I just finished reading this article... http://ca.news.yahoo.com/kids-were-no-angels-mom-whos-suing-parental-141531701.html
Background: Strict parent, whose children regard their upbringing as "brutal", is now suing her children for parental support. The lady is 73 years old and is "estranged" from her 4 living children and 10 grandchildren.
I can see the WTS glomming on to legal cases like this for its older members who have had to shun their DFd children, and then when the kids want nothing to do with the parents when they fall ill [and the WTS tells them to ask those DFd adult children for financial support] they've found a way to punish the DFd kids even further by getting court orders to pay for parental support. In fact, I've highlighted some parts of the article that have a distinct JW "aroma" to them.
Kids 'were no angels,' mom who's suing for parental support claims
Vancouver Province – Thu, 22 Sep, 2011
Kids 'were no angels,' mom who's suing for parental support claims
A Kootenays woman waging a bitter legal battle to get money from her adult children says she is not the monster she's been made out to be, just an "ordinary stay-at-home mom."
Shirley Anderson, 73, broke her silence Wednesday to insist that her four sons and one daughter had a good but strict upbringing and that she doesn't deserve to be destitute, sick and alone in her old age.
Anderson sued her five children almost 12 years ago under the Family Relations Act, arguing that they had a duty to provide parental support.
Anderson, who in 2000 was awarded $10 per month per child, claims it was her lawyer's idea to ask the court on Sept. 20 to increase that to $750 per month in total. The judge reserved decision.
"In 2008, I was forced to sue them all over again in a bid to recover parental support payments that had not been paid by two of my children," Anderson told The Province. "My health had deteriorated even more by that point."
Anderson said her lawyer can no longer afford to work for her pro bono and she can't afford to pay for a lawyer.
"[My children] are not destitute, they still take trips to Hawaii while I'm forced to live under the poverty line," said Anderson.
She claims she "basically raised my kids alone" because her husband Gary, a Labatt's truck driver, "was always on the road. "I might have been strict, but that's the way I was raised, with discipline. "They were no angels," said Anderson.
"My daughter was good, but the boys were hell on wheels. Not many mothers go to bed at night saying a prayer that their sons don't kill themselves or someone else. They partied hard."
Her son, Ken Anderson, 47, who paid his mom $10 per month for more than a decade, asked B.C. Supreme Court this week to dismiss his mother's litigation against him and his siblings.
"I'm done paying her and if the court awards her more money, after she's used government money to go after us for the last 12 years, I won't pay a cent," said Ken, a logging-truck driver whose wife Sherry represented him in court. "We have our own family and we haven't saved for our own retirement.
"If you have good parents, like my wife's parents, you don't mind helping. My upbringing was just brutal, and I was basically abandoned at age 15."
Anderson admitted that she is estranged from all of her 10 grandchildren and her adult children. One son died recently and another is in and out of jail.
Anderson, who said she rarely leaves her apartment, is ill with lupus, two kinds of arthritis and requires expensive chemotherapy medications.
She receives $1,554.44 a month from the Canada Pension Plan and Old Age Security, but says she can't afford her medications and has to rely on the food bank.
"It's alleged I abandoned them in their teens, but Ken lived with us until he was 18. Our daughter got a brand-new car on her graduation."
Anderson admitted most of her kids left home before "the age of majority, but that was the way things were back then. They had a normal upbringing. "I stayed home as women did in the '50s and '60s to give my kids a good life and now I need their help."