One of the best written news articles I've read in a long time.

Warning: it is an extremely emotional story about child neglect.

http://www.tampabay.com/features/humaninterest/article750838.ece

Thank you for posting that. I had a lot of emotional reactions as I read it, and things I wanted to say, and nothing left by the time I hit the end. Wow.

“My house was a mess,” she says. “I’d been sick and it got away from me. But I never knew a dirty house was against the law.”

I almost wonder if the mother is so screwed up that she actually believes that.

WOW, simply no words to suffice for that.

Excellent writing, and a touching, moving story. How a woman can live with herself after neglecting a child like that is beyond me. Kudos to the family that adopted her, and hopefully she will have a chance now.

While I'm sad about what happened to the girl, I'm filled with an overwhelming feeling of utter revulsion and disgust toward that sorry excuse for a 'mother'. The fact that she used negative records to prove that 'someone' was taking care of the girl is disgusting.

The story is a moving one for sure. But for some reason it just hits me as one of those stories that win some award for reporting and then it turns out that the characters were either made up or are a compilation of ten different people that the reporter saw while at the DYFS offices. What hit me as odd was the boys were not taken and still allowed to live with excrement all over the house and with someone who is so obviously incompetent.

But if not, it's great that this girl is out of the environment.

The story is a moving one for sure. But for some reason it just hits me as one of those stories that win some award for reporting and then it turns out that the characters were either made up or are a compilation of ten different people that the reporter saw while at the DYFS offices. What hit me as odd was the boys were not taken and still allowed to live with excrement all over the house and with someone who is so obviously incompetent.

But if not, it's great that this girl is out of the environment.
Read the article again, her sons were adults.

I think one of the sons was mentally challenged, "soft of slow" as the mother called him, so Rover's argument could still stand when it comes to him... but all the article says is that her sons were "twenty something" and one was "sort of slow". Can't really judge off that.

You know, the mother was probably that girl once. I wonder if she didn't have a similar upbringing that made her how she is. We pity the girl, but when the girl grows up and can't function, we vilify her.

Maybe those eugenics guys were onto something, before the whole genocide thing.

The mother was close to being "mentally challenged" too, according to the article.
Danielle’s IQ, the report says, is below 50, indicating “severe mental retardation.” Michelle’s is 77, “borderline range of intellectual ability.”
An IQ of 77 indicates translates to about the 10th percentile.

We pity the girl, but when the girl grows up and can't function, we vilify her.

Well, she wasn't too dumb to open her legs. We vilify her because she chose to put another human being through the same hell she survived, if your assumption is correct.

Even smart, well-adjusted people screw that one up millions of times a day.

If the mother couldn't handle taking care of the daughter, than she should have asked for assistance rather than all but torture the poor girl.

Tons of people are willing to help a mother in need. Those same people WILL vilify the same mother if she doesn't ask for help and puts children at risk.

Of course that's completely obvious to us. No one here is operating with an IQ nearly two standard deviations below average.

I'm sorry. I can't feel sorry for the mother. The daughter was 7 and unable to walk, talk, feed herself, was in dirty diapers, sleeping on a moldy mattress, had lice and matted hair, didn't know how to eat solid food, etc. When they were taking the mother's daughter, the mother couldn't find shoes for the girl (per her own admission).

The trailer the reporter visited the mother in was in much better shape than when the girl 'lived' with her mother, so the mother obviously had 'some' ability to do rudimentary clean up. Living in a house with shit and piss all over the place, with mounds of dirty diapers and roaches, without food, clothing, or any life skills, nope I'm sorry, I can't find anything there to feel sorry for the mother.

She lost her daughter of which she was obviously unable to provide care. The child's well being is vastly more important than whether some unfit mother feels she was treated fairly. She didn't treat her daughter with anything. It's obvious (assuming what was being told in the story was true) that the child was not being cared for at all. She HAD to be removed from the situation.

I'm not saying anyone should pity the mother. She was obviously ridiculously unfit to care for a child.

I just think it's easy to look at the situation exclusively through the lens provided by that article, without stepping back and looking at the bigger picture. The child was probably one more in a generations long downward spiral, not the victim of intentional malfeasance.

That's entirely possible. She still had to be removed though from that environment.

What I don't understand is how the mother could have 'raised' her two sons to adulthood, but when CPS was removing the girl they said the girl was near death. The mother, IMO, obviously knew how to be at least a somewhat better parent the first two times around. I don't think that neglect can be blamed on retardation. No matter how retarded the mother was, she knew her child was in the home.

I'm not sure how much better the boys fared:

The caller reported that a child, about 3, was “left unattended for days with a retarded older brother, never seen wearing anything but a diaper.”

They may have survived through sheer luck. For that matter, I wonder if we'd ever know if there were other children that didn't?

Well they could at least talk heh.

Just something I stumbled across....

http://www.springerlink.com/content/lp89m112l6503532/

Abstract Thirty-two retarded young mothers were found to have significantly more protective, controlling, and punitive attitudes toward their children than a control group of mothers who had completed two or more years of college work. The retarded mothers regarded their own mothers as even more controlling, protective, and punitive than they themselves were. These findings are compatible with the hypothesis that increases in IQ scores of the children of retarded parents could be due to somewhat better parenting. If so, programs for retarded youngsters should place more emphasis on child rearing and family life in order to help counteract inappropriate parental attitudes that retarded children learn from their own parents.

Of course there's no way of knowing if the mother in the story had a mother that even cared.

Also found this:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1279667

Eleven mothers with developmental disabilities who were considered by social service and child welfare agencies to be providing neglectful child care were found in baseline to have several important child-care skill deficits (e.g., bathing, diaper rash treatment, cleaning baby bottles) compared to nonhandicapped mothers. Parent training (consisting of verbal instructions, pictorial manuals, modeling, feedback, and reinforcement) resulted in rapid acquisition and maintenance of child-care skills in all mothers. Mean percentage correct scores increased from 58% in baseline to 90% in training and 91% in follow-up (M = 31 weeks).

Isn't there some biological trigger that's supposed to create the mother/child bond? We've speculated that my cousin is missing that, since she has abandoned several children with different boyfriends and had more abortions than I can count on my hands. The issue here doesn't seem to be IQ, not if the conditions are as bad as listed. Heck, my idiot golden retriever growing up was able to care for her own puppies, and that dog was as dumb as they come.

Years ago, in my days as a student of serious thought, we argued a similar question and ultimately decided that this type of female was the ultimate psychopath (also knows as a sociopath, character disordered personality, etc), as your cousin might well be: does not form emotional attachments, does not learn from experience, does not feel remorse, fails to recognize consequences of behavior, and so on.

i seriously wish i had NOt read that article, Plant City is less than 10 miles from my job....i pass through it atleast once a week.......god damnit.

I tend to agree with Sanchek. Mentally disabled people, like everyone else, tend to evaluate their level of functioning based on their *own* baseline, rather than that of others. They move at that speed and may have a sense that they're overwhelmed, but don't have any idea *how* far removed they are from what most of us would consider normal functioning, and most people with mild-moderate mental retardation feel *very* strongly about doing things 'by themselves'... assuming that she was ever formally evaluated before this tragedy happened, or that anyone cared about the results, if she was. What happened to Dani was monstrous, but she didn't get to that emaciated creature on the mattress in a day, or even in the six years that she was alive there; that was the result of many years of neglect of the mother as well. Where were *her* family members in all of this?

An I.Q. of under 80 puts into question whether she can really be held culpable for her actions, and the extreme distress she showed both during and after the time Dani was removed would tend to indicate that she *had* bonded with her daughter, even if she was utterly incapable of taking care of her (and incapable takes many forms, Michelle may herself have been the victim of severe neglect either in itself or in favor of other siblings, and let's not forget there were two other children needing/demanding care from her). I'm not in any way excusing her behavior, simply saying there wasn't *necessarily* anything criminal or deliberate in it. I may have a bit of a unique perspective on the matter, however.

As many of you may know, I've had rheumatoid arthritis since I was in my late teens, and it's gone through periods where it is well-controlled, and periods where it's very poorly controlled. When my inflammation is severe, it is not so much the joint pain directly that interferes with my functioning but the crushing fatigue and confusion that results from all the inflammation and its assorted proteins floating around, suppression of red bone marrow, etc. When my inflammation is severe, I'm very much walking around in a fog and it's difficult to concentrate on anything for any length of time - everything is "Out of sight, out of mind", and even issues like remembering to take my anti-inflammatory drugs, or whether I've taken them, become problematic. I've never been a great housekeeper, but I've definitely had periods where 'I let it get away from me' and wouldn't have dreamed in a million years of *letting* anyone, much less asking anyone, in to help me beat back the tide of entropy and clean out my filthy, and on two occasions roach-infested, house - both my sense of privacy and of shame are/were far too strong to permit that.

One would hope that, in a situation where the life of another was at stake, such considerations would trump those of pride or shame; but that officials visited the place in 2002 and *didn't* remove Dani or engage in any meaningful followup may have translated in her mind to 'everything being okay' or 'no help (punishment) being forthcoming', and she was simply relieved that they were gone.

You don't get to that state in a day, a week, or a month. What happens is that it creeps up on you, and 'landscape amnesia', both internal and external, being what it is, it takes some significant event (like having your emaciated, nonfunctioning daughter taken from you) to shock you into awareness that what is going on is a long way from normal. And if nobody's expressed concern for you in a long time, and/or you haven't encountered any obvious consequences (threats of eviction and/or job difficulties were most common in my case, as I don't have any children for precisely the aforementioned reason), you just keep limping along, doing the best you can. If you're lucky, you'll become aware, or someone will inform you, that you aren't functioning and you'll ask for help, simplify/modify your behavior, etc (I'm going through a pretty bad stretch right now and am trying to remember to paste 'to do' lists on my computer and refrigerator, set timers for my medication (which I can't currently remember whether I've taken :/), etc); if you aren't... you'll just keep drifting/sliding until more severe consequences occur, and if you're either bright and good at 'covering' (ask the families of about any alcoholic or drug addict about this), or, as in Michelle's case, being severely neglected yourself, that can be a long slide.

It's beyond horrible what happened to Dani, and we will never know what her potential might have been had she been in a loving and healthy environment from birth. And as much as we often decry the threat of a 'mommy state' robbing us of both personal freedom and personal responsibility, in cases like hers, and increasingly in the modern world where people no longer know their neighbors, much less look in on them, and families are strung out across the country and as often as not estranged from each other, what else ends up filling in the gaps (and poorly) but the various social agencies? A lot of people failed here besides the mother, and to lay *sole* blame and revulsion on her shoulders is a bit disingenuous.

Finally, as to the 'well, she opened her legs' comment: This brings up an interesting question, namely, where *was* the father in this equation? Blaming a mentally deficient and, from all appearances mentally ill woman for 'opening her legs' (and we have no idea whether or not *that* event was coerced, or that she properly understood birth control), in addition to being misogynistic (it takes two people to make a baby, but only one of them is the biological carrier of the consequences) does bring up questions as to what the other contributor to Dani's genetic legacy himself brought to the occasion, either genetically or as a matter of conscience.

In any case, as sad as a creature as little Dani remains, I suppose some comfort has to be taken in that 1) she survived her ordeal and she is being loved and cared for now, and 2) subjectively, from the little girl's perspective, life is opening up up for her and she knows only the wonderful safety and fulfillment she is now experiencing, and not what has been permanently taken from her.

Sincerely,
Nydia

To Kanyli and Bylimet:

Oxytocin and prolactin are the hormones that play the primary roles in mothers 'bonding' with their infants, which women going through labor and delivery get a huge hit of (but which are produced under many other circumstances, playing key roles in mates bonding with each other, and the formation of social trust relationships). They also function in a similar fashion in other social mammals, if you wondered why those cute little puppies have such a cute little puppy smell :). There are individuals who are less responsive (or nonresponsive) to these hormones due to defects in receptor production, etc; and this is one of many reasons people can end up sociopathic and unable to feel empathy for or emotionally bond to others. Extreme deprivation in infancy can also produce a similar result - but it's important to understand that these hormones are produced by the same endocrine glands, and function in the same way, in both men and women. Were it otherwise, how would pair-bonding form, or fathers bond with their children? - and we've seen plenty of evidence just posted here on the boards of how our resident fathers' lives radically changed when their little bundles of joy showed up. While we might express particular horror at non-empathic women, this doesn't make them any more 'ultimately' sociopathic than men - just somewhat less common.

Regards,
Nydia