How to treat and educate high-risk children

A psychologist who specializes in trust, delusions and dark personality traits reveals the truth about symptoms of mental illness in teens.

Recently, during a morning walk, I overheard a friend describing the havoc a "problem child" had wreaked at an after-school club her six-year-old son, Jake*, had attended.Jake had known Beth* for several years.The two were previously in preschool together.Even when Beth was four years old, Beth was terrifyingly violent.She screamed and yelled, hit and bit, regularly sending Jake and his other classmates home with bruises.Unlike other children, Beth never seemed worried about hurting others, and she had no qualms about getting into trouble.Once, Beth punched a classmate and then smiled at the adults in the room as if to say, "What are you going to do about it?"

Both Betlyu's parents and the kindergarten staff did not know how to deal with her behavior.And the questions continued.Before long, the conversation with my friend Beth became so heated that the after-school coordinators gave her access to the entire gym, where the club was held regularly, and isolated all the other kids in the nearby library for their safety.

My friend sent numerous emails and polite requests to the staff to better manage Beth's behavior, to no avail."[I] got an acknowledgment that the child's actions were not right, but instead of a plan to intervene, it ended there," she said.She was inclined to pressure Beth out of the club.But before she did that, she wanted my advice.She knew that as a social and personality psychologist, I've spent the last 20 years studying people with dark personalities: psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism, sadism.I thought what should he do?

Although my work focuses on adults, these traits do not appear suddenly as we grow and mature.Our characters may develop throughout our lives, but most people still recognize aspects of their personality, defined as patterns of thinking, feeling, and behavior that have existed since early childhood.

When it comes to darker traits, psychologists have shown that we can measure "callous-unemotional (CU) traits" in children as young as two years old.For children of this age, diagnostic questions are generally asked to caregivers if the child appears to be non-emotional, does not mind hurting others to get what he wants, and if problems do not bother him.These traits, like other aspects of personality, are on a continuum.Everyone lives somewhere, from the very top.too.But research has shown that high levels of CU in childhood increase the risk of high levels of psychopathy in adulthood.

The word "psychopath" is loaded.It conjures up images of serial killers like Ted Bundy, or imaginary monsters like Hannibal Lecter, and the (mistaken) belief that the condition cannot be completely cured.When applied to children, such a label can be destructive and self-indulgent.For these reasons and many more, psychopathy is not a term psychologists use to describe children.At the same time, these behavioral patterns cannot be ignored.

There are known mental disorders that reflect similar patterns of behavior."Conduct disorder" is characterized by persistent patterns of aggression, lying and serious rule breaking.While CU traits alone are not enough to diagnose a conduct disorder, practitioners can determine if a child diagnosed with a conduct disorder has "limited prosocial emotions" -- clinical parlance for similar patterns of ignoring others.Ghey, by a consultant forensic psychiatrist during the murder trial.