenant, a Boy Scout Master, and a close family friend—a predator who utilized his “badge” and community standing to remain invisible to even the most attentive parents. Decades later, when Fredericks took the life of his abuser, the public’s instinct was to look backward and pathologize his upbringing. But, there was nothing to suggest that Joanne Fredericks was a neglectful nor abusive parent. Clark’s actions were the “slow-motion” result of systemic failure and untreated trauma, demonstrating that when a predator leverages societal institutions to bypass the family’s protective barriers, the eventual adult outcome is a product of external betrayal rather than domestic failure.
David Kaczynski
The story of David Kaczynski is another example of “there is more going on than parenting.”
David ultimately alerted authorities after recognizing his brother Ted’s writing style in the Unabomber manifesto—an act that required profound ethical resolve. It prevented further violence. It cost him his privacy. And it did not spare him suspicion.
Despite acting to stop harm, David and his family were still pulled into public scrutiny, their history examined for explanatory clues, their motives questioned and fingers pointed.
What is often missing from public retellings is the developmental context surrounding Ted Kaczynski himself. What came to light later is the permanent, eroding influence of a prolonged hospitalization of Ted at a critical time in his development. His isolation occurred during a time when attachment, emotional regulation, and relational trust are typically forming. Developmental psychology has long recognized that these early disruptions can have lasting effects on personality organization and stress tolerance later in life.
This context does not excuse violence. But it does challenge the fantasy that one household—or one parenting style—can fully account for extreme outcomes.
David Kaczynski went on to dedicate his life to violence prevention and restorative justice. Like many relatives of perpetrators, his response was not denial, but moral repair—an attempt to reduce future harm rather than deflect responsibility.
Living Inside Psychological Contradiction
Families of perpetrators are forced to hold conflicting psychological realities at the same time that resist simple narratives:
- Love for a family member
- Horror at that person’s actions
- Empathy for victims and their families
- Shame they did not earn
- A permanent fracture in identity and belonging
Clinically speaking, this is cognitive and emotional dissonance under extreme stress. There is no “correct” emotional posture. And yet these families are often judged as if one exists. And they do so under the harsh spotlight of social critique.
Too much grief is read as loyalty.
Too little is read as callousness.
Silence becomes suspicion.
Speech becomes self-defense.
Sue Klebold
This family tension played out again, years earlier, when Sue Klebold eventually spoke about her son Dylan—not to justify his actions at Columbine, but to explore missed warning signs and advocate for mental health awareness. Sue has discussed how parents of perpetrators become society’s “untouchables.” She notes that the parents of “near-adult” children are held to an impossible standard of total surveillance and culpability. In her Ted Talk she summarized the multicausal nature of inexplicable violence by saying: “The rest of the world could explain away what he had done: either he was born evil—a bad seed—or he’d been raised without moral guidance. I knew it wasn’t nearly so simple.” Her discussions have been met with empathy by some and condemnation by others, revealing how little tolerance we have for complexity once violence enters the frame.
A family can be ground zero of a tragedy without being its cause.
Peter Lanza: When Concern Is Not Enough
The case of Peter Lanza is yet another example of the public’s fantasy that “good” parents can always prevent or intervene effectively.
Peter Lanza was the non-custodial parent of Adam Lanza, who killed twenty children and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 before taking his own life. In the years leading up to the shooting, Peter Lanza repeatedly attempted to secure psychiatric care for his son. He was acutely aware his son was unwell. He expressed concern about Adam’s severe social withdrawal, rigidity, and deteriorating functioning. He urged intervention.
The family possessed the financial resources necessary for intervention, but what Peter Lanza lacked was custodial authority.
While Peter strongly disagreed with his former wife’s approach to parenting, deep concern is not synonymous with legal leverage. In the absence of a documented crime or a clear violation of the law by his son, he found himself without recourse. There was no court order he could invoke, no mandated treatment he could compel, and no legal threshold crossed that would have allowed him to override the custodial parent’s decisions. (For a discussion of the lack of psychiatric hospital beds for minors, see my post from May 5, 2026.)
Clinically, this is a familiar and agonizing bind.
Non-custodial parents frequently identify warning signs and feel an acute sense of urgency, yet they lack the legal standing to mandate evaluation or treatment. Unless specific, high-bar criteria are met—such as imminent danger, reportable abuse, or statutory thresholds designed to protect civil liberties—the parent is relegated to the role of a powerless observer in the drama of their own family.
In other words: concern without authority is not inaction. It is constraint.
From a systems perspective, Peter Lanza’s experience highlights the limits of individual responsibility within fragmented family, legal, and mental-health frameworks. It also exposes a painful irony: even when parents agree that help is needed and have the means to pursue it, access can still fail—due to consent laws, diagnostic ambiguity, fractured custody arrangements, and the absence of enforceable mechanisms for early intervention.
To reduce this tragedy to “parental failure” is not only inaccurate—it is intellectually lazy.
What These Families Share
Mel Kohberger. Joanne Fredericks. David Kaczynski. Sue Klebold. Peter Lanza.
These families differ profoundly in circumstance, temperament, and outcome. What they do not share is blameworthiness. These and other families of murderers like them are put in an impossible moral position:
- They noticed something was wrong—or realized it too late.
- They lacked information, authority, or effective pathways to intervene.
- They were forever changed by violence they did not commit.
- They experienced misplaced judgment and scrutiny by the public
From a clinical standpoint, these cases underscore a reality professionals understand well but the public resists: developmental trajectories are not fully controllable, and prevention is not a simple matter of caring more, trying harder, or parenting better.
Why This Belongs in Public Discourse
When we insist on locating violence solely within family failure, we do several things at once—and none of them help:
- We misunderstand risk, ignoring systemic and developmental contributors
- We discourage early help-seeking, by punishing families who speak up
- We shame caregivers, rather than improving access, coordination, and prevention
- We sacrifice accuracy in favor of emotional certainty
Most dangerously, we teach families that if they raise concerns and tragedy still occurs, they will be judged not for what they did wrong—but for not having achieved the impossible.
Why The Myth of Blaming Parents Persists
We blame parents because it’s a way to feel safe. If we can convince ourselves that “bad” people only come from “bad” homes, then we can believe that by being “good” parents, our own families will be safe from tragedy. It’s a mental shortcut that helps us avoid the scary truth: sometimes, life is just unpredictable, and biology or outside influences override parenting. By pointing the finger at a family, we turn a terrifying, multicausal event into a simple explanation that we can judge and file away.
An Expanded Call to Action
If we are serious about prevention—and about ethical storytelling—this must change.
For journalists and editors:
- Stop treating parents as explanatory stand-ins for complex pathology
- Acknowledge legal and custodial constraints when reporting on families
- Avoid hindsight bias disguised as moral clarity
For clinicians and policymakers:
- Advocate for better early-intervention pathways that do not rely solely on crisis thresholds
- Recognize the bind of non-custodial parents and caregivers
- Improve coordination between family courts, schools, and mental-health systems
For the public:
- Let go of the myth that perfect vigilance prevents tragedy
- Understand that effort and outcome are not the same thing
- Make room for compassion without erasing accountability
Violence demands responsibility—from those who commit it.
Grief demands care—for those who suffer it.
And prevention demands humility—about what families can and cannot control.
A perfect family does not exist.
Related reading: The Brain’s Wiring During Murder and The Part of Homicide That Never Makes it into True Crime.
For a podcast discussion about the families of murderers click here: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/guilt-by-association-when-your-relative-is-the-murderer–27243302
