This week while reflecting on the writings that most influenced my thinking about psychopathy/sociopathy, I received a letter from a mother of a five year-old boy whose father shows many signs of the disorder. She wrote:
Do you believe that children can show signs of being psychopathic? If so do you teach them to suppress the way they really feel by masking the problems with fake feelings? Can feelings of love really be learned? Just because someone on the outside appears like they have feelings does that mean inside they have actually changed? As you know they are good actors. The skill is learned very quickly to lie to blend in with the others. I bought your book off Amazon I should be getting it today. And i am also reading Dr. Hares book. I will try to look at your book some more today.
Shortly after my son’s father was arrested, I sat on my bed, with our seven month old baby asleep beside me, with the psychiatry DSM manual open to the page containing the criteria for “antisocial personality disorder”. I asked myself “do any of these criteria relate to common themes discussed in the child development literature.” I had to answer that question to know how best to mother my own child.
Interestingly, all the criteria mapped onto three developmentally acquired abilities: Ability to Love, Impulse Control, and Moral Reasoning. I then vowed I would read everything there was to read about each of these.
I started with Ability to Love. In my opinion the most important book about Ability to Love is Learning to Love by Harry Harlow, Ph.D. He is the scientist who demonstrated that a baby monkey clings to his mother out of pleasure in affection and “contact comfort” not because mother is a source of food. Prior to Dr. Harlow, scientists believed that the child learned to relate to his mother because she was associated with food.
The profound conclusion reached by Dr. Harlow’s research team is that babies are born to “learn to love” just like babies are born to learn language. We don’t come into the world talking but as our brains develop and we are exposed to language we learn to talk. Similarly, we don’t come into the world loving, but as our brains develop and we receive the right input we learn to love.
There are other interesting parallels between talking and loving including the observation that both are disordered in autism and both are influenced by genetics.
My world completely changed when I read page 44 of learning to love. It is on this page that Dr. Harlow discusses a very important developmental sequence. Ability to Love starts to develop before pleasure in aggression and competition sets in:
“The primary basis of aggression control is the formation of strong generalized bonds of peer love or affection… All primates, monkeys and men alike are born with aggressive potential, but aggression is a rather later maturing variable. It is obvious that a one year old suffers from fear and is terrified by maternal separation, but the child neither knows nor can express aggression at this tender age…This lack of aggression targets accounts in part for the fact that “evil emotion” culminates during the age-mate stage, long after peer affection and love have developed. It is the antecedent age-mate love that holds the fury of aggression within acceptable bounds for in group associates.”
Love starts to develop before aggression does, and has a head start in the race for the brain connections that form the basis of our values.
Now back to our 5 year old boy. I am very disturbed by the recent trend of referring to children as “psychopathic” in the scientific literature. Not that she does not describe symptoms of psychopathy, but to call a 5 year old psychopathic, negates the importance of learning to love and acts like it is an inborn ability.
I would say that this boy is learning disabled and requires extra help when it comes to learning to love. Just like speech therapy would help him if he couldn’t speak, love therapy will help him if he can’t love. Studies of autistic children show that a mother’s love makes a big differences for many severely affected children. Why shouldn’t we at least give this 5 year old the benefit of the doubt and give him love therapy.
Many studies show that the parents of at-risk children struggle with loving them. It is hard to love an impulsive child who goes after the cat with sharp tools. These parents are also harmed by suggestions that psychopathy is entirely genetic and firmly in place by age 3.
The focus on “discipline” also hurts these families because children need to learn to love. How can they learn to love if the people who are supposed to teach them are constantly yelling at them and scolding them or spanking them?
What is the answer?
An at-risk child is a full time job! Parents have to love that child 24/7 and not leave him alone to go to the kitchen to pick up the knife and go after the cat. Preventive positive parenting means waking up before the child, being there when he opens his eyes and saying, “I love you”. It means giving him hugs and kisses, playing and having fun together.
from the above link:
The Type B Character is ultimately cruel, even when trying to express or provide pleasure. Their own tolerance for social ostracism is systematically increased by their habitual patterns, and the level of risk and amount of displeasure of others that they are willing to experience is always increasing. In fact, violence and pleasure, specifically including sexual, become intermingled in such a manner that they are mutually reinforcing. Intimacy is markedly absent and the willingness of a partner to bear the infliction of pain/discomfort becomes the highest expression of a now “pathological love.” Ultimately, a willing partner is not nearly so desirable as an unwilling or deceived partner (victim). Intimacy is replaced by the intensity of power and control as expressed and felt through increasingly high risk violence and/or deception.
Interpersonal Functioning (i.e., style of interpersonal interaction, including behavioral strategies and tactics as related to both motive and method):
Such individuals are nonproductive and must “produce” through the suffering of others (e.g., drug sales, thefts, extortions). They are actively predatory in lifestyle and “survive” through more or less direct applications of violence, ranging from aggression to self-injury, psychological to physical, and verbal to nonverbal. In fact, violence and the threat of violence are their primary problem solving devices and the primary means through which they get their increasingly antisocial needs met. They are noncompliant with legitimate but restrained authority, but submissive and avoidant with unrestrained or consequential authority; and, directly aggressive and exploitive to those clearly weaker than they. They thrive where legitimate authority is absent, impotent or unjust.
TB “saving our money to bail him out of jail”—-DON’T BAIL HIM OUT!
SOME, and I repeate, SOME FEW kids will show up as P-traits at this early age, ,but I have never seen one as an INFANT, or TODDLER, which is Jill’s FEAR. I have seen babies and toddlers that were very needy of attention, and any baby’s way of getting attention is to cry. Some of them are very difficult to comfort, or there is some suspicion that it is possible these kids have “migraine-type” headaches, which of course they have no way of telling you what hurts except to cry, and that probably makes a head ache worse.
Possibly Dr. Leedom will chime in on this one.
sky: thanks for those links. Yeah, oppositional disorder-I kind of bottom line that now=rebellious.
BRACE: that was interesting. Working on changing more of the belief system rather than the behavior. Yeah, I can see where that could be helpful. This is complicated. I believe behavior is a choice. But, then how to reconcile this with a very young child other than to just say it’s genetics. I don’t have the answer….but I feel I do not want to be around nor tolerate extreme behavior. Life is too short to allow these people to ruin our lives. I don’t have the answer to my grandson…I wish I did. But: I can say this…..I am sure glad I don’t have to be around him 24/7! And my heart goes out to my son, his wife and the great younger boy..who is getting wasted by having to pay all the attention to the behavior of the bad one…that is not fair to anyone. To the credit of my older daughter: she has no children and has given this boy much attention and opportunity including a paid for college education waiting for him. He’s a smart young boy and I’d like to see some time/effort put forth on him because he tries hard instead of everything being focused on the misbehaving one. *ok, off soapbox.
Oxy: Ok, I will not bail him out…but his mom always will.
Type B Character do not lose impulse control, they quite intentionally and systematically develop displays of violence as a primary problem-solving device, intentionally manipulating fear in others in a goal directed manner. Such displays are no more a matter of loss of impulse control than their noncompliance is a matter of loss of ability or skills.
sky: very interesting and from my experience: TRUE!
Boy, you know, you don’t want to ever give up on a kid…but this kid has almost finished my son off. He’s a discouraged, sad shell of a man now. He’s almost robotic and they all spend their time just trying to survive. I remember when this kid was just five years old and weighed very little and was soooooo skinny and yet….he was able to inflict so much pain on so many people. What is the answer???? None of us know it….
sky: I have to agree with your posting.
a baby monkey clings to his mother out of pleasure in affection and “contact comfort”
I hope it’s a positive sign that my son hugs me for lengths of time when I pick him up at daycare and blows kisses to the sitter.
But it is scary to hear that the ability to love can be LOST.
BTW I am a loving person, but as I am a new mother and was confronted with infidelity and discovering, slowly over 4 months that my son’s father is a S, I do NEED to hear how to create a loving relationship with my son, and be reminded to play with him although I adore him and hug, kiss, hold tell him I love him frequently.
I am for all intents and purposes a single mom who must balance time with my son, doing homework (grading), cooking, cleaning etc.
I do not think that because I allow my son to play on his own (in his kitchen or with his balls: he collects baseball, football, bouncy ball, basket ball) that I am a bad mother, but as a mother of a child at risk I DO need to be reminded to spend quality time with him because he is very content playing on his own.
TB, in in-patient settings I have seen kids as young as 8-10 that were a huge physical danger to their parents and others, parents couldn’t sleep at night afraid the kid would wake up and burn down the house on their heads. IT IS VERY RARE though, in percentages. I am sorry your son seems to have such a child.
The “enabling” mother isn’t going to be a help either in trying to mitigate the consequences for the child, in fact, if the kid has a chance in hades, I think he NEEDS consequences. The problerm is that they are NOT stupid, and their arrogance at feeling “smarter than everyone” doesn’t help.
My own sperm donor who WAS extremely smart and precicious was running away at age 8 and getting completely across the country from Oklohama to Oregon to his uncle’s house (early 1930s). By 11 or 12 he was long gone from any parental control and out in the world on his own. Conning his way across the world, not just the US. When he’d get into financial problems his father would bail him out, not a good thing in my opinion.
Me taking my kid out of jail didn’t help him though I never PAID any “bail” money, with juvies unless it is murder they usually just give them back to you til court date months later.
In retrospect, I would have walked away from mine at age 17 and never looked back. But retrospective vision is 20:20 and forward vision isn’t, so not beating myself up over it.
I do feel sorry for your son with the problems he has with that child, though, as I know it eat s at your soul and life like a cancer. I’d rather have a child that was severely MR than one that is a potential P that “blooms early.”
Dear Banana,
Children that age DO explore and play alone contentedly and should learn this skill of entertaining themselves, and then after a while they return to your lap for reassurance that you are there for them. I think your son playing this way is a GOOD thing. It shows he is secure enough to venture out from your lap. To me that is a POSITIVE THING!!
Yes, you are a “single parent” and recognizing that is a big step, because you do not therefore EXPECT your x to contribute, because you and I both know he will NOT contribute positively to your son’s upbrining.
Read Dr. Leedom’s web site about raising children AT RISK, who may have some of the genetics and have some interaction with their P parents as well. Your son is not by any stretch of the imagination a “lost cause” just because he has a P father! Keep in mind, he has YOU for a mother, and I think that is a WONDERFUL THINMG!!!! ((((hugs)))))