The Childhood Psychopath: Bad Seed or Bad Parents?

During the first three to nine months of life, an infant develops bonds with the parent. Some infants are easy, some difficult. Parents have to work on making this bond deepen, because a strong factor in the development of psychopathy is the child's lack of connection with others. The ability to connect is crucial during these early months. One two-month-old baby who had been placed in several foster situations showed signs of being unattached: she would not make eye contact and when picked up, she reacted violently. The foster mother who decided to try to change this used behavior modification to get the baby to make eye contact while she was feeding. It took almost seven months, but eventually the child responded with less rigidity and greater bonding.

Attachment at an early age helps children to:

• develop intellectually
• develop a conscience
• cope with frustration
• become self-reliant and self-valuing
• develop empathic relationships

Like dairy, meat, fruits and vegetables for the body, there are basic emotional nutrients that must be made available to children in a balanced manner. Self-worth, resilience, hope, intelligence, and empathy are essential to building character for effective impulse control, anger management, and conflict resolution. Without these assets and skills, children cannot establish rewarding relationships with community systems, which puts at risk the entire social structure.

Our society often romanticizes the outlaw and sometimes neglects the child who is trying to develop in a prosocial manner. For example, a nineteen-year-old boy in a small town in upstate New York decided that something needed to be done to better his community, so he ran for mayor and won. However, the adults ridiculed him and attempted to erode his sense of confidence. What they should have been doing was encouraging his contribution and sense of community responsibility, i.e., helping him build character. However, our society can mistakenly feed the destructive impulse and starve the positive one. It's important to see that these nutrients come not just from within the family but also from society at large.

A parent's job is to socialize their child and to learn the observational and listening skills necessary to detect when children are deviating into harmful patterns. It focuses not on placing blame but on detecting the "nutritional" imbalance and devising ways to set it right.

Emotional health needs attention on a regular basis. Just because kids appear to be doing fine does not mean they are and parents need to take the time to listen and observe, rather than take the status quo for granted.

Start Early

Research indicates that the propensity toward violence may begin as early as in the womb. Setting up a routine of emotional nutrition from infancy, just as one is concerned to provide the proper amount and balance of food at that age, is essential. A program of emotional nutrition can keep children on a solid path of developing the building blocks of good character.

Be Consistent

A consistent diet enhances immune functions and keeps us healthy. So does consistency with emotional nutrition. This chapter shows how the metaphor works in terms of decision making, keeping rules, and devising strategies in confrontations and power struggles. A child who can achieve these skills along the way—which will then become risk protection factors—needs to be noticed and praised, and the parents need to hold firmly to a set of values that they believe will develop character. Just as consistency in dieting habits pays off, so too will it show rewards in a program of emotional nutrition.

Consistency is one of the most difficult skills of parenting to master. People are not machines programmed always to perform at peak levels. We all have frustrations, bad moods, off days, and children can sometimes push the limits. These are the days when we are most likely to feed our children emotional junk food because we're too exhausted to do otherwise. It's important to remember the big picture.

Detoxification

Sometimes children get involved in unhealthy activities and may develop patterns of lying, aggression, manipulation, or other forms of acting out. In that case, parents must have strategies for breaking those patterns and getting their children back on a healthy track. Empowering children toward emotional health means finding positive things that get them the same sort of attention they were getting with their negative behaviors, so that replacing those behaviors will not deprive them of the attention.

Introducing Variety

Parents may not be able to handle their offspring alone, and it's perfectly normal to feel overwhelmed and confused. Good parenting means recognizing limits and finding the appropriate people to help out. If their child's teeth were crooked, they wouldn't attempt to fix the problem themselves but would go to an orthodontist. The same holds true for emotional health: Parents can't be expected to be able to deal with all the emotional difficulties their child might experience, so they need to know their limits and get the appropriate help. This might be a therapist, a group therapy situation, or a mentoring program. Parents should discover what resources are available in their areas.

While a born psychopath may have neurological disorders that defy everything we do, it still seems to be the case that many criminals with certain psychopathic traits may have been turned toward something prosocial with the right nurturing. The more we can decrease the number of psychopaths in the general population, the better off we will be. Thus it makes sense to find ways to assess childhood psychopathy and to redirect such children before they become truly dangerous.