Does Mother Know Best?

This is an episode of Inside the Tent, a podcast going behind the scenes of Campside’s award winning shows.Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.If you’re reading this in the app but missing it in your inbox, you can enable email delivery anytime in your account settings.Jennifer Bush was one of the sickest children in America. She had more than two hundred hospital visits, dozens of surgeries, and a mother who never left her side. Then the doctors began to ask a darker question: what if the person harming Jennifer Bush was the person who loved her most?Journalist Sara Ganim grew up in the same sun-bleached Florida town as Jennifer. Decades later, she returns to a case that split a family, a courtroom, and a community. It was a case built on a diagnosis that turns a mother’s every act of devotion into evidence against her.In Mother Knows Best, Sara digs into the doctors, the records, and the science, and she uncovers a question that reaches far beyond one family: how do we tell the difference between a parent who is harming a child and one who is simply refusing to give up?Sara and producer Karen Given start from the beginning of their exhaustive three year journey to produce the show. They wanted to find a story with a potentially unexpected ending. And local reporting in Florida led Sara to Jennifer Bush and her mother Kathy.The story brought to mind Gypsy-Rose Blanchard, but was this actually a case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy? Sara and Karen initially hoped to tell a story less reliant on existing documents, but Kathy’s four month trial in 1999 meant reviewing thousands of pages and hours of testimony.In this episode, Vanessa Grigoriadis asks about their experience reporting on the medical community. Sara was most surprised by the amount of disagreement amongst doctors. There are unfortunately lots of unknowns in medicine, and parents in particular want answers.Sara and Karen discuss what constitutes justice, for a mother sent to jail and a daughter sent to foster care. At least here, both mother and daughter get the chance to tell their stories. And there is time, with an hours long podcast, to explore the people and issues deeply.Listen to Inside the Tent on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.Email us with questions or comments: questions@campsidemedia.com.We hope to see you inside the tent again soon. Subscribe now for updates on Mother Knows Best and all of Campside’s hit shows. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit join.campsidemedia.com