“You know, you look at it and it’s hard to say exactly if a law has been broken here,” Bedford County Sheriff Randall Boyce said. “This is extremely unusual. I don’t think anyone has seen something like this before.”

Russia threatened to suspend all child adoptions by U.S. families over the treatment of the boy, who was called Justin Hansen by the Tennessee family.

The boy’s adoptive grandmother, Nancy Hansen of Shelbyville, said the boy was violent and angry with her daughter. She said she flew with the boy to Washington and then put him on a plane to Moscow.

“He drew a picture of our house burning down, and he’ll tell anybody that he’s going to burn our house down with us in it,” she told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. “It got to be where you feared for your safety. It was terrible.”

Authorities in Tennessee were investigating the adoptive mother, Torry Hansen, 33.

Bob Tuke, a Nashville attorney and member of the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys, said abandonment charges against the family could depend on whether the boy was a U.S. citizen.

It wasn’t clear if the adoption had become final. A Tennessee health department spokeswoman said there was no birth certificate issued for the boy, a step that would indicate he had become a U.S. citizen.

The sheriff said Hansen initially agreed to be interviewed by authorities but then postponed it after talking to a lawyer.

Boyce said it would be difficult to substantiate claims by Russian officials that the mother mistreated the child.

“We’re here, and the child is in Russia, so it’s hard for us to know whether this child has been abused,” Boyce said.

The boy arrived unaccompanied in Moscow on a United Airlines flight on Thursday from Washington. The Kremlin children’s rights office said the adoptive mother wrote in her note she was returning him because of severe psychological problems.

“This child is mentally unstable. He is violent and has severe psychopathic issues,” the letter said. “I was lied to and misled by the Russian Orphanage workers and director regarding his mental stability and other issues. …

“After giving my best to this child, I am sorry to say that for the safety of my family, friends, and myself, I no longer wish to parent this child.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called the family’s actions “the last straw” in a string of U.S. adoptions gone wrong, including three in which Russian children had died in the U.S. The cases have prompted outrage in Russia, where foreign adoption failures are reported prominently.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev strongly condemned the family’s actions, telling ABC News that the boy “fell into a very bad family.”

“It is a monstrous deed on the part of his adoptive parents, to take the kid and virtually throw him out with the airplane in the opposite direction and to say, ‘I’m sorry I could not cope with it, take everything back’ is not only immoral but also against the law,” Medvedev said.

A freeze on adoptions could affect hundreds of American families. Last year, nearly 1,600 Russian children were adopted in the United States, and more than 60,000 Russian orphans have been successfully adopted there, according to the National Council For Adoption, a U.S. adoption advocacy nonprofit group.

The boy was adopted in September from the town of Partizansk in Russia’s Far East.

Nancy Hansen, the grandmother, rejected assertions of child abandonment. She said he was watched by a United Airlines flight attendant and that the family paid a man $200 to pick the boy up at the Moscow airport and take him to the Russian Education and Science Ministry.

Nancy Hansen said a social worker checked on the boy in January and reported to Russian authorities that there were no problems. But after that, the grandmother said incidents of hitting, kicking and spitting began to escalate, along with threats.

She said she and her daughter went to Russia together to adopt the boy, and she believes information about his behavioral problems was withheld from her daughter.

“The Russian orphanage officials completely lied to her because they wanted to get rid of him,” Nancy Hansen said.

She said the boy was very skinny when they picked him up, and he told them he had been beaten with a broom handle at the orphanage.

There was no response to a knock at Torry Hansen’s door, and a phone listing couldn’t be found for her. Her mother also declined to put AP in touch with her.

The U.S. ambassador to Russia, John Beyrle, said he was “deeply shocked by the news” and “very angry that any family would act so callously toward a child that they had legally adopted.”

Anna Orlova, a spokeswoman for Kremlin’s Children Rights Commissioner, said she visited the boy and he told her that his mother was “bad,” “did not love him” and used to pull his hair.

——

Vasilyeva reported from Moscow. Associated Press writers Travis Loller in Nashville, Joshua Freed in Minneapolis, George Tibbits in Seattle, and Foster Klug and Robert Burns in Washington contributed to this report.

We don’t let our son point guns – not even toy guns – at people. If he plays with his “rifle” (which looks fairly realistic), it’s with Dad, in a way that will teach him good gun safety habits.  We want to shape his respect for guns in advance of the day when he might learn to handle a real gun.

My gun stance is basically this: I am not anti-gun, I am anti-shooting people. 

This past weekend, I had occasion to think about our approach to Jacob and toy guns. Could allowing our son to play with toy guns  – even to the limited extent that we do allow it — make him less likely to handle guns safely? Or are we just keeping a boy from being fully a boy?

We were at a social gathering with a whole passel of parents and six year olds. The kids were playing happily in the host family’s backyard while the adults discussed school, summer plans, “American Idol” and the Final Four. 

I watched idly out the window as Jacob dashed by, a blur of red “Toothless the Dragon” T-shirt and artic-pattern camo pants. He had something in his hands. He was pointing it at his best friend. It was a toy gun – the twin to his own carefully-played-with rifle from home.

I pointed this out to my husband, who went out into the backyard, delivered the “Don’t ever, ever, ever point guns at people” lecture to all of the children, confiscated the misused toy gun and returned to our discussion. 

Not 30 seconds later, the child of the house dashed into the dining room. “Mom, it broke again!” he whined. “I told you to be more careful – I don’t know if I can fix it this time,” she patiently replied. Turning, she plunked the offending toy onto the table to jam the wayward piece of plastic back into place.

I almost choked. It was a machine gun. A toy machine gun. Not a neon green one or a red one; not a nerf gun or a water gun. A pretty realistic replica machine gun – camo paint coloring, scope and all.

His repaired machine gun in hand, the little boy returned to his game. Looking more closely out the window, I was able to tell that the children were playing war. We did that as kids – chasing each other around, trying to claim the tree house or the jungle gym as “ours.” But I quickly noted that the child with the broken machine gun wasn’t the only one armed to the teeth with replica plastic weapons. There were pistols, shotguns and another rifle in the armory as well. 

At one point, the hosts’ child staged a dramatic “death” on the battlefield, lying motionless in the yard with his sweet face pressed to the grass, blond mop-top splayed out in a static halo. His mom noticed and laughed.  “Ever since we watched ‘World War II‘ on the History Channel he’s been playing soldier!”

My husband is a history buff; he watched part of that series. I shied away from the graphic footage of long-ago carnage. I don’t think Jacob is capable yet of realizing that the soldiers fighting and dying on the screen represent people with moms and dads, brothers and sisters.  And if he could realize that, those are nightmares I’m not ready for him to have.

We are sheltering and shielding our child, protecting him from playing with toy guns, from falling off his bike without a helmet, from exposure to the horrible, violent things humans do to each other. All week, I’ve considered the idea that maybe the parents who graciously had us all over to play that day have the more realistic strategy — let the child watch a show about the reality of what guns do, and let him work it out through his play. 

For some reason, it doesn’t bother me when the kids play light sabre battle, duel fiercely with foam swords or “zap” each other dead with imaginary lightning bolts from their fingers. But it really disturbed me to see them “shooting” each other with realistic-looking guns in pantomime of war, mankind’s greatest horror.

As the afternoon wore on, my husband kept a close eye on the kids; he and a couple of other parents intervened when the guns got pointed at a person.  I was relieved to see that we weren’t the only parents in the bunch channeling the adults from “A Christmas Story.” 

Guns are something that these children, living here in one of the most hunting-friendly areas of a gun-crazy state, will almost certainly encounter in real life. I hope that playing with toy guns won’t give them a false sense of security: an idea that once shot, you can just jump back up from the grass and go about your business, despite the reality of so many accidental gun deaths among the very young each year.

But I’m comfortable with our decision about how Jacob should play with toy guns: very seldom and never pointing them at people. 

I was already a pediatrician when I had my first son. I knew better, yet I was still in tears — like many new moms I found tears weren’t hard to come by — when a well-meaning nurse suggested I might not have enough breast milk, as my baby was on the 25th percentile, and hadn’t gained much weight in the previous week. I didn’t heed her advice to add formula; I knew that a happy, content baby, who is growing at his own pace, probably needs nothing.

Someone needs to be on the 25th percentile; someone needs to be on the 10th. Kids and babies come in many sizes, and variation in size is as normal as variation in hair color. We can’t all be above average. But then again, maybe the obesity epidemic is proving me wrong.

Studies have shown that the path to obesity starts very early on, perhaps even before birth. Gaining too much weight in pregnancy doesn’t only affect mom’s long-term weight — it may also increase a kid’s obesity risk later in life. And we know all too well that extra weight in childhood persists all too often into adulthood. Of course, carrying significant extra weight has serious health implications, and is a risk factor in many chronic diseases — including heart disease and type-2-diabetes — and shortens lifespan.

While it’s now a fact that a third of American kids are overweight or obese, it’s especially notable that a recent study in Clinical Pediatrics suggests that the tipping point in obesity occurs before the second birthday, and excessive weight gain may start in babies as young as three-months-old.

If that’s the case, interventions aimed at preventing childhood obesity should start well before kids start preschool. But where should we focus our efforts? Which early life factors affect weight gain the most?

Eight early-life risk factors may determine later obesity:

Obesity Reviews recently detailed a study that systematically reviewed the medical literature, looking for early-life factors that affect obesity. From more than 12,000 publications, the authors found 22 review studies that that met their standards, and they found several recurring themes:

Maternal factors

• Maternal diabetes

• Maternal smoking

Infant factors

• Rapid infant growth

• No or short breastfeeding

• Obesity in infancy

• Short sleep duration

• Less than 30 minutes of daily physical activity

• Consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages

Other factors identified as potentially associated with later development of obesity include parental obesity, very high or very low birth weight, TV viewing, food insecurity and low socioeconomic status.

These studies of course do not prove that these factors cause obesity. The associations are hard to disentangle, and many of these risk factors seem to cluster with lower socio-economic status, where smoking, parental obesity, diabetes, unhealthy foods and beverages and a sedentary lifestyle are more prevalent and exclusive breastfeeding less practiced.

Much more work will need to be done before we can say for sure which habits clearly lead to obesity. While it seems that each one on their own increases the risk only by a bit, I think it’s safe to say that some of our age-old notions — that pregnant women should eat for two, that a fat baby is a healthy baby, and that the more (baby-food) the better — were quite clearly misguided.

Nevertheless, none of the obesity-associated risk factors are controversial, or assumptions we’re likely to later regret. Breastfeeding is the first component of healthy nutrition and has a long list of advantages — to both mommies and babies — and should be encouraged and assisted as much as possible for a multitude of reasons.

As for sleep, all parents I suppose cherish their kids’ sleep. There is indeed good reason why we adore sleeping babies. Sleep is as important as food, drink and safety for kids’ wellbeing.

Sleep’s central importance wasn’t something I heard much of in my medical training. I guess telling people who are going to be on call (i.e., awake) every third or fourth night for many years that lack of sleep undermines good physical and mental health would worsen the physician shortage. Sleep’s many secrets are yet to be revealed — we still know too little about how to solve insomnia — but helping babies and kids develop good sleeping habits not only takes care of their health and well being; it also gives parents some alone-time and an opportunity to regroup. And to sleep. And that is priceless!

But lately when I say those words, I feel a tightness in my chest. I look at Julia, my sweet Julia, in her sparkly shoes and her tiara, and I feel that I am failing her somehow. Her father and I separated three months ago. Camelot we are not.

I often ask myself how I got here. I have never considered myself feminine in any typical way. I get my hair cut once a year. I equate shopping for clothes with a trip to the dentist. Before I had Julia, certainly, I would never have imagined that I would essentially live in the Disney palace, forced by my daughter to talk in “a handsome voice” and mostly about getting married or mopping the kitchen. “Cinderella loves tidying up!” she frequently proclaims. Unfortunately, her passion in this category rarely extends to her room.

Partly, of course, it is apathy. When the fatigue of everyday life sets in, every mother picks her battles. In my case, Julia absolutely has to brush her teeth, but do I care if she wears her shiny pink polka dot dress to school three days in a row, particularly when she’s woken up at 2 a.m. to ask me this? Honestly? Not so much.

And yet there was a time, a time before Julia, a time I can barely remember now, when I don’t think I would have given in so easily. The day her father and I found out I was pregnant, we walked to a nearby baby store and picked out a pair of pale blue booties and a yellow giraffe, stuffed and quizzical looking. I had a strong feeling I was having a girl, but still I wanted something neutral. I didn’t want the world to define her; I wanted her to define her world.

I didn’t understand then just how challenging this would be, not only vis-à-vis my daughter, but vis-à-vis me. Like many other women, when I got pregnant I was determined to establish a reasonable balance between my work life and my family. My goal while Julia was small was to take care of her as well as write my first book. This equilibrium sounded good in theory — and in e-mails to my friends — but in truth I had a hard time actually doing it, actually ensuring that I had both a child and my own life. I believed in balance on paper but never felt truly entitled to it. Julia was over a year old before I got a babysitter, and then only for a few hours a week. Somehow I got it into my head that no one could take care of her like me, so I worked mostly during her naps, which most days was about as productive as serving coffee during an earthquake.

In the meantime, my marriage suffered. I didn’t anticipate the envy and loneliness I would feel as I watched my husband go to work, to colleagues and a paycheck. We had been together 10 years before we had children, and they had been lived as equals. Suddenly, this was no longer the case. Suddenly, we had very little time together, and most of it was spent talking about his work and life. My future, my career plans and goals, felt sidelined by fatigue and logistics. The “flexibility” I coveted suddenly meant I was picking up all the slack and getting very little respect in return. Before long, it seemed whenever I raised a qualm or demanded help, he would say, “But I have a job!” I’d get upset in return, of course, but my voice always seemed to fall flat. Mostly I’ll never forget how degraded those words made me feel, nor how I stood there just praying that Julia wasn’t old enough to understand them.

When I think about why this happened — how I unraveled, how I let myself go — the answer feels almost too obvious to utter. But the truth is, I have never not felt that someone wasn’t looking at me, judging me, and this was particularly so as a new mother. Until then, I had somehow done a fair job of protecting myself, keeping others at bay, but with Julia came an increasing inability to distinguish what I wanted from what others expected of me as a woman and a mother. “This is the best time of your life,” I heard. “She needs you the most now,” they said. It wasn’t that I inherently disagreed with those things, but I did spend entirely too much time worrying about how others viewed me and my choices, instead of focusing on what would make me happy, or even what would work best for my family. In a sense, I have always lived life as if I were a character in a movie — perhaps every woman does. One of the strongest memories I have of being pregnant is not how it felt to be poked from the inside by my little girls, but of walking down the street, large and slow, and feeling an overwhelming sense of pride in the satisfied and sentimental looks of strangers as I passed by them. It’s the feeling of someone else’s approval, and it’s probably one of the most powerful things in the world.

My daughter knows that look; I know she does. She has a pair of fairy wings that she loves to wear about town. She almost always flutters in front of me when she does, and I do love the look of joy and abandon on her face as she jumps about, arms spread wide. I want to say there is a sort of freedom there nestled in her curly blond hair, bouncing off her round baby cheeks, and perhaps there is — the freedom you find in fantasy and imagination. I only wish that sometimes she could stay in that little world, eliminate, that is, the bystanders who walk by and smile, innocently enough, at her in such a way that she beams and winks her irresistible wink. As I did with her in my stomach or, days old, in my arms, she is getting something from them. She is learning what is means to be a woman: on show, agreeable, lost in some other world.

Nothing about this feels easy. When Julia stares in the mirror — at 4 years old — and cries because she doesn’t “look nice,” I admit that sometimes it feels like there is nothing I can say to reach her. My impulse at these moments is to blame nature, the media, but then every now and then I catch myself doing something I never thought I’d do. At a recent school fair, I asked her probably 10 times if she wanted to visit the nail polishing stall, though each and every time I asked, she said no. Sometimes I fear I’m subconsciously preparing her for the torn life, the woman’s life — telling her to be strong and independent, but also reminding her that people are looking, and that that is somehow important. I smile too when she’s in her fairy wings.

Lately, though, I am trying to be more careful and astute in all things. I feel more responsibility than ever, and I know too what’s at stake. My husband has begun to spend more time at home, and he and I have started counseling, started to open up about our various struggles with our respective roles, and how to differentiate what is expected of us from what we truly want. For the first time in months, I feel hopeful. But I’ve also vowed to be more conscious and direct with Julia no matter what happens between her father and me. I recently got her a book on women’s history, and she’s really into Abigail Adams (though, admittedly, mostly because of her fancy clothes). I also play her a lot of Janis Joplin. We jump around the room screaming along with the songs, and I show her YouTube clips too. “You just want me to like her because she’s ugly,” she says to me, smiling. Above all, she’s a smart one, my girl.

She knows her mother’s been going through a hard time. Sometimes, without warning, I cry in supermarkets and on sidewalks, uncharacteristically unconcerned if others see me without makeup on, or with it somewhere down around my chin. I always mutter “Sorry, sweetie, sorry” to Julia whenever I do this, though I’m beginning to realize it may not be the worst thing for a daughter to see her mother being human, having an interiority, struggling to regain a self she let go.

In the past few months, she’s been understandably more needy and prone to tantrums and fits of her own. The other day, during one of her meltdowns, she did something I found so disturbing that my shoulders tighten just thinking about it. She ran to her room and stared at herself in the mirror as she cried. I followed behind her and sat by her side as she did, but that only upset her more. With a glassy stare somewhere between fear and confusion, she took to looking frantically back and forth between the mirror and me, and it was at this point that I started crying too. I realized then that my daughter didn’t quite know how to be herself, express herself, without worrying about how she would appear to others. It was as if our lives at that moment collided. I knew exactly where she was — stuck between her girly world, a world where people are looking and judging, a world represented so completely by this mirror by which her frilly dresses hang and in front of which she has spent hours primping and posing, and the real world of her mother, a world that lately is hardly simple, that is full of tears and trials, that makes you work for your triumphs.

When I could stand it no more, I pulled her onto my lap. “It’s going to be all right, Julia. You know it’s going to be all right.” I felt as if I were talking about nothing and everything at once.

“In real life?” she asked. “It will be OK in real life?” Along with the tantrums, this is something relatively new too, a development since he’s been gone. Whenever I say anything — we need milk, I have a stomachache, your sister’s eating a puff ball — she asks, “In real life?” as if we women normally live in some other realm, and not here, now.

“In real life,” I confirmed, in a voice that was surprisingly serious and slow. They felt at once ridiculously simple, these words, but also exactly to the point. They reminded me of the lessons I’d learned since Julia’s birth — that life isn’t a movie, nor are you a prop or a poster girl, but a person — and how they were the exact ones I needed to impart to her as she began to sift through the stuff of women’s lives, to distinguish who she really is from who others think she should be.

On the floor around us were a million scattered accessories — rubber bands with rhinestones, plastic pink high heels from Target, glitter embedded in everything. “We’ve got to clean up this mess,” I said partly as a diversion and partly because I meant it. I’ve started to throw away these little trinkets whenever I get a chance, and though doing so always brings with it a strange tinge of guilt, I’m happy to say Julia has never once noticed anything missing.

I gave her a little tickle, and we both chuckled. I don’t mind her knowing that I’m struggling — that sometimes you have to go through hard times to get to honest times — but I also want her to know that I’ll be OK too. Leaning back and giving me a kiss, she seemed to intuit this. For a blissful moment, we weren’t talking in funny, fake voices. We were just Mommy and Julia. And I knew then that if anything could make us happily ever after, it was that.

Such was the fury over the issue that last night, CNN posted a follow-up specifically on babies and air travel, featuring advice from a psychologist who says, “The other people on the plane do not have to be subjected to your child crying. It is absolutely not something that they should be expected to endure. They can’t leave. So if you’re flying, it means that you may have to get out of your seat and walk around, pace the airplane and make sure your child has a pacifier and a bottle. You may be tired at the end of the trip, it may not be a great flight for you, but that’s your job as a parent.”

In 10 years of parenting, I have flown roundtrip with my children exactly three times, so I have way, way more experience listening to other people’s babies scream and having other people’s toddlers kick my seat than anyone has putting up with mine. And I’ve still got to say: If you think you “absolutely” should not be expected to endure children fussing on a plane, you are going to be one miserable, bitter traveler. Oh, wait! Maybe you already are!

As soon as the CNN story posted, the commenters again came out swinging, racking up nearly 3,000 posts in a matter of hours. While many took the rather reasonable stance typified by the poster who said, “Wow, we do live in a society and babies are a part it,” others had a somewhat dimmer view.

“I do not want to hear babies screaming on a flight. Period,” wrote one gentleman. “When I travel, I am usually working and very tired. I use the flight to catch up on rest. If your child cannot stay quiet, or at least be quieted down quickly, then don’t fly with them, because you will hear from me directly.” I’m sure he’s a delight with the flight attendants, too. Of course, the old chestnuts were also in heavy rotation: “You are selfish and only thinking of yourself,” wrote one user, while another added that, “If as a parent you are unable to adequately handle the rigors of parenting in various stressful situations (such as an airport) then perhaps you should not have had children to begin with.”

But perhaps even more deeply at odds with reality were the commenters who echoed the CNN story itself, the ones who blithely observed, “Think ahead of every eventuality beforehand and be prepared for it. Apart from one instance when one baby was sick, I have never had an unruly, noisy or disruptive child,” and, “Those of us who were lucky enough to have competent parents didn’t annoy the heck out of too many other people.” See? If your kid cries while the guy in 23F is working on his PowerPoint presentation, it is so your fault.

Does society lack for lousy parents and bratty kids? I don’t see us running out of either any time soon. So it’s surely a good thing that, within that lightning rod CNN story, there were plenty of wise reminders that parents traveling with kids should err on the side of preparation and attention to their offspring and courtesy to their fellow passengers. It doesn’t, however, change the fact that kids are loose cannons who often, just for the hell of it, make noise and poop in their pants.

If the wailing baby in front of you is bumming you out, that’s understandable. If you think “you should buy a muzzle for your kid” or that the parents need to “remind me to get a seat next to you during every flight you take from now on so I can scream in your ear the entire way,” you may want to consider the possiblity that you have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. And that’s the real great illumination of the CNN story — something many of us already know all too well. Sure, flying sucks and the planet is full of rude, clueless people, but if you really want to see some outrageously childish stuff, just go straight to the comments section on any story about how other people ought to behave.