However...

1) Protecting yourself can, rather easily, be stronger than protecting your offspring. Although this depends on circumstances too, it means that competing priorities sometimes must be decided upon and some will have to be eliminated. It is even worse in humans than in other highly child rearing animals because our intelligence means we evaluate a lot of inputs that for other animals would be wholly instinctive or impossible to deal with.

2) Who says she was not protecting them? Again, our intelligence confuses and obfuscates too. She might very well have been thinking that this was for their own good. Many mothers do far worse stuff to their children for their own good. So this might not involve a paradox.