12-Year-Old Girl Poisoning Mom Over iPhone Raises Serious Societal Questions

A woman in Boulder, Colo. had to do the unthinkable and call authorities to have her 12-year-old daughter hauled off to a juvenile detention center.
What sort of conduct could cause a mother to have to turn her own daughter over to the authorities, you ask? In a story that seems to be taken straight out of Stephen King horror novel, the 12-year-old girl in question tried poisoning her mom twice for taking away her iPhone.

I’m not quite sure what’s worse about this incident: the fact a 12-year-old girl could even fathom to take her own mom’s life or the fact that this 12-year-old girl may have just thrown away her entire life over an overpriced electronic device.

Authorities responded to a call from the Boulder Community Hospital after being alerted a mother had been poisoned with bleach by her daughter. The mom told authorities she had noticed a bleach like smell coming from one of her breakfast smoothies about a week ago. The mom said she didn’t put much thought into the smell though, because her daughter had just cleaned the windows and she just thought it was the window cleaner drying. Days later the woman noticed a bleach smell coming from a carafe of water she had by her bed, and that’s when she confronted her daughter about the odor. Her daughter admitted that she had poured bleach into the smoothie and water as revenge for her mom taking her iPhone away as punishment. Now the 12-year-old girl is being held in juvenile detention on two counts of attempted first-degree murder.

What has our society come to when our children are so addicted to the handheld electronic devices we buy them that they would attempt to take a parent’s life for taking one away? Are we spoiling our children too much these days, or was this little girl just a bad seed?

I don’t have the answers, and I’m sure the mom of this child doesn’t either. The only thing we know for sure is a mother’s attempt at trying to discipline her child for the better went about as horribly as it could, and this mom who could have lost her life may now end up losing her daughter instead.