I certainly do not condemn Anita for giving birth to Joran, a murderer. And I'm also aware of the terrible position she finds herself presently in. It's true, she's damned if she does and damned if she doesn't. That's why I don't understand why parents of the accused don't limit themselves to two comments.
1) I love my child and will not abandon him/her in their time of need.
2) No further comment
Although admittedly is easy to be an armchair psychologist, I'm critical of the way it appears that she turned a blind eye to early problems, especially being a teacher that should have been trained to pick up on such indicators, rather than dealing with them head on. I'm critical of her for instead of dealing with these problems, she took the 'out of sight, out of mind' approach and allowed him to live apart from the rest of the family and to come and go at his will. I'm critical of her for allowing him the funds by way of a very large amount of money on account with which to gamble and drink at the casino while he was under the legal age to do so. I'm critical of the way she blamed (and continues to blame) others for his problems, specifically Natalee and her family. And I'm critical of her trying to spin his current problems into a mental disorder, thus further not holding him responsible or making him be responsible for his own actions.
Aside from that, I'm not thoroughly convinced that she doesn't know more about what happened to Natalee than most seem to think.
Does anyone remember Mark Hacking's mother? She did none of this type thing. She stated that she loved her son. She was enormously apologetic for what her son did. She never denied or covered up or tried to spin it into anything more than it was. That's how one should handle it, IMO.
