Something that boggles our minds especially when we look at our children and know we couldn't hurt a hair on their heads.
Anyway here's something I found whilst researching. I remember saying to my late bf, Darlie is smiling at the bday party because the source of her stress is gone....it reminded me of Scott Peterson grinning at the vigil for Laci. He agreed with me...(or else, LOL)
Why do mothers kill their children? Over at Scientific American, guest blogger Eric Michael Johnson, of Primate Diaries fame, has fashioned a nicely turned essay considering one answer to this question or at least a partial answer offered by researcher Dario Maestripieri: When mothers kill their children, they are reacting to a particularly toxic combination of stress, powerlessness, and social disadvantage.
Maestripieri, Johnson writes,
has spent most of his career studying maternal behavior in primates. In particular, hes focused on the factors that influence a mothers motivation towards her young. As a professor of Comparative Human Development, Evolutionary Biology, Neurobiology, and Psychiatry at the University of Chicago he has enjoyed the kind of cross-disciplinary success that most scientists only dream of. His 153 academic papers and six books have been cited more than a thousand times by scholars (including this one) in many of the worlds top scientific journals. His latest paper is scheduled to be published in early 2011 by the American Journal of Primatology. In it Maestripieri lays out the argument hes built over the last two decades showing how one of the most serious impacts on maternal behavior, one with potentially lethal results, is so common in modern life as to be nearly invisible: stress.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/tag/eric-michael-johnson/
Caveat: It's based on monkey behaviour!