This is more common than most know. Their sociopathic behavior could be caused by many things, developmental imbalances in neurochemical from birth due to parent ingesting drugs or alcohol during pregnancy or deep emotional issues. Or, a combination.

Your first instinct to love is correct, but have you ever heard of "tough love"?

Additional psychoactive drugs can exasperate as well as help, but careful diagnostics and counseling need be done WHENEVER such treatments are incorporated in adult and especially child treatments for behavioral issues.

I have a friends who adapted crack babies, and they are now 10 years later brilliant motivated amazing kids, so such dysfunction is not the rule for such children.

Kids are smart. Smarter than their parents and overseers in most cases. They search their environment very thoroughly for resources. They know how to use their parents for such if they can find their weaknesses and capitalize on them.

If they know you will not discipline them appropriately they will continue their behavior until that resource is no longer worth their trouble.

They likely feel powerless and are compensating by controlling the immediate environment. That and emotional anger coloring all their acts can seem evil.

Protect yourself and others as you would from any such invasion of your safety and security. If you don't, someone else they act out towards might just do so with deadly force, like a neighbor with a gun or an armed police officer.

If you truly love them (and that is very lucky for them) teach them the impact of their behavior on the real world. You might save their lives. That is a truly loving act when you think about it.

ZG

I'd have to say the parent needs to take some responsibility here. Yeah the kid smashed his windshield in but where was the parent when he was doing it? Then he did it AGAIN??

I know you can't watch your kids 24 hours a day and mine has done some dumb stuff as well but we as parent's need to start taking some responsibility for our kids actions.

It's all well and good to smack the child but who's smacking the parents?

seriously the kids realize they can do what they want that is a habit the so called medical quacks will reinforce. i was into alot of bad stuff when i was young but then my grandfather reminded my mother how well switches worked on her and guess what they workrd on me too. inoticed that the generation of kids that came out after corporal ounishement was removed from local schools had hell of alot more discipline problems.

Originally posted by dgtempe
Anyway, they woke up at 4:30 am this morning and started throwing things

I only saw this thread today, and I only read your posts (it's quicker and it gives me an understanding of what is happening), so sorry if this was already posted.

To me, the most noticeable thing was the above quote.

Children need more sleep than adults, and I was reminded of that maybe two or three months ago.

I live near a school for the 5th and 6th grade (and I think now up to the 9th), for kids usually between 10 and 13 (or up to 16, if they have 9th grade classes), and one day, when I was walking back home on my lunch hour (I work some 100 metres away from home ) I heard two kids talking. One of them was complaining of feeling too tired, because he had too many things to do, with the classes, some after school activities and the studying, so he was complaining to his friend that he could only get 10 hours' sleep each night.

My first reaction was to think that it was strange, after all I only sleep six hours every night (seven now that I'm enjoying my holidays ), but then I remembered how things were when I was a kid, and I also remembered that the older we get the less sleep we need.

So, the above quote makes me think that there is something really wrong with them, I don't know at what hours they go to bed (here in Portugal we usually go to bed relatively late, I think it's normal for kids to go to bed around 10PM), but they should sleep around 10 hours, and not awake at 4:30.

One of the possibilities that I see (and I am not a doctor) is that there is something worrying them, or maybe there is something that is exciting them during the day and making them more alert.

I hope you and your son find a solution fast, I think that if they keep on behaving like that some more years things will probably turn very bad.

PS: another thing I thought while I was looking through the Merck manuals (my primary source of medical information), and I don't think this was referenced in your posts. For how long have the kids being with their father? Were they always like this? Was there any change in their sleeping habits or location?

Send them 2 kids to live with me for a while they will be angles when i send them back.

I think your thinking of an adult and not as a child.

The idea of everything you want is different to a chid then it is for an adult.

when your nine, you don't care if you have medical coverage.


Do they have structure? Do they have rules, does your son actually initiate discipline?

Kids need that most before all else. Not being spoiled. But kids feel loved when parents set boundaries, and keep the rules.

I mean this kindly, not an attack, but it may be your son is a pushover. I understand the stress. But if my kid deliberately smashed two windows, I wouldn't be curled up on the floor, I would be making sure his life was hell and he didn't see daylight for awhile.



YOur son may be falling for the same toxic path by giving kids whatever they want because he feels guilty for a broken family.

This never works, and you end up with bratty rotten kids.

In fact, if you adopt an older trouble child, they TRAIN you to not fall to the tempation of spoiling them, but to set rules and boundaries and stick by them, and to give a strict structure.


Kids act out hypothetically.

What their actions say, is: No one cares about me and what I do, why should I care about them?

And the action screams: I need attention.


[edit on 19-8-2009 by nixie_nox]

I have two nine year olds and they are not "dicks" or brats or anything else. They would not destroy a store, run around acting like spazzes and certainly would never break a car window.

Though, they have been raised in a loving home with two parents and neither of us have been or are on drugs.

I expect my kids to clean their rooms, vacuum the upstairs, clean their own bathroom, bring down their dirty clothes and empty the dishwasher. They also fold and put away their own clothes

They do not get allowance or paid for this. They are a part of the household, get their clothing and food bought for them and a roof over their heads. They get to do sports, gymnasts and arts.

I don't open a can of whoop ass on them and I don't beat on them. they have been swatted at times and they have lost privileges at times. They had their doors taken off the hinges and taken away when they kept slamming them. That stopped the door slamming

So, not all kids are bad. My kids friends are pretty sweet too. Again, they have loving stable families who enforce rules.

I don't know what to tell you to do. It sounds really really messed up and I cannot imagine dealing with such a thing. I do believe kids can be born missing something and I hope that your grandchildren were not. That it is an expression of their childhood so far and can be corrected. If they are truly sociopaths, I don't know what I'd do