I understand that sometimes children come down with an illness in the teen years that changes their personality or adds a lot of other challenge---and I mean separate from adolescence itself.
I understand that sometimes children are exposed to traumas despite the parents' best efforts.
I understand that sometimes children's pediatric mental problems take a turn for the worse in adolescence if the kid's problems are not very responsive to medication or the parents have done a poor job presenting the need for medication and setting the foundations for medication compliance.
I understand that if a person, child or not, gets a bad knock on the head or other brain damage, it can permanently screw up personality.
But *most* of the time when I see genuinely bad teens or teens with severe enough conflicts with their parents to make them bad, the root cause of the problem is the parents' failure to teach empathy when the child was young, especially by example, and the parents' failure to apply attention, affection, empathy and compassion to the growing child/teen through *all* the child's ages and stages.
Someone I know who got shipped to a program, who shouldn't have been but was having some *minor* "bumpy road" adolescence issues, had parents who would fly off to different parts of the country in different directions with their jobs, and with essentially no advance notice tell this child, "Oh, you're going to have to find someplace to stay this weekend, because we won't be here." Once, when the parents did this, this child ended up staying at a friend's house--not because of invitation by the friend, but because of compassion by the friend's family in taking the child in, for *THREE WEEKS*!
In the parents' defence, did they perhaps think their adolescent might prefer arrangements made by the child over whatever arrangements they made? Perhaps. But it's vital in parenting for your child to know you care and you're watching out for them, even when they struggle and push your kisses away with an, "Aw, Moooommmm!" A child of any age always has to know that Mom and Dad want to hold and treasure and love it and that its ventures out into the world are the child's *own* idea, despite Mommy and Daddy really wanting to hold on but lovingly letting go and watching with bated breath.
A child that's taught empathy will have a certain fundamental respect for other people and their property. That all *comes* from empathy.
You never need to teach an empathic child not to be a thug or a thief---all you have to do is put the question in terms of, "How would you feel if someone did that to you?"
The crucial thing broken in sociopaths and psychopaths is *empathy*---and a lot of times it's not because they always lacked the capacity, but because it wasn't *taught* by example and careful nurturing of the trait at the critical ages.
A child with something neurologically wrong may have unusual problems with impulse control and judgement, but those are frontal lobe functions, and the frontal lobe doesn't physically mature in anyone until the early twenties. Better impulse control and judgement is something a child naturally grows into as its brain finishes developing.
One of the absolute stupidest things these Programs do is deprive a kid of music. They ought to be playing complex instrumental music for all the childrens' waking hours and making music classes for making music mandatory. Music works critical frontal lobe functions and fosters and speeds development. There are no guarantees that it will improve everything, but it's one of the best tools we've got.
It's not prayer that keeps a kid from growing into a thug and a thief (although private, silent prayers can't hurt).
It's competent parenting.
And if you don't know how to teach compassion, and empathy, and work the areas of the brain that foster impulse control and judgement---if you're a parent, it's your job to *learn*, either before you have a child or while your child is young.
It's not *luck* that raises an empathic child. It's skill.
Jesus said, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." (Which, of course, is also the primary principle of Wicca, just in different words.)
Empathy. An empathic child will not hurt even total strangers by thuggery or thievery, beyond the childhood ages that are normal for that, and absent mental illness.
Compassion. A child treated with compassion by her parents in formation and application of the household rules will not have more than *rare* technicolor rages over the household rules, absent mental illness. When the rules are formed, applied, and explained with empathy and compassion on the part of the parents, children and adolescents *mostly* follow them.
The Programs methods of what they make daily life like for the adolescents in their care are barbaric and antiquated as regards treatment of mentally ill persons. They do mentally ill persons more harm than good.
To the extent that they foster suspicion of informers rather than empathy, they're bad for the juvenile delinquents, too.
If you want a juvenile delinquent to not turn into a lifelong sociopath, you have to take advantage of your last chance to teach empathy.
*My* child will not grow up to be a thug or a thief because she has already firmly developed the capacity for empathy. She's learned the trait. It doesn't just go away absent serious actual *damage* to the brain.
If you don't understand child development and what makes thugs and thieves what they are, then of course it looks like "something that could happen to anybody" and random Acts of God which kids grow up which way.
If you *do*, then you know that when your child has a firmly-seated, well-developed sense of empathy, you're out of the woods for sociopathy or psychopathy.
And that impulse control and judgement improve for just about everybody by the time they reach their early twenties just because of the completion of physiological development of the frontal lobes. So that part--for an empathic kid that gets in scrapes from bad impulses and bad judgement--just takes time. Although you can foster quicker and better development with activities targetted to that part of the brain, many of which may seem to bear no relation to the tasks you're trying to improve---they just happen to "live" in the same neighborhood of the brain.
If you know what the hell you're doing, raising a good kid is no accident.
Timoclea
