The Patriot Post® · Nightmare Mom Cheered, While Super Mom Convicted

This is a story of two mothers — two different approaches to parenting, and two very different reactions from society.

Let’s start with Mom #1.

Karyann Parkinson is an accomplished and experienced mother. Family science is not only her lived experience but also her vocation and passion. She earned a degree in the subject from Brigham Young University and worked as a live-in behavior specialist at a rehabilitation treatment center, where she and her husband cared for 35 girls. Parkinson and her family moved to Williamsburg, Virginia, from Utah so she could complete a degree at William and Mary Law School.

This past summer, Parkinson was eight months pregnant with her fifth child and studying for the bar. One fateful June afternoon, she and her five-year-old son stopped at several community ponds around their neighborhood to collect goose feathers. The boy rode his bike independently and competently crossed streets at crosswalks in their gated community. After arriving home, the son asked if he could return to the pond, half a mile away, for more goose feathers. Parkinson said yes and let him go back through the neighborhood while she stayed home and made lunch.

A passerby spotted the boy and called the community’s security guard. The guard escorted him home and gave Parkinson an earful, as she advocates letting her children “encounter reasonable risks” in a safe environment to build competence and confidence. Allowing her son to walk to and from the pond in their gated community presented a low risk. For further risk-mitigation analysis and reader context, her son is also a competent and competitive swimmer.

Nevertheless, Parkinson was arrested, charged, and convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. She has also been put on a child abuse and neglect registry, on which she’ll remain for seven years, and was sentenced to six months in prison (the prison sentence has been suspended pending good behavior and cooperation with CPS).

Several theories may explain why this encounter with the security guard went downhill so quickly.

First, Parkinson was eight months pregnant and lost her patience. She knew what Virginia law says about what a child can do independently and argued with the security guard, then later the police and CPS. She had previously interned for Virginia State Senator Jill Vogel (R-Winchester) and was familiar with a reasonable childhood independence law bill that Vogel sponsored. That bill passed unanimously in 2023, and it stipulates that “no child can be considered abused or neglected for engaging in ‘independent activities without adult supervision,’ as long as those activities are age-appropriate and are not ‘so grossly negligent as to endanger the health or safety of the child.’” Some believe Parkinson was steamrolled by the political players after interning for Vogel.

The other running theory is that Parkinson got the book thrown at her because she was mouthy and stuck to her guns. Either way, one must ask: Did she commit a crime against her child worthy of a possible prison sentence, traumatizing her family, and jeopardizing her license to practice law?

Next is Mom #2, of whom everyone in America has an opinion. She, of course, is murderer Lindsay Clancy.

In January 2023, Clancy sent her husband on an errand, and one by one strangled her three little children with exercise bands in the basement before slashing her wrists and neck and throwing herself out of a window in an attempted suicide.

Clancy’s recent trial wasn’t to determine whether she murdered her own children. She already admitted to that. It was to determine whether she had criminal responsibility because of her supposed postpartum psychosis. Last week, her case ended in a mistrial.

Women in pink gathered outside the courtroom in solidarity with Clancy, demanding that she be deemed not criminally responsible because they can relate to her postpartum struggles. They also might relate on an even more awful level — viewing parenting as a burden and kids as the cause of their strife. Evidence suggests Clancy bought into a mommy culture that resents kids. In one of the crime scene photos, there’s a wine mug next to her bloody knife that says, “Because, kids.”

Clancy’s mental health issues do not and should not excuse her brutal and slow killing of her children. Full stop. One juror was brave enough to stick to his guns, and Clancy’s hack lawyer singled him out for it.

Clancy’s lawyer also went on “Good Morning America” to ask President Donald Trump to issue a pardon. The president cannot pardon Clancy — she is being tried on a state murder charge, not a federal one. Her attorney knows that, but he’s hoping to stir up an angry mob of women thinking with their emotions rather than their brains.

Two things can be possible at once: Postpartum depression, anxiety, and psychosis are real and terrible to live through, and Clancy is guilty of murder. She created the opportunity to asphyxiate her children and carried out the heinous killings. Her children and her husband deserve justice.

As podcaster and homeschool mother Bethany Mandel writes, “There is something deeply broken about a parenting culture that treats childhood independence as criminal while treating maternal resentment of children as so ordinary that we put jokes about it on t-shirts and coffee mugs.”

These juxtaposed cases are yet another example of how good parenting is criminalized while bad parenting is rewarded. Parkinson was giving her child independence and was criminalized for it. She is left to appeal her conviction while her community just assumes she’s a bad mother. Clancy has already inspired a copycat murder by another woman, seeing that she might get away with it if she pleads insanity.

These stories feed into the bigger discussion of devaluing children’s lives as a modus operandi. Pro-abortion women have been documented saying to pro-lifers that if they don’t stop defending children in the womb, they’re going to be “Charlie Kirked.” Massachusetts just codified a law allowing abortion up to birth. Canada is toying with assisted suicide for infants born with disabilities or syndromes that would make life harder.

A person is a person, no matter how small, and their life has meaning and value. Our society is cheering for the wolves while the lambs are being slaughtered. When we focus on victimhood and lose sight of the real victims, that’s when these atrocities take hold.