Chasing Neverland: When Does a Child Get to Be a Child?

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR GIVING CHILDREN A CHILDHOOD?

From maternal dominion to premature sexual autonomy, childhood is increasingly subjected to competing adult claims—each presented as liberation, compassion or progress.

The murder trial of Lindsay Clancy was supposed to determine a difficult but recognizable legal question: Was Clancy criminally responsible when she strangled her three children, or had severe mental illness destroyed her capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of what she was doing?

Her lawyers did not deny that she killed Cora, five; Dawson, three; and Callan, eight months. They argued that postpartum psychosis and bipolar disorder rendered her legally nonresponsible. Prosecutors contended that the killings were deliberate and planned. After a lengthy trial, the jury reportedly divided 11–1 in favor of acquittal, producing a mistrial rather than a verdict.

That legal dispute is serious. Psychosis is real, and in extreme cases it can destroy a person’s contact with reality. A civilized justice system must distinguish malicious murder from an act committed under a disease so severe that the perpetrator could not understand its nature or wrongfulness.

But outside the courtroom, something different occurred.

Hundreds of predominantly female supporters assembled in pink beneath slogans including “Believe,” “She Needed Help” and “Peace for Lindsay.” Some attacked the prosecutor. Online partisans redirected suspicion toward Clancy’s husband despite the defense’s acknowledgment that she killed the children. Her attorney was elevated into a feminist champion. The emotional center of the story migrated from three strangled children to the suffering of the woman who strangled them.

The mother became the movement’s central victim. Her murdered children became supporting characters in the story of how society had failed her.

Compassion for a mentally ill defendant does not require this inversion. One can believe that Clancy was psychotic, favor hospitalization over imprisonment and demand better maternal psychiatric care while saying plainly that Cora, Dawson and Callan were the innocent victims. Mental illness can affect culpability. It cannot transfer victimhood from the dead to the person who killed them.

The public reaction therefore raises a question larger than one criminal proceeding:

At what point does a child become an independent person whose life and suffering cannot be subordinated to an adult’s autonomy, trauma, ideology or political usefulness?

Conditional Childhood

Modern society speaks constantly of children’s rights while repeatedly making those rights conditional upon adult interests.

Before birth, the child’s protection may depend upon maternal choice and a statutory definition of viability. After birth, parental pathology may displace the child as the principal victim. During adolescence, protective boundaries can be portrayed as obstacles to sexual autonomy. In school and online, institutions compete to define children before children possess the judgment necessary to evaluate what they are being told.

The result is a doctrine of contingent childhood: the child receives protection only when that protection does not interfere with a preferred adult claim.

This can begin with the language of bodily autonomy. Its application is strongest early in pregnancy, when the embryo or fetus is completely dependent upon the woman’s body. As pregnancy advances and independent viability emerges, however, “my body, my choice” becomes morally incomplete. There are now two bodies and potentially two surviving patients.

New York illustrates the difficulty. Its law permits abortion without a specified medical justification through 24 weeks. After that point, a practitioner must determine in reasonable and good-faith professional judgment that the fetus is not viable or that abortion is necessary to protect the patient’s life or health. The state expressly includes physical and mental health.

That is not literally abortion until birth “for no reason.” The law requires a medical determination after 24 weeks. But “mental health” is potentially expansive, the statute does not enumerate qualifying conditions, and the judgment rests primarily with the provider. It is consequently much broader than an exception limited to imminent death or grave physical injury.

Abortions late in pregnancy are rare. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1.1 percent of reported abortions in 2022 occurred at 21 weeks or later—a category that begins far earlier than full term and includes pregnancies involving severe fetal diagnoses, maternal illness and delayed access to care. It would therefore be inaccurate to suggest that women commonly carry healthy babies for nine months and then casually elect abortion.

Rarity, however, does not answer the moral question. If a viable child can be delivered alive without imposing materially greater danger upon the mother, why should deliberate fetal death remain an available objective? Near the end of pregnancy, the alternatives are no longer abortion versus nine additional months of gestation. They may be fetal death versus live delivery and adoption.

The concern is that bodily autonomy can quietly become maternal dominion: an assumption that the mother retains exceptional authority over whether the child will be permitted to acquire enforceable status.

The Chattel Temptation

Children are not legally property, and the analogy should not be made literally. Yet a quasi-proprietary conception of childhood emerges whenever the child’s moral standing remains dependent upon the wishes or emotional condition of a controlling adult.

Wanted children are celebrated. Unwanted unborn children can be classified as medical problems. Murdered children can be overshadowed by identification with their mother. Adolescents can be declared autonomous when adults seek the removal of protective restrictions, then treated as incapable of judgment when they resist an institution’s preferred conclusion.

The child is granted or denied agency according to adult convenience.

That arrangement is reminiscent of chattel because the weaker person’s interests remain contingent upon the stronger person’s claim. The vocabulary has changed from ownership to autonomy, health, affirmation and therapeutic compassion, but the allocation of power can remain disturbingly familiar.

This is evident in the moral imbalance surrounding Clancy. Several hundred adults could organize visibly for the accused mother. Her children had no equivalent constituency. They could not speak, rally, confer political validation or recognize supporters who saw themselves in their story. Their silence made them available for narrative reassignment.

This is not necessarily sociopathy in the clinical sense. It is moral instrumentalization. Human beings cease to matter primarily in themselves and become instruments in someone else’s preferred account.

Clancy becomes the symbol of neglected mothers. Her husband becomes a possible embodiment of male failure. The prosecutor becomes an oppressive authority. The children become evidence of the tragedy that happened to Clancy.

They remain present factually but disappear morally.

Empathy Captured by Identity

The problem is not a complete absence of empathy. It is an empathy hierarchy.

Women who endured postpartum depression, anxiety, frightening intrusive thoughts or inadequate treatment may understandably identify with Clancy’s suffering. An unwanted intrusive thought is not a desire, and a desire is not an intention. Most mothers who experience disturbing thoughts will never harm their children and may be horrified by the thoughts themselves.

Yet identification can become morally distorting when “I understand her suffering” turns into “she could have been any of us,” then into “she represents women like me.” At that point, criticism of Clancy can feel like criticism of the supporter herself. Accountability becomes an attack upon the group.

Several forces can converge:

• Therapeutic determinism: trauma or illness is treated as eliminating agency altogether.

• Identity-protective empathy: compassion flows most strongly toward the person who resembles oneself.

• Victimhood essentialism: membership in a recognized victim class creates presumptive innocence.

• Maternal grievance: resentment, exhaustion or regret becomes attached to a symbolic case.

• Vicarious transgression: another person’s forbidden act is experienced as a symbolic escape, even when the admirer consciously denies approving it.

This is why descriptions of Clancy as heroic or brave—where they occur—require an immediate question: Brave for what? Seeking psychiatric help? Surviving catastrophic illness? Facing a courtroom? Or committing the act that left three children dead?

The first answers are compatible with humane concern. The last is not. When admiration attaches vaguely to Clancy without an unequivocal condemnation of what she did, compassion risks becoming moral camouflage for identification with the transgression.

Genuine maternal-health advocacy should be able to affirm a straightforward proposition:

Clancy may have been psychotic and legally nonresponsible, but Cora, Dawson and Callan remain the primary victims, and protecting children must be the first obligation of maternal mental-health policy.

Anyone unable to affirm that principle may be advocating for something other than improved psychiatric care.

The Ellen Jamesian Threshold

John Irving supplied a useful model in The World According to Garp. Ellen James is raped as a child and has her tongue cut out so that she cannot identify her attackers. Later, women calling themselves Ellen Jamesians voluntarily mutilate themselves in theatrical solidarity. Ellen James repudiates them, but her wishes no longer matter. Her suffering has been appropriated and converted into an ideology with rituals of its own.

The progression is recognizable:

1. An authentic tragedy becomes a symbol.

2. The symbol becomes a collective identity.

3. Identity produces escalating demonstrations of loyalty.

4. Rhetoric weakens the boundary surrounding a forbidden act.

5. Someone eventually acts.

A movement crosses the Ellen Jamesian threshold when symbolic solidarity begins to inspire adherents to reenact, embody or escalate the behavior surrounding the original suffering.

Most Clancy supporters will never harm a child. Many are motivated by legitimate fear that maternal illness is misunderstood. But a public movement becomes dangerous when it makes filicide psychologically intelligible as the culmination of female suffering—especially when it surrounds the killer with admirers, absolving slogans and a storyline in which her children recede from view.

It is one thing to say, “I understand how she felt.” It is another to build an identity around that understanding. It becomes categorically more dangerous when one unstable person moves from identification into enactment.

The Walsh Warning

On September 1, 2026, Illinois mother Corie Walsh allegedly killed her two-year-old son, Barrett “Bear” Walsh, by hanging him from a basement rafter. Prosecutors say witnesses reported that Walsh had become “very invested” in the Clancy trial and was discussing it with friends in a group text only hours before Barrett’s death. Walsh allegedly said that her son was the devil or the anti-Christ. She was subsequently found with apparently self-inflicted wounds. Her attorney says she was experiencing a psychotic episode.

Walsh cannot yet accurately be called a Clancy admirer, conscious imitator or product of the campaign surrounding the trial. Public evidence does not establish that she attended a rally, believed Clancy was innocent or deliberately adopted Clancy’s actions. Her apparent delusion may have arisen independently and merely incorporated the most emotionally salient story she had recently consumed.

One case is an outlier, not a pattern.

Nevertheless, Walsh’s reported absorption in the trial, the temporal proximity, the basement setting, the use of neck compression and the apparent suicide attempt create a legitimate behavioral-contagion hypothesis. Investigators should examine whether the Clancy case supplied her with identification, a behavioral script, psychological permission or an anticipated explanation.

The Walsh case is best understood as a sentinel event: insufficient to prove contagion but too specific to dismiss. Additional evidence may strengthen the connection or show that it was incidental. Intellectual honesty requires withholding a final causal judgment while recognizing the warning.

Responsible reporting can explain postpartum psychosis without romanticizing filicide. Once an accused mother becomes a heroine, however, the story may become psychologically available to another unstable person not merely as a warning but as a model.

Suffering becomes symbolism. Symbolism becomes identity. Identity can create permission. Eventually, permission may find an actor.

Premature Emancipation

The struggle over the child’s status does not end at birth. Later, a different set of adults may invoke the language of autonomy to weaken boundaries constructed for children’s protection.

This subject requires precision. There is an obvious difference between preventing two similarly aged teenagers from being treated as sex offenders and permitting a much older adult to claim that a minor consented. Close-in-age exemptions recognize adolescent relationships. They do not logically justify adult access to children.

There are academics and rights-based advocates who argue that some age-of-consent laws are paternalistic or improperly criminalize adolescent sexuality. Some arguments focus carefully on peer relationships. Others risk obscuring the disparities in age, authority, experience and economic power that make nominal consent unreliable.

A predator rarely introduces himself as a predator. He presents himself as the one adult who understands, affirms and respects the child. Parents become controlling; boundaries become prejudice; secrecy becomes trust; compliance becomes autonomy. The vocabulary of liberation can become a tool for separating the child from protective relationships.

The governing principle should be simple:

The greater the disparity in age, authority, wealth, experience or dependence, the less meaningful nominal consent becomes.

A child should not be declared mature whenever an adult wants access and immature whenever the child resists an institutional demand.

Childhood Under Competing Hegemonies

The modern child passes through a succession of adult dominions:

• Maternal hegemony: legal and moral recognition may initially depend upon maternal acceptance.

• Parental hegemony: after birth, the child may still be treated as an extension of the parent rather than a separate rights-bearing person.

• Therapeutic hegemony: professional explanations can make the adult’s diagnosis more prominent than the child’s injury.

• Institutional hegemony: schools and counseling systems possess immense authority over language, identity and belonging.

• Sexual hegemony: protective boundaries can be characterized as repressive when they obstruct adult theories of liberation.

• Commercial hegemony: platforms monetize children’s attention, insecurity, appearance and desire for approval.

• Political hegemony: movements conscript young people into identities, grievances and conflicts designed by adults.

None of these systems ordinarily announces hostility toward children. Each claims to protect, educate, liberate or affirm them. Collectively, however, they can occupy nearly all the psychological territory in which an independent personality is supposed to develop.

The mother may determine whether the child enters the world. The institution may supply the categories through which the child understands himself. The predator may exploit the incomplete development of consent. The algorithm may manufacture desires before the child recognizes that they are being engineered. The movement may offer an identity before the individual has formed one.

The common mechanism is preemption.

Nature Interrupted, Nurture Displaced

Nature and nurture have not disappeared, but neither is permitted to operate without increasingly aggressive interception.

Nature supplies biological inheritance: sex, temperament, aptitudes, limitations and vulnerabilities. Nurture traditionally comes through parents, extended family, faith, community, discipline and accumulated experience. Together, they form the imperfect but intelligible environment in which personality emerges.

A third force now occupies the space between them: deliberate external conditioning.

The traditional formula was straightforward:

Nature and nurture produce a developing personality.

The emerging formula is more troubling:

Nature is disputed, nurture is displaced, and conditioning occupies the vacuum.

The child encounters institutions, political campaigns, commercial entertainment and digital algorithms before possessing the intellectual defenses required to evaluate them. These systems do not merely provide information. They supply categories, enemies, desires, diagnoses and prefabricated identities.

Parents must live with the consequences of what they teach. Institutions often do not. The teacher changes classes. The activist moves to another campaign. The online community disappears. The platform retains the revenue. The child retains the psychological consequences.

This is authority without enduring responsibility.

The Preemption of Personality

Children must eventually encounter ideas different from those of their parents. Education should expose them to knowledge, disagreement and the tools of independent analysis. The danger is not encountering ideas. It is receiving conclusions so early, so continuously and with such powerful social incentives that independent judgment never has room to develop.

Education teaches a child how to examine a proposition. Indoctrination teaches the child that questioning the proposition reveals a defect in his character.

This difference is especially important in grade school. Young children naturally trust adult authority and have limited ability to distinguish fact from interpretation or political preference. A teacher’s ideological assertion can arrive with the apparent certainty of spelling or arithmetic.

Age-appropriate education can teach biological reality, personal boundaries and protection from abuse. Ideological recruitment attaches adult political meaning to the child’s developing identity and penalizes dissent. Healthy counseling reconnects a child to trustworthy protection. Grooming cultivates secrecy, special intimacy and separation from protective adults.

The purpose of childhood protection is not to maintain ignorance or obedience. It is to preserve enough time and psychological space for an authentic self to emerge.

The Tyranny of Zeros and Ones

Digital systems operate through binary instructions. Human beings do not.

Mature moral judgment requires the ability to hold uncomfortable truths together:

• A mother can be profoundly ill and still have killed her children.

• A child can possess developing autonomy and still require protection.

• Parents can be imperfect without becoming enemies.

• Institutions can possess expertise without possessing infallibility.

• Compassion can coexist with accountability.

• A political opponent can be wrong without becoming less human.

Binary ideology cannot tolerate those tensions. It requires a clean division between approved and condemned, victim and oppressor, affirmation and harm, ally and enemy.

Once Clancy is assigned to the victim category, her children interfere with the classification. Once an institution is deemed affirming, parental hesitation becomes harmful. Once a person is placed in an oppressor category, ordinary restraints can weaken because punishment is redescribed as justice.

The danger begins when classification becomes authorization.

If another person is merely a zero or a one—approved or condemned—then eliminating the incorrect value can begin to resemble correction rather than cruelty. A child shaped entirely by such categories may retain intelligence while losing ambiguity, proportionality, restraint and fellow feeling.

That will not make most children violent. It may make many anxious, brittle and intolerant. But in a small number, psychological crisis can fuse with ideological certainty. The individual then possesses both a grievance and a moral system capable of justifying action against whoever has been assigned responsibility for it.

That is when the zeros and ones leave the screen.

Are We Crafting Lucifers?

Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger supplies a terrifying image. The supernatural visitor creates miniature people, watches them quarrel and then casually crushes the life out of them. He feels no responsibility because he places himself outside their moral universe. He cannot do wrong, he explains, because he does not know what wrong is.

The horror is not merely that Twain’s Satan destroys people. It is that he does not experience them as people. They are replaceable objects within a world he controls.

That is the danger of educating children entirely through abstraction. A classmate becomes a category. A parent becomes an oppressor. A dissenter becomes a threat. An unborn child becomes a condition. A murdered child becomes evidence of the mother’s suffering. The human being disappears behind the assigned label.

Are we crafting Lucifers in our schools and homes—not supernatural monsters, but young people capable of manipulating human categories with great certainty while possessing too little experience of human consequence?

The question is not an indictment of all teachers, parents or digitally immersed children. It is a warning about the character cultivated when moral value is assigned through ideological classification rather than shared humanity.

Twain’s stranger can create people but cannot value them. Our institutions can transmit enormous quantities of information, assign elaborate identities and produce impressive technical competence. The unanswered question is whether they can cultivate the conscience that prevents knowledge from becoming domination.

Restoring the Human Variable

The remedy is not ignorance, technological isolation or permanent parental control. It is the restoration of the human variable—the recognition that no political, therapeutic or computational system fully contains another person.

A child-centered doctrine would begin with several principles:

Personhood cannot depend entirely upon desirability. Human value does not originate in the wishes of someone older, stronger or more powerful.

Vulnerability increases adult obligations. Dependence should produce greater protection, not weaker rights.

Bodily autonomy has interpersonal boundaries. No person’s autonomy confers unlimited authority over another person’s body.

Mental illness affects culpability, not victimhood. A psychotic offender may be legally nonresponsible; the people killed remain the victims.

Consent requires capacity and freedom from exploitation. Verbal agreement cannot erase profound disparities in power, age and dependence.

Education should cultivate judgment rather than demand identity. Schools should teach children how to test claims, not require political or personal declarations as proof of virtue.

Technology must serve development rather than exploit vulnerability. Companies should not be permitted to engineer insecurity, compulsion or premature sexuality in children for profit.

The practical test is straightforward:

Does an intervention strengthen the child’s eventual capacity for independent judgment, or does it make the child more dependent upon the adult or institution intervening?

Policies that create secrecy, emotional dependence, irreversible commitment or punishment for dissent deserve heightened scrutiny.

The Right to an Unoccupied Mind

A complete doctrine of children’s rights must include something seldom recognized: the right to enough psychological space for an authentic personality to emerge.

This is not a right never to be influenced. Such a childhood is impossible. Parents transmit values. Teachers organize knowledge. Communities establish norms. The right is instead protection against premature capture—against adults who install identities, desires and loyalties before the child can meaningfully examine them.

Children learn conscience through relationships in which other people cannot simply be deleted, blocked or reduced to avatars. They learn restraint by living with imperfect family members, repairing friendships, caring for weaker people and discovering that disagreement does not terminate human obligation.

A culture of permanent classification teaches the opposite. Every discomfort acquires a culprit. Every disappointment becomes an injustice. Every relationship becomes conditional upon affirmation. The child may reach adulthood with an abundance of labels and prescribed grievances but very little interior authorship.

Earlier generations feared that biology, family and tradition might confine children too severely. Those dangers could be real. The modern response may create the opposite danger: detaching children from all three before they possess anything strong enough to replace them.

A child supposedly liberated from every inherited boundary is not necessarily free. He may simply be available for acquisition by the most persistent external influence.

When Does a Child Get to Be a Child?

Childhood is not merely a number of years before legal adulthood. It is the protected interval in which a human personality is allowed to form.

A child should not have to earn personhood by being wanted. He should not surrender protection to demonstrate autonomy. He should not disappear from his own tragedy so that adults can preserve a preferred political narrative. He should not be converted into parental property, institutional territory, commercial inventory or ideological material.

Before asking what adults may choose, excuse, teach, affirm or take, society must answer a more elementary question: When does a child get to be a child?

And after family, school, ideology, sexuality, technology and politics have each claimed a portion of the developing person, how much of the original child will remain to become an adult of his own making?

Sources and Notes

1. Associated Press, “Women in pink rally in support of Lindsay Clancy at her trial for killing her 3 children,” August 20, 2026.

2. WBUR, “Hundreds rally outside Plymouth courthouse in support of Lindsay Clancy,” August 20, 2026.

3. WBUR, “Courtroom hears harrowing 911 call in Lindsay Clancy murder trial,” July 29, 2026.

4. New York Public Health Law §2599-bb, “Abortion.”

5. Office of the New York Attorney General, “Abortion Is Legal and Protected in New York State.”

6. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Abortion Surveillance Findings and Reports.”

7. ABC7 Chicago, “Frankfort mother charged with murder in death of 2-year-old son,” September 5, 2026.

8. Fox 32 Chicago, “Frankfort mom accused of killing toddler called him ‘anti-Christ,’ followed Lindsay Clancy trial,” September 4, 2026.

9. Peter Graham, “Against the Stream: Lowering the Age of Sexual Consent,” BJPsych Bulletin 43, no. 1 (2019).

10. Mark Twain, “The Mysterious Stranger,” Project Gutenberg edition.