Hello everyone, I hope all is well with you. The season change is upon us. I’m not ready to give up summer, but fall is here in all its glory. The leaves are changing, and the air is cooler. Time to hunker down in front of the fire and get my writing on. I write more in the winter than I do in the summer. Something about being in front of the fire with my laptop seems to keep the words flowing. I’ve got a few stories I’m working on and I’m excited about where they’re going. I don’t usually work on more than one at a time, but I had this amazing idea for another story while in the midst of the second one, so I had to put the first one on the back burner. I will come back to it.
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But enough about that. Today, I want to talk about Jeffery Dahmer. I know. I know. Gruesome topic, but I watched the documentary “Monster” on Netflix, and I have to say it was intriguing. He didn’t have a good home life. His mother took a variety of drugs while she was pregnant with him, and it appears she may have suffered from post-partum depression after the birth of her second son David.
He also had a tumultuous home life. His parents fought often, and his father was absent. He was always working, and his mother wasn’t emotionally capable to take care of Jeffery and his younger brother. In my honest opinion, he was alone since birth.
This lack of parental love and guidance may not have created Jeffery’s problems, but they certainly didn’t help. I wonder if he had grown up in a loving environment, would he have been a totally different person. So, it begs the question, what’s more important nature or nurture. Is being a serial killer something we’re born with, or is it a learned behavior from an abusive or neglectful environment?
In the documentary, they discussed giving Jeffery’s brain to science, and his father was opposed to the idea. He felt nothing could be gained and he wanted to honor his son’s request to be cremated. All of him. His father, Lionel’s, argument was that they had dissected John Wayne Gacy’s brain and didn’t find any abnormalities. It was normal. He felt Jeffery’s would be normal too.
So, that tells me nurture plays a far bigger role in developing healthy kids than nature. This is good to know. We can stop this type of person from developing if we create loving and safe environments for our kids.
I sense a theme here. I’ve written posts about school shootings, mass shootings, and now serial killers, and the underlying theme in all of this is disconnection. This is just another example illustrating how important the parent-child bond is. The stronger the bond, the healthier the child. We can do better. We can raise our kids with intention. Thanks for stopping by and reading my post today. What do you think? Are there ways we can do better as a society in raising our kids? Leave a comment! I’d love to hear from you!
