Special interests

 Marise Chiverella was a little girl who was murdered at the age of 9 in 1964 while she was walking to school. Marise was missing for only a few hours when she was found. Her murder went unsolved for about 57 years. 

This post isn’t about child murder, but about the way in which the mystery was solved. Eric was an 18 year old whose special interest was genetic genealogy. His mother facilitated his special interest by allowing him to surf her own genealogy accounts. 

I will expand on this more later, but I firmly believe that kids and young people flourish when they are allowed to just dive into the things they’re interested in. I believe that the majority of the time, school gets in the way of that- unless they are going to school specific for their special interest by their own choice. 

Here is a link to an episode of Bloodline Detectives with Nancy Grace about how Eric solved Marise’s case. The detectives described Eric as “beyond his years”. However, I believe any child can achieve this much and more when liberally guided while following their own interests and passions. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My experience- the child protective services debate

  My Experience: The Child Protective Services Debate I served as a  Child Advocate  in two states over the course of about 18 years. I worked with a total of 23 children in this capacity. What this program does is appoint an advocate to a child or sibling group who is in the custody of the state. We visit the child, interview all involved with their cases, draft court reports on our recommendation for the best interests, and testify in court.  Child Protective Services has a bad reputation. As the years went on, I also developed a negative opinion on them. However, the negative opinions of CPS take two extremes. Some who dislike them claim that they don’t do enough, and some who dislike them claim that they do too much. They either fail to help a child in a truly abusive situation and the child “falls through the cracks”, or they are too eager to remove a child from a home for “every little thing.” It’s a popular opinion in the “they do too much” camp that families ...
Read more

The Judah Brown Project

Image
  On a 90 minute drive last week, I listened to   this episode   of the Suffer the Little Children Podcast. The host, Laine, took a break from talking about child abuse to talk about water safety. She interviewed a woman named Christi Brown who is the founder of   The Judah Brown Project . It was named after her son who died at age 3 in 2016 from an accidental drowning. Photo of Judah Brown taken from the Judah Brown project webpage linked above  Similar to car seat safety, it seems like so many recommendations have changed since I started working with children and since I had a small child. We used to swear by “floaties”! But as it turns out, floaties in pools tend to give children a false sense of security.  She talked about teaching infants as young as 6 months old “survival swimming”, which I had seen videos of before, and it gave me an anxiety attack!   Here  is an example of an infant survival swimming lesson. Please don’t try this at h...
Read more

Missing children who might be alive

  When news broke in 2009 that a 29 year old woman named   Jaycee Dugard   had been found alive after being missing since she was 11, I thought it was wonderful. I also thought it was a fluke. When it comes to missing children, we are always told that they die within about 72 hours of going missing. Everyone tells me that “statistically” they do. I have not found solid statistics about this, though.   Four years later in 2013,  three young women  were rescued from their abductor’s home in Cleveland. Just like Jaycee, they were all assumed to be dead. Their rescue was major news, because it was three of them instead of just one. The Cleveland abductions were what led me to discover several more individuals who were found alive after being missing for a considerable period of time. Some examples are Shawn Hornbeck, who was missing for over four years when found alive; Elizabeth Smart, missing for 9 months; Steven Stayner, missing for 7 years when found alive,...
Read more