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.
I just got the three books in this series from my son and I am going to start reading them.. He said they are very good. I usually have to be hunting something to read but right now have about 10 books piled up (including those three) to read so will be occupied for a while.
Lately though, have been busier than usual so have actually had less time to read.
How can one discern an undisciplined, spoiled, and unruly child, from an at risk child?
I think that’s an important question, because a normal, but spoiled child needs to be corrected, however, it may well be true that an at risk child would not benefit from strict discipline, and would need more empathy training, and as you say, instruction in loving. On the other hand, since sociopaths use our empathy against us, wouldn’t this modeling of love and empathy simply be used to manipulate….a spoiled child, in need of boundry setting, and consequences, would quickly learn to take advantage of this approach.
That’s not to say that the child shouldn’t be shown love and respect. Just that many children who act reprhensibly, are simply spoiled rotten and have their parents emotionally black-mailed. Hummmmm. Not sure.
Dear Kim,
You ask a VERY GOOD QUESTION, and one that I don’t think there is any easy answer to.
Back when I worked in the juvenile and adolescent psych inpatient center I saw kids very young that were DANGEROUS and I have no doubt that the majority of them became full fledged psychopaths. I saw kids age 12 that were rapists and very dangerous due to their size and total inability to have any compassion or empathy for their victims or others, all about control.
A kid whose mother married into my husband’s family I knew for a year when he was five and he was totally out of control. His mother was BPD and very manipulative, hateful and vengeful. I don’t know anything about the boy’s father. The boy responded fairly well to me because he knew I WOULD discipline him even if it meant holding him to the ground and lying on top of him. I actually had to do that once, but once was enough. He knew I would not allow him to kick me in the shins or throw things at me in my own home.
His mother was no rocket scientist and neither was he, but his half sister took more after her father and was quite bright. Her father died when she was 4 though, in an automobile accident.
The boy has turned out to be a drug abuser, manipulator and quite dangerous with multiple arrests for assault. His half sister is completely different as an adult, She is self responsible, self supporting, stays away from her mother and brother and seems to be doing well, especially considering where she came from and what a chaotic life she has led due to her mother’s frequent partner changes after her father’s death etc.
I wish I had a “foolproof” way of picking out the kids who are saveable and those who are not! But I’m not sure that ANYONE can be sure what is going to happen in the future! LOL
I bet teachers would like to know this too and therapists as well. Dr. Leedom says basically all we can do is to try to teach them empathy from an early age and yep, some of them will choose to use that against us because they choose to and some will internalize it and connect.
I wish I knew whether “connection” or “empathy” came first, whether the bonding to others causes empathy to flourish, or whether the lack of bonding comes frist and therefore prevents empathy from being taught or felt. Is it taught or is it a natural result of bonding? I don’t know. I’m not sure any one does.
I do BELIEVE (this is just an opinion and they are like noses, we’ve all got one) that you can take a child that is born “normal” (within that area that is considered “within normal limits”) and you can mistreat it so badly, neglect it so badly that it will fail to bond to other humans and will be a HIGHLY DYSFUNCTIONAL ADULT, maybe even criminal or dangerous, with little connectivity to other humans.
I also BELIEVE that there are some children born with such DNA that there is little chance (if any) that the most nurturing environment in the world that they will connect “normally” to other people in a loving and empathetic way. They may not be “criminal” in the sense that they rob liquor stores or molest children, but they will not (at best) be caring empathetic individuals even with a good environment.
However, if those Children with DNA inclined to psychopathy and disconnectedness are ALSO given bad parenting, then they may become the next Hitler, the next Ted Bundy, the next Charlie Manson, the next Bernie Madoff, the next Eliot Spritzer, etc. (the list is endless).
The thing we must keep in mind though is that regardless of what our environment or DNA is (assuming we have enough IQ to tie our shoes and have touch with reality) we are RESPONSIBLE for our own CHOICES.
I may have the DNA to be an alcoholic, but I have the CHOICE to drink or not to drink. I may have the DNA to not connect with others in a normal way, but I have a CHOICE to beat my wife, or neglect my child or not…etc.
NO MATTER WHAT OUR DNA is, we have CHOICES. Some of us may have more trouble leaving alcohol alone because of our DNA and some others may have trouble with cocaine or meth, or sex, but WE ALL HAVE CHOICES one way or another.
Psychopaths KNOW RIGHT FROM WRONG…even that Austrian MONSTER who kept his daughter locked up for 24 years, he KNEW IT WAS WRONG or he wouldn’t have HIDDEN the situation, he doesn’t WANT to believe the truth, but he KNOWS what he did was wrong.
We all have different DNA unless we have an identical twin, but what we DO with that DNA is our CHOICE. My DNA didn’t let me have much of a chance to be an NFL star, but I had other choices! What I made of those choices was up to me. If I used the advantages I had to overcome the disadvantages I had I could make a life for myself. So can the psychopaths if they make that CHOICE.
We have CHOICES and we get the CONSEQUENCES of those choices. We don’t always know in advance what those consequence will be either. I’m not sure that my P son realized that killing that girl would land him in prison for decades—though HE SHOULD I would have thought, figured that out. His ability to ANTICIPATE LOGICAL consequences is obvious faulty though.
My ability to anticipate logical consequences is improving though, but I still can’t tell the future. We just do the best we can in loving and raising a kid, and at some point, we have to let it go.
Witsend had to let her son go when it reached the point that he was becoming dangerous to her and there was no way he would accept “help” because his CHOICE was to refuse to see that HE HAD A PROBLEM…his ability to predict the consequences of failing in school was 100% off. He THINKS he will be a great and rich and famous skateboard star and doesn’t need an education.
But there is no way his mother can convince him this is not good judgment. So that is the point you have to “let it go, and let God.” Sometimes that point is reached early, like the mother in Tennessee who adopted the kid from Russia and couldn’t control him and sent him back.
I agree that was a no-win situation, and I am sure that Witsend must know the feeling that mother felt. Russia is not going to let a “normal” child be adopted out of the country and with alcoholism rampant in that country kids who come from an orphanage and are upwards of 7-8 years old are probably not bonded and have major problems both genetically and from prenatal alcohol that most parents would find very difficult to impossible to deal with. Even inpatient, we had difficulty dealing with these children, as they know they have power and have no fear. I would hate to go to sleep at night knowing one of these children was in my home and knew how to strike a match.
It’s a sad situation. I’m glad I don’t have to deal with it now, and my heart goes out to those people dealing with it, and my prayers for both them and the children.
Boy, you know, I’d love to believe love therapy works, at least part of the time. Never having raised a unwilling, unloving oppositional child, I don’t know. However, I’ve watched my son love my EXTREMELY ADD, seriously strong even though skinny as a rail, torturing grandson. And it has made NO difference in his ability to show love. He does NOT like affection, or any form of it. He’s going on puberty now and I hugged his sweet, loving brother [they are polar opposites] bye and he just hugged and loved me so sweetly, but this grandson literally withdrew and CRINGED when I gently put my arm around his shoulder and said bye. My little four year old granddaughter screams, “Leave me alone!” when I try to show her affection. So, somebody tell me…….
Dear TB,
I wish I could tell you that there was anything I thought might even help your “going on puberty” grandson—but I don’t know of much if anything that does corral them. I feel for your son and his family in dealing with this child, and I even feel for the child, because there isn’t a way I can see that he could be “happy” either.
As for your GD….????? I don’t have any answers except you do the best you can and then let it go and let God handle it.
I remember when Witsend came here in such agony trying to find “help” for her son age 16, and he will be 18 in December, still hates her….but is out of her house, if not her heart. There comes a point when we just have to accept what IS rather than grieve over what we WISH WAS.
Maybe the Granddaughter will turn out okay, but at the same time, she doesn’t know you well, and her mother has probably/maybe? indicated to her that you are not to be in control. So I don’t have a full picture of the situation and maybe you don’t either since you really don’t know her all that well either because your daughter has kept you away from her.
I remember some of the stories you told about how your daughter would behave what sounded to me inappropriately and oppositionally definant to you as well (the night she took her to the bar where the LOUD music was blaring) etc. and got mad at you for objecting…the thing that is the hardest to accept I think (at least for me would be) that there is NOTHING you can do about how your daughter raises/treats the child or treats you either.
I wanted so desperately to have grandchildren, but I’m glad now I don’t have.
Sometimes the love therapy seems to work with some kids…so don’t give up hope completely, but don’t let it eat your guts either!~ (((hugs)))) and my prayers for you and your family!
Ox: Thanks for helping! Yeah, my son and DIL broke down several years ago and put him on meds. It’s made a real difference in his behavior. Instead of trying to murder my little granddaughter, he has become extremely protective of her, which is a great relief! He’s withdrawn now, but still ‘punky’, just not as energetic about it. I try to love him, but he rejects me, and quiet frankly, with his attitude and behavior, he’s not a winsome kid anyway. I try always to treat him as fairly as my other GS, but I much prefer the sweet one. Everyone does.
Yeah, you’re right about my GD. I am just not sure what ‘my best’ is. I don’t want to keep her again for awhile and never overnight. Really, right now, I am so blown and hurt that, not only did she not love me, she didn’t even want to be with me. I have to get past that and I’m not certain I can, at least for some time. I sadly feel that this is yet another difficult, demanding person that if I had a relationship with her, would require me, once again, to be a floor mat. I’m just not anxious to do that. Not to mention health wise, I don’t have it in me.
Thank you for your prayers, Ox, those are the most important things you could do for my family and me! [[[[Hugs!]]]]
So – can a child be a sociopath at 5?
In my opinion, yes they can be – or at the very least, they can be well on their way.
For the past 18 years I have worked with children – most of them have been aged from 3 to 6, and usually the year they turn 5 (over here in Australia, this is the Pre-Primary year that comes after kindergarten and before first grade Primary school).
I have know several children who were incredibly violent and seemed down-right malicious, even at that tender age. Most came from dysfunctional homes, but not all did. Most had learning disabilities, some form of autism spectrum disorder or conduct disorder. One had Asperger’s (a form of autism, usually high-functioning) plus Multiple Personality Disorder (which has a new name now – Dissociative Personality Disorder maybe? I can’t think right at this moment).
One 4 year who was hunting fellow Pre-Primaries with a pair of metal scissors and had to be restrained for about half an hour (until his mum came to take him home) to stop him from harming himself and others, came from what seemed like a lovely home with good parents. He pulled out clumps of my hair, spat in my face and thrashed about so violently that my shins were bruised from holding him. (We have to be very careful how we restrain them, if at all, for all sorts of safety and legal reasons, so I really wasn’t able to use sufficient force to defend myself too well…) The scissor-hunt was no game; you could see it in his eyes and in the stealthy way he moved; a very fixed look and an over-all vacancy of expression, only periodically he would snarl. Scary stuff.
The most frightening child I ever worked with was 5. It was not long after we had had a dreadful gun massacre at a tourist site in Tasmania and there were photos of the gunman all over the TV and in the newspapers. I remember saying to my work colleagues – he looks like that guy who just killed all of those people. It wasn’t because of his physical characteristics – it was more his manner and the cold way he looked right through you. That vacant stare that at the same time felt as if he was memorising every line on our faces, storing us in his memory for when he was old enough to get himself a gun. No amount of kindness or care got through to him – he always made me feel as if he was just marking time, studying me. To be fair, he was in foster care after an allegedly horrific abuse situation with his real parents. We were never given the details.
Anyhow, he moved away; I moved away; and I didn’t see him for 9 years (so by then he was 14). I was at an outdoor basketball game one night, when this dark, hooded shape started to slink along the edge of the court across from where I was sitting. The figure stopped under a light directly opposite me and stayed there for a few moments, just staring in my direction. I couldn’t see a face, the light threw the face into shadow, but I went cold and goose-pimply all over. A bit later, I asked another of the parents who “that kid was?” When I was told the child’s name, I knew why I had felt fear, even without having seen their face. It was the same kid.
Dear Aussiegirl,
I worked in an inpatient psych hospital for adolescents and we had kids as young as 5-6 that were uncontrollable with various “diagnoses” but the majority of the teens we had I think would after turning 18 be diagnosable as psychopaths. (Actually ASPD per the DSM IV) but even a diagnosis of CONDUCT DISORDER or Oppositional definance was difficult to get tagged on to them inspite of some pretty violent behavior.
We had a large 12 year old with at least average intellegence who had already sexually molested several children (both sexes) but he didn’t see this as a problem at all and he was because of his large size and early maturity quite the bully. I’m sure by now he must have been iin prison a time or two.
Some of them indeed can be quite scary at 5-10 yrs old especially if they also seem to be ADHD as well, or bi-polar. Some by that age realize you have to sleep and you can’t watch them 24 – 7 and I wouldn’t go to sleep with such a child in the house–we had a blogger here who had such a daughter and she had threatened to burn the house while the mom slept. The mother (a divorced mom) was beside herself trying to find appropriate care. Another blogger had a son she was afraid of and though she tried to get legal and psych and school help, all she got was blame for being a bad parent and not MAKING this 16 year old boy take his medication, go to school, and do his school work. DUH!? She’s going to try to FORCE FEED medication to a physically adult male who has threatened to burn the house down on heer head while she sleeps if she crosses him?
I think your P-dar going off was what the young man intended to do. Sometimes they do enjoy creeping others out.
I have just found this site – pretty glad to have, too. I have a son who is now a diagnosed sociopath – he is 19, and in prison for armed robbery. He was my sweet, precious little boy once. I mean, he seemed sweeter and more sensitive than his sister, who has grown up to be relatively normal (not perfect, but not scary). But the idea in the original article that we can “love” the sociopath out of a kid – I don’t think I can agree with that. My kids ALL received TONS of love from me – and very unconditional. I was so determined even when they did wrong, to point out very clearly that it was what they DID that was wrong, not them, and that even when I was angry at them, I loved them entirely, and all that good lovey-dovey stuff, and hugged and said good things, “caught” them being good, all kinds of stuff. And one turned out a total sociopath, and one turned out just a regular person. And the other one is only 11, but she is probably the most normal of all of them (including me haha!).
So really, can you tell me that if I had loved my son better and taught him to love better, he’d not have turned out this way? I don’t think so. I mean, I have asked myself this over and over again through the years.
I haven’t read all these comments, but enough to be amazed that I am not alone! I mean, I figured I wasn’t, but going through the courts as my son’s criminal acts became worse and worse, you would sure think I was! People couldn’t believe that a more-or-less decent mother could have a son like mine – who hated me, blamed me for everything, did whatever he could get away with, and if he didn’t get away with it, denied to the point of utter ridiculousness, and finally just said “it’s no big deal” when there was nothing more for him to say. This beginning with stealing other kids’ things, and moving on up to serious drug-taking and drug-dealing, and finally armed robbery. In prison, still the attitude that “it’s no big deal,” and at the same time, it’s all my (his mom’s) fault.
But when he started physically abusing me and his little sister, there was no help for me at all. He was scary-sneaky about the things he did, and we lived for the last 2 years in near-constant terror. I was trying to “parent” him while at the same time, keeping my daughter and me locked up in our increasingly-high-security bedrooms whenever he was home, because when a boy gets bigger than you, there is really only so much you can do. And one time, he went to a short-term sentence at a youth jail (15/30 days) for assaulting me, leaving bruises, and I was required to pick him up and continue to provide a home for him when he was done serving this sentence for assaulting ME!!
The day we heard on the news about the armed robberies in the general area where I live, before they knew who did them, my older daughter (who had escaped by then into a marriage, thank God, and left the house) called and jokingly said, “Did you see my brother on TV?” haha, and we kind of laughed. Two days later, the sheriff came to my door to let me know that my son was in jail for these very armed robberies. Despite being sick at heart, I was also overjoyed in a sick kind of way – he was about 17-1/2 and by the time he was done dealing with this, I would no longer be required to provide a home for him – WE WERE FINALLY FREE!!!!
Since then, I have gone through an awful lot of grief. That was about 3 years ago. My little sweet son, we were so close, so loving, such a nice little family as he grew up (I was single, so it was him, his sister, and me, until years later when my third kid came along and I didn’t marry her father because he couldn’t deal with my son and all his issues) he and his sister and I did so much together and loved each other, and spent a lot of time as a family. I knew “something” was wrong with him, but once he was diagnosed with ADHD I figured that was it, and now it’d all be okay. [insert sardonic laugh] Not exactly.
Anyway, it was always very difficult to try to explain to people outside my home, even my closest family members, what really went on and what he was really like. My parents, usually my best support, still have a hard time seeing him as anything other than the sweet little grandson, possibly led stray in some way not MY fault, but not his fault either. He has conned them out of so much money, and shot bebes through their windows, and all kinds of stuff, but it is still hard for them to see him realistically. Now that I have grandkids, maybe I can understand, a little bit.
But it’s good to read the stories of other people who have raised children that can be this horrible, and who deal with the abnormal things we parents have to deal with. it doesn’t help my situation at all, but it helps my heart to know – to not be so alone! And I love facebook, because I also found out a cousin had similar experiences with her son – it is very hard to deal with all the “all you need to do is…” crap people give you when raising a kid like this, because everybody thinks they could have done better. It’s just nice to know that there are other people in the world who understand that no matter what you do, this is who he is, and – oh, I don’t know – if you are here talking about your child, then you know what I mean, I guess. Hmm, now will I be brave enough to hit “post” even though I’m almost entirely anonymous and for all I know nobody will ever read this? Hmm…
knittinjen, I’m glad you got couragious and hit the post button! There are a number of ladies here with disordered adult children, so you are in good company.
I just wanted to welcome you, and say I’m glad you are here.