"This is a journey no family would choose, and the outcome is unclear even under the best of circumstances. Here is one boy’s story.Before Oscar* got kicked out of his first preschool, he was upset about lunch. Not long into the school year, the 4-year-old expressed his displeasure with the midday meal by dousing his tray with milk. When his teacher brought him to the director's office to be disciplined, Oscar was unrepentant. He reached his tiny arm across the director's desk and swiped its contents onto the floor.It was already clear to his mother, Sarah, that something was off. Oscar's tantrums were nuclear; his disobedience was beyond correction. And he was so impulsive that when someone else's child climbed into a gorilla cage at the Cincinnati Zoo, Sarah was seized by terror—and sympathy. Given the number of times Oscar had broken free from her at the zoo and run off in search of adventure, it was sheer luck that he hadn't ever landed in a cage himself.Now 14, Oscar has been diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) and severe attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). He still throws tantrums when he doesn't like what's on the lunch menu. But when he runs off now, he sometimes comes home in a police car. His behavior is more self-destructive than criminal, but it tends to attract attention.Once, when Sarah took her kids—Oscar and his older brother plus their two younger sisters—grocery shopping, Oscar decided he'd had enough before Sarah had gotten through her list. She urged him to be patient. Instead, he ran to a nearby dollar store, where he raged to a clerk that he was going to kill himself by drinking bleach. The clerk called the police, and Oscar ended up in a children's hospital, where he was involuntarily committed as a suicide risk. Kids like Oscar are regulars in hospital mental-health wings. They're also overrepresented in after-school detention halls and juvenile justice centers—and, when they grow up, in jails and prisons. We see them on the news when they do something dramatically reckless, like climbing into a gorilla's cage—or when they commit an act of violence. The recent wave of school shootings has brought aggressive, impulsive young offenders to the forefront of public consciousness.So how do we keep explosive kids from becoming destructive, dangerous teens and adults? Armchair parenting experts tend to promote harsh punishment, arguing that even the most challenging kids will straighten up if given significant consequences for their actions: a good long grounding, say, or a strategic spanking. Many of us shake our heads at the overly indulgent parents who, we believe, allow their kids' behavior to escalate unchecked.But research reveals that, contrary to conventional wisdom, harsh discipline backfires when it comes to pathologically disobedient kids. The best way to keep them from ending up on the nightly news is, instead, a skill-building, problem-solving approach grounded in compassion.Experts in the so-called disruptive behavior disorders—which include ODD and conduct disorder, and which often accompany ADHD—say that instead of doling out punishment, we need to help these kids develop the coping skills and impulse control that aren't innate to them."It's only counterintuitive if you haven't been paying attention to the research that's accumulated over the last 40 to 50 years," says child psychologist Ross Greene, who founded the nonprofit Lives in the Balance, which advocates for changing the way we treat behaviorally challenging kids. "And that research is pretty compelling."https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201809/living-pathologically-disobedient-kid▶️ Donate Now: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ Sign Up For Our Newsletter: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletterYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 1. Donate: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 2. Newsletter Sign-Up: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletter▶️ 3. On YouTube: Subscribe, Click Notification Bell▶️ 4. Subscribe to the Freedomain Podcast: http://www.fdrpodcasts.com▶️ 5. Follow Freedomain on Alternative Platforms🔴 Bitchute: http://bitchute.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Minds: http://minds.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Steemit: http://steemit.com/@stefan.molyneux🔴 Gab: http://gab.ai/stefanmolyneux🔴 Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Facebook: http://facebook.com/stefan.molyneux🔴 Instagram: http://instagram.com/stefanmolyneux
It's a funny thing in life that when you criticize a group or sex, then people somehow think you are hostile or negative towards that group or that ethnicity or that sex.
And it's not the case at all.
You criticize people that you respect.
You criticize people from whom you expect Better, who have the capacity to improve and so on.
It is an act of love to provide constructive criticism.
It is an act of contempt to refrain from criticism.
Like you don't criticize a two-year-old's lollipop figure of a human being.
You say, good drawing. But if somebody claims to be an artist and is 15 and still doing the same thing, then you will, of course...
Give them some criticism. So, yeah, it's kind of funny.
Like, I put out this video, or two videos, I guess, which were an introduction to female evil parts 1 and 2.
And people are like, oh, you must hate women.
And it's like, no, quite the opposite.
I think that women are powerful and wonderful and have the capacity to do better as a whole.
Just as I think that men are powerful and wonderful and have the capacity to do better.
But it's funny how applying the same standards to women that you do to men is somehow misogyny.
Anyway, I believe in equality.
So I read this article from Psychology Today.
I'll put the link below.
And it really is fascinating.
I'm endlessly fascinated by the concept of agency.
Who gets to have free will?
Who gets to have agency in the world?
Who gets to be responsible for what it is that they do?
And the concept of female agency, because I was raised, of course, during the height of feminism in the 70s and 80s, and, you know, that women are equal to men, and women can do everything that men can do, including, I perhaps wrongfully assumed, have agency and responsibility.
So the reason I wanted to talk about this article is it's fascinating to see just how agency is stripped.
It's even more fascinating that it is in The magazine.
I mean, it's kind of pop psychology, but, you know, there are real psychologists who write and edit and so on.
So I could understand in a more generic publication, not looking at the roots of agency in these kinds of situations, I'm having a little trouble understanding how psychologists could miss this kind of stuff.
And again, maybe it just shows the propaganda.
Maybe it shows something I'm missing, but let's have a look.
at the article so the article is called living with a pathologically disobedient kid see already already you see we have the nullification of agency you're just if you are a mother and you have a pathologically disobedient kid you see it has nothing to do with you as a mother it has nothing to do with your choices as a mother it has nothing to do with the great missing Penis-trunked elephant in the room,
which is the father. Where is the father?
What type of man did you choose to have a child with?
You see, you're just living with this.
It didn't happen to you.
It just happens to you.
There's no agency. There's no choice.
So this is living with a pathologically disobedient kid.
You play the cards you're dealt, and you have no agency in the matter.
It's fascinating to see. The subtitle is, this is a journey no family would choose and the outcome is unclear even under the best of circumstances.
Here is one boy's story.
One boy's story. See, the story of the boy is completely removed from the choices of the mother.
Isn't that fascinating? So these are pseudonyms.
And it says, before Oscar got kicked out of his first preschool, he was upset about lunch.
Not long into the school year, the four-year-old expressed his displeasure with the midday meal by dousing his tray with milk.
When his teacher brought him to the director's office to be disciplined, Oscar was unrepentant.
He reached his tiny arm across the director's desk and swiped its contents onto the floor.
It was already clear to his mother Sarah that something was off.
See? Something was off.
What does that mean? It means that the mother is merely trying to manage a child that she had no hand whatsoever in creating and nurturing.
Now here you can see we start with first preschool.
So I don't know where that is, but he's four years old.
So he's four years old. Now psychologists know as a whole that there are genetic elements to every aspect of the personality.
And also, that personality is fairly set by the time you're about five.
So, he's 80% of the way, and probably closer to 90-95% of the way, to having his personality.
Because, while it's true that Picardoff appears to be at the age of five, we can assume that there is a descending level of influence, right?
So, the first six months...
Way more important than the last six months, right?
From zero to six months old.
Far more important than four and a half to five.
So 80, 90, 95% of his personality has been shaped partly by genetics and partly by his environment.
So why are they starting at the age of four?
Very interesting. Why are they starting at the age of four and not earlier?
Now, given that personality is largely genetic, doesn't mean exclusively, but there's no aspect of personality not influenced by genetics, then when you choose the father of your child, you are also choosing, of course, half the genetics of your child.
So the big five personality traits have significant genetic components.
And there's some choice and there's some environment and so on, but there's less choice and so on when you are a baby, right?
Obviously, right? No free will when you're a baby.
So, if you really wanted to try and understand what's going on with this child, you would start with his early childhood environment, and you would start off with the man that this mom, Sarah, chose as the father of Of her child.
But that doesn't happen.
Now, these guys have no excuse for not knowing this.
This is common knowledge in the field of psychology.
So why are they doing it this way?
Well, we'll figure it out as we go forward.
So Oscar was unrepentant, right?
Swipes the contents of the director's desk onto the floor.
So... It was already clear to his mother, Sarah, that something was off.
Oscar's tantrums were nuclear.
His disobedience was beyond correction.
You see now, beyond correction, the mother...
Can do nothing about it.
All she can do is try to manage this feral beast that the fates and the gods mysteriously placed in her environment that had nothing to do with her choice of the father, nothing to do with any of Oscar's early infant experiences.
Did he have a pair bond with his mother?
Was his mother going through stress?
Where's the father? Was he dumped in daycare at a very early age?
Was his mother a working woman?
Was he breastfed? Did he have skin-on-skin contact?
Did he have eye contact? Was he loved?
How was he dealt with when he was upset?
Was he allowed to cry things out or was he comforted?
Did he learn how to self-soothe?
These are all essential questions that occur in the backstory or the prequel to this article.
Well, do you think they're going to try and deal with any of this?
No, because you see, that would be to give the mother some agency and say that it is for certain that some aspect of Oscar's problems are to do with the choices of the mother.
Absolutely no question.
Because she chose the father of Oscar and she chose how to deal with Oscar when he was a baby.
Or maybe was she under a great deal of stress when he was gestating in her womb.
Right? None of this is figured out.
She's just dealt this crazy kid.
She just has to try and find a way to manage it.
She has nothing to do with it whatsoever.
Now that's fascinating when you think about it.
Because If the argument is that moms have nothing to do with how their children turn out, then there should be no such thing as Mother's Day.
Right? Because Mother's Day is saying, I love you, Mom, before the wonderful things you did for me as a child that helped me to grow into strong, resilient, happy, healthy, emotionally tough, and morally secure person— So, if all the good things that occur as the result of mothering means that you must love your mother, you must give her cards and flowers, and you must take care of her when she gets old because she was so wonderful, and look at all the love she gave you and all the wonderful foundation she gave you for life and so on.
But if, in this case, well, she has nothing to do with how her child turns out.
In other words, she might as well be a stranger living down the block as far as the effect that she has on Oscar.
Then how can we love mothers if they have no effect upon us?
And if they have an effect upon us, then we should love them for the positive effect and we should have issues with them for the negative effect.
That's just basic moral rationality and reality, which appears to be beyond this Psychology Today article.
So, now what happens is, instead of talking about the source of Oscar's issues, what happens is, We now get anecdotes about how terrible it is, and this is designed to give you empathy for Sarah.
Gosh, you have a really impulsive, crazy child.
How difficult for you, how tough that must be, my goodness, right?
So the article goes on to say, and he was so impulsive that when someone else's child climbed into a gorilla cage at the Cincinnati Zoo, Sarah was seized by terror and sympathy, given the number of times Oscar had broken free from her at the zoo and ran off in search of adventure.
It was sheer luck that he hadn't ever landed in a cage himself.
Right? So, instead of dealing with anything traumatic that may have happened to Oscar when he was a baby, maybe he was dumped in daycare or whatever, the only emotions we're given access to are Sarah's emotions.
Now, I can speak as a parent for myself that my daughter does not break free and never has broken free from me and run off in search of adventure.
Never. In fact, trying to get her to go somewhere else can be a real challenge because she loves to hang around.
She loves my company.
I love her company. And so, why does he want to get away from his mother?
You see, he's just off in search of adventure, right?
Why does he want to get away from his mother?
And we're talking low single digits here, right?
She takes him to the zoo.
Why, if he's bonded, right?
The children who bond with their parents want to stay close to their parents.
So why is he wanting to get away from his mother and go somewhere else?
So this, in fact, was not his issue, right?
He didn't climb into the gorilla cage, but she's worried.
Now that's the only thing that's given as an issue, right?
So we start off at the age of four, he douses his tray with milk, and then he swipes the contents of the director's desk onto the floor when he is supposed to be, quote, disciplined, right?
Now, why was he dousing his tray with milk?
If you don't have curiosity, you end up with punishment.
And that's the great horror of parenting throughout history.
If you don't have curiosity as to why your child is doing something, you must end up managing the effects of the behavior because you're not trying to find out the cause of the behavior.
If my daughter did something like that, I would be shocked.
I would be not appalled, but I would be like, wow, that's very much out of character.
What's going on? Now, usually when children are acting out, it's because they have a complaint, a significant complaint, that has not been listened to for a long time.
Why does he not respect any kind of authority?
How has he been treated?
Who knows, right? Because no one asks.
We go from four years old, where the issues are already probably embedded, to something he didn't even do at the Cincinnati Zoo, to now 14!
14! Talk about a hop and a skip and a jump through history, eh?
Now 14, Oscar has been diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder, ODD, and Severe Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, ADHD. He still throws tantrums when he doesn't like what's on the lunch menu, but when he runs off now, he sometimes comes home in a police car.
His behavior is more self-destructive than criminal, but it tends to attract attention.
So why is he running off?
Why is he running off?
So why is he still throwing tantrums?
There's no causality here.
It's just the way that he is, right?
Now, if the way that he is is entirely genetic, then his mother has responsibility for who she chose as the sperm donor, the half-genetic donor of her child.
If it is entirely environmental, then she has something to do as the primary caregiver for the first four years that remain a complete mystery.
Now, there are choices that he has at the age of 14, but if we say that his behavior is partly environmental and partly genetic, well, the mother has control, because there's no father that's mentioned here, the mother has control over both the genetics of the child and the environment.
So here's another example.
And now you see we don't ever ask Oscar why he's upset or Oscar why he's angry or try and find out what happened to him early on in life.
Right? We don't interview.
They don't interview the daycare teachers.
They don't interview, I guess, Sarah to find out what it was like.
They don't track down the dad and find out what he was like.
What they do is they need to keep you focused on sympathy for Sarah because Sarah, you see in this article, is the victim of a crazy, nasty, disobedient child.
She has nothing to do with it. She's just trying to manage it.
She just got strapped to the back of a wild bucking horse and is just trying to find her way through.
So the article says, Once when Sarah took her kids, Oscar and his older brother, plus their two younger sisters, grocery shopping, Oscar decided he'd had enough before Sarah had gotten through her list.
She urged him to be patient.
Instead, he ran to a nearby dollar store where he raged to a clerk that he was going to kill himself by drinking bleach.
The clerk called the police and Oscar ended up in a children's hospital where he was involuntarily committed as a suicide risk.
I mean, that's appalling and astonishing and he's going to kill himself by drinking bleach.
So the kid doesn't want to live.
Now, there's no context here.
You know, I just need to get through my list, Oscar.
No, I'm gonna go to a clerk and rage and talk about drinking bleach and so on.
And no history, no causality, nothing like this.
What is Oscar's relationship with his father?
What was his father like?
Is his father even in the picture?
Does he ever get to see his father?
See, two younger sisters The younger sisters have a same-sex role model in Sarah, right?
What is Oscar going to do when surrounded by girls and a woman?
And daycare teachers, preschool, right?
Daycare teachers, mostly overwhelming women.
Primary school teachers, overwhelmingly women.
Has Oscar ever had any access to a benevolent male authority figure?
Doesn't matter, right? Just won't even ask those questions.
Article goes on. Kids like Oscar are regulars in hospital mental health links.
They're also over-represented in after-school detention halls and juvenile justice centers and when they grow up in jails and prisons.
We see them on the news when they do something dramatically reckless like climbing into a gorilla's cage or when they commit an act of violence.
The recent wave of school shootings has brought aggressive, impulsive young offenders to the forefront of public consciousness.
Now, this is interesting.
Kids like Oscar They just end up in these mental health wings.
Now, the fact that the single biggest predictor for a negative life outcome is being raised by a single mother, and Sarah is, as far as I can tell from the article, a single mother, this is not unknown in psychological circles.
It's very well known. But you can't talk about it.
You can't discuss it because that gives women agency.
The most important... The thing that a woman can provide her children is not money.
It's not love.
It's not breast milk. It's not a roof over their head.
Fundamentally, the most important thing that a mother can provide her children is a father.
It's a father, particularly her sons.
It has been well known throughout history.
Women are wonderful at many, many things.
But raising boys in particular alone is not one of those things.
And so if a woman ends up as a single mother, it's either because she chose a bad man and left him because he was bad, in which case she's responsible for that, or she chose a good man, but she drove him away or left him despite the fact that he was a good man, in which case she's responsible for that too.
There's no way. And don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to erase male responsibility here at all.
But we've had so much focus on male responsibility.
That we need to shift the focus to female responsibility at some point if we want to actually solve problems.
Because saying, well, there's men too, and men make...
Of course men make choices. And the father of Oscar is morally reprehensible for having a child and then not being in the picture, as far as I can tell from the article.
It's terrible. Absolutely terrible.
Absolutely wrong. Absolutely immoral.
But we all know. Come on.
We all know that men are hound dogs.
We all know that men will try to have sex with just about anything.
I mean, there's a picture on Twitter...
Of a male toad attempting to have sex with a headless female toad.
I know that's a bit of an extreme example from the wrong genus and species, but men do not control sexual access in Western societies.
Women do. So men will try to have sex and women will say yes or no.
Men propose, women dispose. Men ask, women say yes or no.
So I put more responsibility on the woman for granting sexual access than the man.
There are some areas in which men have much more responsibility, but there are areas in which women have more responsibility.
Granting sexual access, particularly the point of reproduction, is to a large degree, not exclusively, to a large degree, it is the woman's job to say no to getting pregnant with men who are unreliable.
So... And that's funny too.
They do something dramatically reckless like climbing into a gorilla's cage.
But that's not what this kid did.
He's taking an anecdote and attaching it to this child.
Here we go. Now we go somewhere.
It's good, right? So how do we keep explosive kids from becoming destructive, dangerous teens and adults?
Armchair parenting experts tend to promote harsh punishment, arguing that even the most challenging kids will straighten up If given significant consequences for their actions, a good long grounding, say, or a strategic spanking, many of us shake our heads at the overly indulgent parents who we believe allow their kids' behavior to escalate unchecked.
Now here, you see, we're talking about something that makes no sense in the realm of psychology.
Psychology is generally about prevention rather than cure.
Cure or minimization of the damage caused by bad genetics or bad parenting, well, that's the job of the court system, the prison system, and so on.
That's not really the job of psychology because nobody knows how to turn a sociopath into somebody with empathy.
Nobody knows how to fix broken personalities if, you know, they're just way, way smashed up.
So, the question is, how do we keep explosive kids from becoming destructive, dangerous teens and adults?
Now, you see, we start with kids, not babies.
Start with kids, not babies.
It's very, very important that they have to start with kids, right?
Because you've just got these crazy kids.
You know, they're just pouring milk. They're sweeping stuff off the principal's desk or whatever.
They're climbing into gorilla cages.
They're just crazy kids, right?
No reference to infancy.
No reference to early childhood.
No reference to any of that.
No reference to the presence or absence of the father or the genetics of personality.
So here, we're not talking about prevention here.
We're not talking about, well, make sure that you're not too stressed when you're pregnant.
Make sure that you're in a good, pair-bonded, hopefully married relationship when you decide to have a kid.
Make sure that you have a child with a stable, peaceful, reasonable man, hopefully of a decent level of IQ. Make sure that you have a father in the child's life on a daily basis.
Make sure that you have enough resources to provide for the child and all that.
That would be a way to prevent all this from happening.
But no, what they're saying is, Once the children are all smashed up and their personality development is almost complete, how do we then stop them from becoming criminals as adults?
See? No causality on the part of the mother.
No agency. So, we're now talking about hitting...
Children who are destructive.
And, yeah, okay, so research reveals that contrary to conventional wisdom, harsh discipline backfires when it comes to pathologically disobedient kids.
The best way to keep them from ending up on the nightly news is instead a skill-building, problem-solving approach grounded in compassion.
So now you have to pour untold tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of professional resources into your child because, you see, you probably didn't choose the right father for your children.
Father's not around. You put your kids in daycare.
You hit your kids. You ignored your kids.
Whatever. I don't know what happened with this woman because, again, nobody's even asking this question even though in the Ralph psychology this would be the first question to ask.
Experts are in the so-called disruptive behavior disorders, ODD, conduct disorder, ADHD. Instead of doling out punishment, we need to help these kids develop the coping skills and impulse control that aren't innate to them.
Ah, interesting.
Impulse control. Now, of course, impulse control has significant genetic components.
And if the mom got pregnant, you see, with the wrong man, then she lacks impulse control.
She lacks the capacity to simply cross her legs and say no, or use sufficient birth control.
And don't give me this, one in ten thousand times it fails, no matter this, come on.
Single motherhood is way too common for this kind of stuff.
So, it's like saying everyone in World War I who died probably died of a heart attack right before they got shot.
It's like, yeah, I'm sure a few did, but it doesn't explain their body count.
So, if the child is lacking impulse control, then we look at the parents first, and we say, did the parents lack impulse control?
Well, the mother, I would imagine, did, since there's no father.
in the child's life the father would have lacked impulse control because he again had sex without consequences without being in the child's life and so on so we have two parents with very poor impulse control and now you see what you're doing is you're saying gosh what a mystery that this child lacks impulse control we have two very short parents I can't quite figure out why this child isn't taller very odd very interesting so Why haven't the kids developed coping skills and impulse control?
Why not? Genetics plus environment.
Again, I'm not a determinist at all.
But we do need to take...
To give people choices, often we need to hurt them emotionally.
I mean, that's been the case with me.
I'm sure it's been the case with you. To give people choices, they're going to need to be upset.
So if you were to do something like, say, well, how did these kids end up this way?
Then, of course, what you would do is you would be, I don't know, harsh, but pretty honest and direct with the mom and say, okay, where's the dad?
What happened? What happened in his early childhood?
Did you go back to work after six weeks?
Was he dumped in a daycare? Did a surrounding, sort of a revolving series of relatives and strangers take care of your child?
And so on, right? And that would make her upset.
But what it would do is it would actually do something to help prevent this from recurring in the future, right?
Right? And they're not doing that, right?
They're not doing that. They're saying, well, should you hit kids who are already disobedient?
Well, the question is, why? Why aren't they listening?
So this is child psychologist Ross Green.
He says, it's only counterintuitive if you haven't been paying attention to the research that's accumulated over the last 40 to 50 years.
And that research is pretty compelling.
So, yeah, you don't punish them.
You try and help them to figure out how to develop coping skills and impulse control.
But you may be fighting genetics and the programming of early environment.
Because you see, you get a choice if you have knowledge.
And the best thing is to know what you can affect and what you can't affect.
So parenting outside of real starvation is not going to affect how tall your child is.
So if your child ends up short, you don't sit there and say, well, I should have parented better so my child would be tall.
You recognize that that's a factor of genetics and you focus on other things.
And as a parent myself, I'm scanning my daughter for genetic aspects of personality, for things that she has common with myself, with her mother, and other people in the family, right?
In the extended family.
And that doesn't mean that I don't attempt to help her remediate some of the challenging behaviors she may have inherited, but it means that I don't hold her 100% responsible for her own personality formation any more than you would hold a child 100% responsible.
For how tall he became.
I mean, again, you can work with the child that you have and recognize that the child has some agency and some non-agency.
And if you say it's 100% agency, that's kind of abusive, right?
Because if the kid, let's say that the kid is bored in school, you say, well, it's your fault.
It's like, well, no, maybe the kid's just really smart and school is...
It's preternaturally boring.
So if you say it's 100% the kid's responsibility, then you're putting way too much agency on the kid.
If you say it's 0% the kid's responsibility and it's all X, then you don't actually give the child the chance to develop free will.
Article goes on and says, Oscar lasted all of a week.
At his second preschool, the kids were expected to take an afternoon nap or at least lie down quietly.
He refused. And it wasn't just nap time that irked him.
He refused to do any of the school activities.
He'd simply get up and run away.
Sarah enrolled him next in a preschool design for kids with special needs.
They couldn't handle him either. Either and neither could the fourth one, which specialized in, quote, difficult kids.
He was too much even for them.
So began Oscar's journey from school to school.
His explosive tantrums and flight risk status closed doors everywhere he went.
He wasn't any better at home.
Sarah, a social worker, who is a single mother, couldn't take her four kids anywhere for years because Oscar would always wander off.
Now that's interesting.
Let's go back up here.
Because she talks about kids, right?
Oh yeah, Oscar and his older brother plus the two younger sisters, right?
So we have two boys and two girls.
Now only one of the boys is a problem, at least that's all that's mentioned, right?
So that's interesting. So the first question that I would ask Sarah, which is why I'm not a reporter at Psychology Today, the first question that I would ask Sarah is, do your boys have different fathers?
Do your boys have different fathers?
Did the older boy, if they had the same fathers, the older boy was the father around for the early childhood of the older boy but then was gone by the time Oscar grew up, right?
That's a very interesting question.
In my own family, my brother had access to my father for a couple of years and then my father left very shortly after I was born so I had no access to my father and that produces some different outcomes that you need to be aware of so you can make better choices.
So, if the older boy, who's not described as a problem, if he's from a different father, then they're not full siblings and there could be some genetic elements.
And I would ask about the personality of the father, of Oscar's father.
If they are from the same father, I would say, well, did the older boy have more access to the father for the first couple of years of his life?
Because it's just an older brother.
It could be eight years, it could be ten years between the two.
So there could be a father who was the father for the older brother who then wasn't the father.
For Oscar, right?
It's important stuff. Okay, so then there's more.
He wandered off, right?
If you pushed him, he'd blow up.
He'd break things and tear the house apart, Sarah says.
Also, she's a social worker.
I'm going to go out on a limb here.
That generally means lefty.
That generally means exposed to a lot of feminism.
That generally means male hostile.
In some ways, again, it's not 100%, but, you know, If you've got a guess, that's what you do, right?
So he injured a teacher's aide when he was nine.
So when Oscar refused to do his schoolwork, the aide got in his face and yelled, right?
Which is exactly the wrong thing to do, according to these guys.
Oscar performed a signature move, swiping his arm across his desk.
One of the flying school suppliers hit the aide, who called the police.
Handcuffed, taken to juvenile detention, back of a police car, and so on.
Ended up leaving the school.
Being yelled at. Oscar's strongest behavioral trigger is being yelled at.
Huh. Why?
Why is his strongest behavioral trigger being yelled at?
Was he yelled at by his mother when he was little?
Was he yelled at by his siblings?
Was he yelled at by his father?
Again, Half the genetics come from the father.
Father absence is a huge trigger for this kind of behavior.
And nobody asks about father absence, right?
He's broken. Mom says so.
He breaks stuff, right? You say you can't do so.
He's broken so many computers and iPads that I've stopped buying them.
Why is she getting all the money?
These things are not cheap.
How is she getting all these computers and iPads?
It's just strange. So, he hits himself.
Alright, so, okay. Flare-up happened one Friday this spring around midnight.
Sarah confiscated Asuka's video game controller to keep him from staying up all night.
So he doesn't have any problem paying attention when he's interested.
Oscar erupted, screaming at her and storming through the house, slamming doors.
He was still raging when she fell asleep.
The next day, when he'd calmed down, she conducted a post-mortem.
Did you break anything last night?
She asked.
No, he said.
Why was the hammer out this morning?
I don't know.
Did you hit anything with it?
No.
Well, I hit myself in the leg a couple of times.
Did that accomplish anything?
It's kind of snarky, right?
I released my frustration, and now I have a huge bruise.
You know, sometimes you have to do what I say.
That's no fun.
So, just giving him these petty little Hallmark card lectures, you know, sometimes you've got to do things you don't want to do, right?
It doesn't help the child. It does not help the child at all.
Right? That's not a post-mortem.
The post-mortem is, where did you learn this behavior?
Right? I mean, if you teach the child Japanese, you don't wonder where the Japanese came from.
It comes from teaching him Japanese.
So, has he experienced or seen any violence as an infant?
See, let's say that Oscar's biological father was violent, and maybe that's why she left him with four children, right?
She left him and took four children.
Well, see, if the child has seen the father be violent towards the mother, that imprints upon the son in particular, because what we're doing when we're little children, what we're doing when we're toddlers and so on, is we're scanning our environment to look for sexually successful strategies.
S-S-S, right? Sexually successful strategies.
Because the one thing we know for sure by being alive is that our father successfully impregnated our mother.
And so a child looks and scans his environment and says, what works sexually?
Basically, how did mom get pregnant?
And his genetics, who don't know anything about options and history and freedoms and so on, says, well, whatever my father did, that's what I should do, because that's what worked.
That's what got my mom pregnant.
So the father that you choose for your son doesn't just give him the genetics, but also gives him, oh, this is what you do for sexually successful strategies.
So if the father was violent, then the child immediately knows that violence gets you women.
And assumes that that's the only thing that gets you women if there's no counterexamples, right?
And if you have a crappy marriage with a violent husband or a violent boyfriend, it's not likely that you're going to have any decent people around, so there's no counterexamples, right?
So, the first question, again, if you were actually interested in solving problems rather than blaming little boys and excusing women, is you would say, did he witness any violence at all when he was younger?
Now, if she says, Sarah says, yes, my husband would beat me or something like that, it's like, well...
Now we know where he gets it from, because if a man who beats a woman fathers a child, then genetics are not moral, you understand?
They don't care about the ethics or the non-aggression principle.
They care about, they're about as moral as a photocopy, right?
They just care about reproduction.
They care about reproducing themselves.
And so the genes say, okay, well, if you've got to hit women to reproduce, because that's the first thing I saw, was a successful sexual strategy called hitting women and having babies with them, well, then I'm going to be violent, because that's the best chance for spreading my genes, right?
And again, we're just talking about genetics and evolution and so on, right?
All right. So...
Then we talk about some of Oscar's positive stuff.
He can be charming, funny, full of wit.
His IQ is high.
When he's interested in something, he studies it incessantly.
He has an encyclopedic knowledge of his favorite subjects, World War II, Star Wars, the gene editing tool, CRISPR, and, of course, video games.
So, yeah, he's interested in combat and in war.
This may be because of early exposure to violence, maybe because of just a boy's nature, or maybe he lives in Europe and needs to get ready for what's coming.
But yeah, he's a smart guy.
Now, we do know that social workers on average, again, could be very different for this, we know that social workers on average, not particularly smart.
And not as bad as teachers, but not particularly smart, like highest IQs or like physics and philosophy and so on, right?
So yeah, he's very smart.
And maybe his mom isn't.
And that's a really, really tough match.
Particularly, see, if the mom doesn't take any responsibility for her own actions, it's peculiarly and particularly enraging.
Yes, I know it's personal for me, but that doesn't mean that it's wrong.
It just means I have direct knowledge of it.
But when your mother doesn't take responsibility for her actions as an adult, but blames you as a child for your actions 100%, that is so hypocritical and so manipulative and so enraging.
That is really, really tough to keep your temper when the teenage hormones hit and you get big and strong as a teenager.
So, yeah, that's kind of rough.
And here, the mother is not saying, in this interview, right?
The mother is not saying...
Well, I looked really harshly back at my own history.
You know, I chose a violent guy.
He's not around anymore. Oscar saw physical violence or maybe had a violent boyfriend.
Again, I'm not saying this is true. If it was true, she would look back and say this kind of stuff.
And then she would be taking responsibility and saying, you know, I chose badly.
I chose the father badly.
I chose to put him in daycare.
I may have lacked knowledge, but it doesn't really matter.
The effects are the effects. So then you stop blaming your kid and you apologize to the child for the genetics and the environment that you placed him in or placed in him that have significantly influenced his subsequent behavior.
What she does is she say, well...
I don't know. It's all you.
It's nothing to do with me.
I just have to try and live with this crazy, violent child.
How are you supposed to give responsibility to children without taking responsibility for yourself?
I mean, this is a very common habit, but it's really reprehensible.
So he's creative and likes to draw and so on.
He cares deeply about people.
And he's got a friend.
Let's see here. Not long after the Hammer incident, Oscar blew up at his mother because she wouldn't let him buy new computer games.
He smashed his iPad and ran away from home.
He ended up in a nearby park, pretended to pass out.
He made up a story about being seriously ill.
Right, so... Here's the interesting causality, right?
Not long after the Hammer incident, Oscar blew up at his mother because she wouldn't let him buy new computer games.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Come on. Come on, people.
How can you? How do people type this stuff?
It's amazing to me. Don't you actually want to solve problems?
Well, if solving problems means giving women responsibility, sometimes it appears that outside of Sharia, it's pretty tough to solve those problems.
But Oscar did not blow up his mother because she wouldn't let him buy new computer games.
You know, I've said to my daughter, no, I don't think you should get X game because it's very time consuming.
I'd rather you read more and we have a conversation about it.
So, you see, the causality is, well, she just wouldn't let him buy new computer games and that's why he blew up at his mother.
No other influence, no other option, no other thought.
It's just immediate causality, no deep background.
But if everything's immediate causality, then there's no such thing as psychology, because psychology is trying to figure out deep roots and fundamental thoughts and opinions about yourself and reality that occur early on in life.
Now, Sarah, right, you'd think these things would teach him a lesson, but that's not how he thinks.
She says he doesn't think, oh, these are the repercussions for my actions and I won't do it again when he comes out of hospital.
It was like, life goes on, I wonder how many more times this will happen.
Will it happen when he's 30?
He doesn't think.
Nothing to do with his environment, nothing to do with his father, nothing to do with anything that happened early in his life.
Nothing. So, anyway, they go into some stuff about conduct disorder, the differences between ODD and conduct disorder.
And, yeah, these kids do cause a lot of problems.
And a lot of social resources are poured into trying to deal with all this kind of stuff.
But let's skip down a little bit here.
You can read, of course, the article in more detail.
But, yeah, there are some physiological issues.
And what I found fascinating here was...
They do come up with some stuff as well.
So, the 2010 study, low autonomic responses in 15-year-old boys are predictive of adult criminal behavior, while heightened autonomic responsiveness appears to be a protective factor, right?
So, you know, the cool as a cucumber kind of stuff, right?
Like if you don't get particularly stressed about breaking rules or breaking the law or anything like that, then, yeah, that makes sense, right?
Oscar was in the third grade when a psychiatrist told Sarah, kids like this can go down one of two paths.
One path, he said, led to crime, drug use, and addiction.
The second entailed regular therapy and constant vigilance and keep them off the first.
So here you see a psychiatrist who's telling Sarah a very surface and partial truth, right?
So my argument, again, I'm no psychologist.
I'm telling you this amateur guy on the internet.
It's just my particular thoughts.
But my argument would be to say to Sarah, listen, you chose the dad.
You control the environment.
He has a lot to do with you. And if he's got problems, you need to take ownership for them.
And that way, ownership transfers from the parent taking ownership to the child.
If you want a child to take ownership, you have to take ownership yourself as a parent.
There's no other way about it.
There's no shortcut.
There's no other possibility.
If you want your child to take ownership, you must take ownership yourself.
Now, he didn't say you have a lot to do with how your child has turned out and an apology and taking ownership yourself is the best way to transfer ownership to him and to bring you guys closer together.
Because if you, quote, engineered through lack of knowledge, through inattention, through whatever, but if you, quote, engineered part of his personality dysfunction, either through the father or the environment, a combination of both, then you inflicted this personality on him to some degree.
And so you need to take some ownership for that.
And if you take ownership, he'll take ownership.
But if you give him 100% ownership for things that you chose, he won't respect you, he won't listen to you, and things will just get worse.
So he didn't say that. What he did say was, you've got a real problem here, and you're going to have to really work hard to solve it, right?
So, Sarah was stunned, right?
So this is a male authority figure who's telling Sarah a little bit of the truth about her situation.
A little bit. Like 5%.
What happened?
Sarah was stunned, says the article.
Oscar had seen a string of different therapists by then, but this one was the first to tell her explicitly what the future held for kids like her son.
Right, so he's telling her, how does she react to being told the blunt truth about her son?
A tiny, tiny sliver of truth about her son.
Well, what happens when you tell a woman like this some little bit of truth?
She says, It was scary and heartbreaking, and I cried, and my mom cried, and we never went to see him again.
And that's what's heartbreaking.
She gets a little bit of truth about her son.
She cries, her mom cries, and she just never goes back to the guy who told her a little bit of truth.
She says, he was just being honest.
It wasn't his fault. But I just wasn't at the point where I could hear that yet.
He made it sound like this was going to happen.
That's always stayed with me.
That path is there, and Oscar could go down it.
Now, what's interesting here, she says, I cried, and my mom cried.
Not, I cried, I called the father, and he said X, Y, or Z. Or, I cried, and my mom and my dad cried.
Right? So, just I cried and my mom cried.
She says, but I just wasn't at the point where I could hear that yet.
Not, I made the wrong decision in rejecting the first male authority figure who told me a little bit of truth.
I was wrong to do that and it hurt my child.
She's like, I just wasn't at the point.
I wasn't ready. It just, you know, the agreement with his statement did not happen to me.
I mean, I don't even know how to say any of this.
And she wants her son to take responsibility for his actions when she gets a little bit of truth and runs screaming.
Amazing. Just amazing.
So, oh yes, sorry, the father does show up, right?
Sarah's father, a former principal, teacher, and coach, was a harsher disciplinarian, but in recent years, he softened his approach.
So that's Sarah's father, not the boy's father.
He realized that Oscar's challenges were not a discipline issue and that yelling at him did nothing to correct his behavior.
I started to think, I've got to stop being a disciplinarian and stop being a grandfather, he explains.
He's since shifted his focus to Oscar's many good qualities and tried to be as effusive with his praise as he was with his criticism.
Again, everyone's focusing on Oscar and not on the mom and the choices, right?
So, yeah, a loving, supporting environment with firm boundaries gives kids like Oscar their best chances, experts say.
Even the best possible family life can't guarantee a good outcome.
So, there's some issue with Ritalin, and you can get into the details about that, but he says, this is Chief of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, So there's not much that can be done clinically for psychopathy.
The good news is the vast majority of kids with disruptive behavior disorders have disordered reactive aggression.
They misinterpret environmental cues and react inappropriately.
Psychiatry can help those kids.
So they're talking about some of the brain issues.
An overactive amygdala reacts too strongly to perceived threats, making it harder for the prefrontal cortex to intervene.
So you get your fight or flight and you have like a quarter second for your prefrontal cortex to slow down and intervene.
And that's really tough for kids.
They kind of act out.
There doesn't seem to be an intervention and all of that.
So they're talking about a neurological disorder, right?
So this guy's saying, when a kid blows up and tears apart his classroom, that's a symptom.
It's evidence of a breakdown, a non-optimal central nervous system that's not operating the way evolution intended.
And just as we wouldn't revoke our child's iPad privileges for running a fever, we shouldn't punish kids for behavior that's a symptom of a neurological disorder, right?
So, again, this is back to, well, this kid is just born with an odd brain, and the mom just has to find some way to deal with all of this, right?
But again, where does the genetics of the brain come from?
The genetics of the brain comes half from the father.
And where is the father?
Where is the Father? That is not particularly explained.
In fact, it's not even mentioned, right?
And there was a bit of glimmer of hope towards the end of the article.
I'm afraid it didn't quite pan out.
So they talk about medication and so on, but there's a Woman here, who is, her name is Carruthers, and she's a clinical psychologist at Child Mind Institute in New York.
Now, she says she spends as much or more time training parents and teachers how to respond to challenging kids as she does training the kids themselves.
It can be tricky to get everyone on board.
She says parents expect to bring their kid to therapy, not bring themselves to therapy.
Now, that's true from what I've heard, that a lot of parents would just kind of dump a kid on a psychiatrist and say, fix the kid, right?
Fix the kid, right? So, I'm sitting there going, wow, okay, so the parent...
And the parents' issues may be transferred to the kids and so on, so the parents have to deal with self-knowledge and look at their history and so on.
So I was quite interested or quite excited hearing this quote from the woman, parents expect to bring their kid to therapy but not bring themselves to therapy.
But, she goes on to say, if, sorry, but parents and teachers are really the first line of defense.
There's only so much she can do to teach coping skills in a session after all.
To make lasting changes, kids have to practice those skills in the context of real-world triggers at school and at home, with the help of adults who can reinforce them.
Individual therapy alone hasn't been shown to be effective in the long term, she says.
Contextual interventions along with medication have been the most helpful.
So, yeah.
It turns out that the therapy is really just trying to, again, train primarily moms, I assume, on how to deal with crazy difficult kids that just popped out, like the kids of Zeus from their forehead, just popped out of nowhere.
And nowhere in this entire article, as I mentioned, nowhere in this entire article, is there any mention of Oscar's father.
of the family structure of any connection or contact he might have with his father and as the child of a single mother I will tell you this straight up that if you look at your mom and there's no father in the picture what do you do well what you do is you say either You chose a bad man to be the father of your children.
In which case, why should I respect your judgment now?
Particularly if all you do is blame him, as single mothers often do, overwhelmingly often do.
All you do is blame the man.
You won't take responsibility for choosing a bad man, and therefore I have no father.
Well, I exist, I suppose, but I have no father.
And so, Mom, if you chose a bad man and won't admit that that was a mistake, why should I listen to your judgment about anything else?
Why should I listen to you telling me to take responsibility for my life when you won't take responsibility for choosing the wrong man or a bad man to be the father of your children?
Won't do it. Won't do it.
I'll take responsibility myself where I can, but I have no respect for you.
Or, of course...
She chose a good man, your single mom chose a good man, to be the father of her children, in which case, where is he?
Where's daddy gone? If he's a good man, how bad were you, as a wife and a mother, to drive him away?
And do you take ownership for that and say, well, I was difficult, I was naggy, I was problematic, I was unfaithful, I was drinking too much, I was going out partying, I wasn't taking care of his household, I wasn't...
whatever! Is there any ownership for either choosing a bad man or driving a good man away?
Now, if there is no ownership on the part of the single moms, there will be no respect from the children.
The daughters may mimic respect, The sons may pretend respect from time to time, but there will be no respect whatsoever.
Until and unless the single moms start taking responsibility for the broken families that they're producing.
I guess you can drug the kids.
I guess you can manage the kids.
I guess you can pour hundreds of millions of dollars into trying to remediate the effects of this lack of responsibility But you solve absolutely nothing.
