Charlie Taylor, expert advisor to the British government on behavior, has suggested that nursery schools identify toddlers showing early signs of aggression so that they can receive specialist intervention.
The Daily Mail reported:
Taylor said nurseries should be able to spot children with behavioural issues and recommend them for specialist tuition to provide them with boundaries and social skills.
Mr Taylor said: ‘Any child can go off the rails for a bit and what we need is a system that is responsive to them and helps them to get back on the straight and narrow.’
He said it was easier to tackle poor behaviour among young children because habits were less ingrained.
”˜If you can see it coming when they are two or three or four or five, then that’s when we can intervene,’ he said.
Read: How a bad ‘un can be spotted at the age of TWO — and should be sent to ‘discipline institutes’ at five, says behaviour tsar, on DailyMail.co.uk.
When I first read this article, I thought Charlie Taylor knew what he was talking about. Many Lovefraud readers who discovered that their children had sociopathic traits have told me that they saw callous, unemotional and aggressive behavior at a very young age. Other readers who became involved with sociopaths who already had children sometimes saw the same thing—kids who were lying and manipulating almost as soon as they could talk.
What is to be done with these children? One of the most important points in Dr. Liane Leedom’s book, Just Like His Father?, is that the sooner you start working with an aggressive child to change his or her behavior, the better your chances of success.
Riots in the United Kingdom
Charlie Taylor made his comments upon publication of a report that he wrote on Britain’s alternative education system. Taylor analyzed the schools and services offered to students who were expelled from mainstream public schools, often for behavior issues.
The report was commissioned by the government in the wake of the riots that shook the country for five days in August 2011. Mobs roamed through 10 different boroughs of London and several other cities, including Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool. Approximately 3,100 people were arrested. According to the Guardian, the rioters were overwhelmingly young, male and unemployed.
The Guardian also published a series of articles written by sociologists analyzing what happened. To summarize some of the findings, the newspaper wrote:
Many interviewees identified deprivation and inequality as root issues. Some spoke about the lack of work opportunities and access to education, as well as the educational maintenance allowance cuts. Some believed that getting an education was the key to the golden gate, but a year after graduation they were still struggling to find work. For others, also out of work, a university degree had never been on the cards.
Many of these young people may have grown up in chaotic homes, developed mental health or personality issues, failed in school, and become stuck in destructive behavior. How is society to solve these problems?
Reactions to the suggestion
The best way to address these issues is to start young—the younger the better. So I thought Charlie Taylor’s suggestions had merit. That wasn’t the view of some commentators in the UK media.
Here’s what Sonia Poulton, a columnist with MailOnline, wrote:
According to Mr. Taylor, nurseries are a fertile ground to spot and tag the troublemakers so that they may receive anger management classes before they enter formal education at primary school level.
Sometimes, in daily life, it pays just to laugh at foolishness. As I did – long and hard – when I first heard this recommendation. I can’t take it seriously and I hope other citizens of the UK will respond in the same way. Frankly, it simply does not warrant consideration on any reasonable level.
Read Anger management for two-year-olds? The State wants control from cradle to grave, on DailyMail.co.uk.
Sonia Poulton’s comments reflect the vast ignorance of many people in society about personality disorders. It’s the belief that at the core of our beings, we’re all basically the same. It’s a belief that gets us in a lot of trouble.
Some of us are radically different, even as toddlers. When children are born with a genetic predisposition towards sociopathy, or born into a terrible home environment, the best chance we have for saving them is to intervene as soon as possible. If nursery school teachers could refer troublesome toddlers for special attention, it may help them grow up to be productive members of society, rather than rioters.
Here’s a link to the story of Wayne Dumond, the man I am talking about. There was plenty of evidence to keep him in prison, but for political reasons he was released. That story makes me not have a lot of confidence that I can keep Patrick in prison next parole hearing.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_12/012643.php
Oxy
You mentioned how moving so much when a kid was hard on you and that your summer of chaos caused grief b/c you lost your roots.
I agree. One of the worst aspects of leaving my spath was having to leave a place that I’d made my home. It was a place where I felt I belonged. To rip that from me was part of my trauma. I still haven’t recovered that part, very difficult to establish as sense of belongin in the city, older/solo woman. City was great to escape and disappear into so was great when I had to hide. But it requires affluence to become visable; in the country affluence helps but relationships/events are better “glue”. My loss of a place to belong was a MUCH greater loss than “him”.
Milo,
that’s very interesting that you said there is almost no “autism” in the Amish community. After I figured out what spaths were, I thought that an Amish community might be the safest place to live, with the least # of spaths. Talk about gray rock!
I believe that one of the core components of psychopathy is that they have no values. Just like infants have no values. It’s as if they are people who are still in a child like state. So everything they see, they envy and they want. This is normal for infants until they imprint the values of their parents and their social group or community. Then they develop their own unique identity based on their values, their likes and dislikes as well as their inborn temperment.
Spaths are able to mirror us because they don’t have this type of unique identity.
So what happens when the economic engine of a society is based on a continuous flow of merchandise transactions at an ever increasing pace? We use advertising to convince people to buy more and more things. We have to convince them that they value/want what we are selling.
People are brainwashed into thinking that they are unhappy without the latest greatest. This creates an environment of constantly shifting values. New styles, new attitudes, new ways of being and thinking. It’s like the spathification of an entire culture.
We grow accustomed to that kind of life, but you have to wonder what we’ve given up. Maybe, serenity.
The Amish rejection of “new” things could offer that serenity where you know what you value and it’s the same as it always was, so it feels “true”, not shifting sands.
I think the Amish have decided what’s important is life, livelihood, family and the continuity of that. Whereas, our spath society is all about discontinuity: new start, new flavor, re-invent yourself. I heard that the most powerful word in advertising is “NEW!”
We moved to town when my egg donor married daddy, but we went to the farm every weekend. So I wasn’t too far gone.
When I was in the middle of 2nd grade we moved to another town,, and I went to a little school across the state border where he was the basketball coach. A kid there beat me up every day but I never told, until she eventually broke my jaw and so it became apparent I was hurt.
My abuse was really never acknowledged, and I was told to pity her because she was one of 21 kids living in a 2 room dirt floored shack. Okay, I pity her…but that didn’t make it right for her to hurt me every day for God knows how many weeks before it got found out.
Then after a year and a half we moved to another town and another school, so I started in my 4th school by 4th grade. We did stay there for several years though, but just when I was really part of the community there (though the farm was “home”) danged if we didn’t move again!
I graduated HS where I didn’t really know the kids at all. No lasting friendships there.
I was very very attached to my grandparents and to the farm, more so than anything else…or any where. Leaving here, fleeing here was very traumatic. Now that has happened though, I realize that a PLACE is just that, a place. A house just bricks and sticks.
One of my neighbors lost her big home in a foreclosure and she still grieves over it. Her house is bigger and nicer than mine and mine is 4 bed 3 bath, but she is always knocking her house as not being nice. Not like the house she lost. But so what…it is a beautiful nice home on a nice place. After a while living in the RV I got to where I kind of liked it. No house work….easy to keep up. and Movable if I wanted to.
Sky, Amish life is not as free of stress as you might think. There is a lot of push to CONFORM and anyone breaking out of that status quo is severely chastised emotionally. They even argue about how much “flash” you can put on your horse harness and still be “plain.”
Sky ~ I have found that. I do live with a really great group of Amish neighbors and community members. Not all are like that though, greed and power struggles there too.
One thing that Amish have a great deal of is patience. Where most people today not only need “new” things, they need them NOW. If you ever rode to town in a buggy you would understand the need for patience. They are not in a hurry and feel that things will work out or come there way in God’s time. That is what I admire the most about them.
Oh, yes Oxy, now every teen’s buggy is specially outfitted with a giant sound system. It is so funny.
The child I know born to uncaring parents is in a bad way right now, and people who work for the city know about him but think he is fine. He is a year old and can only grunt to communicate, doesn’t know how to play with a ball, bites everyone and pulls his own hair out. 🙁 Normal baby behavior? NO! You guys are moms, what should a child be doing by one year?
Perhaps the Amish like their way of life but also take it for granted in a way. Until you’ve experienced a spath, up close and personal, you really don’t know what avarice and envy are.
Once I realized what my spath was, I could see through his facade and I saw a life that was driven by pure unadulterated envy, 24/7 for 55 years. It was something that had been unimaginable to me and it looked grotesque. The spath lives every second of his life comparing, calculating, plotting, and resenting. I’m not exaggerating when I say, every moment of his life – except perhaps when he is sleeping but I doubt his dreams are any different.
Normal greed and power struggles in normal people are THE REASON he can hide his true nature. We assume that what we see in him is just a normal degree of that. When we assume that we are SO SO wrong.
Unfortunately, our society is driving more and more people into spending more and more time in just that kind of rat-race lifestyle. It can only get worse unless we make it better. I think that the Amish founders must have figured that out. Now their descendents may no longer remember why it was so important to their ancestors.
He should be starting to stand and maybe take a few steps…he should be making sounds and maybe a few words, da da…at least. (ma ma is more difficult for them to say so he will say da da first) He should be able to hold a sippy cup and eat finger foods.
The biting and pulling out his own hair is very unnerving and he should not be doing that for sure.
What is your relationship to this child, Near?
Giant sound system? LOL ROTFLMAO Battery operated of course. That’s RICH Milo! absolutely Rich!
We used to have a pretty large Amish community around here, about 90 families, but they starved out and left after a few years. Not sure where they went. I used to see them at the sale every Saturday morning, the women selling cakes and cookies. There are some “modified” amish that live near here that use trucks on the road for business but other wise live electricity free, in a log house, etc. I met them when they contacted us about oxen, and they were training a young steer to pull a cart to sell veggies out of in town during the weekends.