Of all the ways for someone’s child to become famous, surely the one chosen by Susan Klebold’s son Dylan was the worst. On April 20, 1999, Dylan and his friend Eric Harris took guns to Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado, and killed 12 students and a teacher. Now, ten years later, Dylan’s mother is speaking out for the first time in an essay for O Magazine.
“Dylan changed everything I believed about myself, about God, about family, and about love,” she writes, adding that she had no idea that her son was so disturbed and suicidal. “I cannot look at a child in a grocery store or on the street without thinking about how my son’s schoolmates spent the last moments of their lives.”
It is not the intention of this article to blame the parent directly for the actions of the child. At 17 years old, Dylan surely had enough cognizance of his own abilities to know what he was doing. However, Dylan didn’t simply get into a fistfight at school or rob a liquor store. I should expect that a crime of this magnitude would have had some warning signs leading up to it. He left behind many diary entries that spoke of his hatred of others, and he was a frequent subject of school bullying. I cannot imagine that none of this was noticed by his parents until after the fact.
It’s a common experience to find your teenager shutting himself away from parental attention; this is part of the typical development of the post-pubescent years. But it is the responsibility of the parents not to simply let their child be, but to guide them through their changing experiences. Parents need to step up and keep their children talking with them; open communication makes all the difference between a healthy, well-adjusted child and a repressed, socially-stunted misanthrope. Obviously, things won’t always turn out the way this story did, but the teenage years sometimes turn out to be the ones in which the first wedge is driven between parent and child. It’s up to the parents to make sure that doesn’t happen.
