July 1, 2010 Knoxville writer Katie Allison Granju wrote the book on parenting. Specifically, she’s co-author of Attachment Parenting: Instinctive Care for Your Baby and Young Child, which in 1999 made “co-sleeping” and “baby-wearing” household terms, and she’s written on the subject for a wide variety of national publications, including The New York Times, Salon, and Babble. When Granju’s 18-year-old son Henry died on May 31 of a brutal beating he sustained during a drug deal gone wrong, every parent who heard the story was forced to face the same thought: “If this could happen to Katie Allison Granju, it could happen to me.”
Henry was a deeply loved child, a boy who loved his family deeply in return, but he had struggled with a drug addiction for years. In their grief, his parents have started a memorial fund to help the parents of other struggling teens afford the often prohibitive costs of in-patient drug treatment. To read more about the fund and find out how to donate, please click here. To follow Katie’s blog—in which she grieves Henry and simultaneously welcomes her fifth child, Georgia, who was born on Sunday night—click here.
