[Raindropvampire]

I hate to write off a child but my little cousin has no empathy. The last straw is killing his brother's hamster. If you try to talk to him about it he finds it hilarious because of the noises the hamster made and the fact that it's been two weeks and his brother still cries about it. He's 7 but has always been like this. I remember when he was 3 and I caught him trying to drown my brother's kitten. He could not grasp the concept of it was wrong. When I explained it scared the kitten and hurt it he said "So it doesn't hurt me." I thought he didn't understand because he was so young but it's become painfully clear this isn't the case. He honestly doesn't care how his behavior affects anyone else. If it doesn't hurt him or inconvenience him then it doesn't matter. The most concern he showed for the hamster or his brother is that he got grounded. When he broke his brother's arm there was no remorse or I'm sorry. To him it was just funny. When his mom said he couldn't go to a movie and he spit in her face and threatened to stab her if he didn't get to go. When she started crying he just rolled his eyes and kept yelling about the movie. He had no reaction to her being upset. His mother has to keep a lock on the outside of his door to keep him from wandering around the house at night. He's tried to smother his baby sister(4 months old) and he will pinch her and leave bruises. He thinks this is the greatest thing ever because of the way it makes her cry and her face turns purple if she cries too hard. Has anyone here ever had to deal with a child like this and if so what did you do? I've tried to suggest counseling but his mother won't hear of it because she's afraid he'll get taken away. I've tried telling her that she has two other children to worry about and he's a danger to their welfare. He has been responsible for 4 trips to the hospital for his older brother. One of them was pretty serious but his mom lied about what happened so nothing was done. I'm just at a loss as to how to deal with this child or his mother.

[Contrast]

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.

You can show the boy what an empathetic person would normally do in these situations, you can teach him how to react in a normal manner..

but deep down, you cannot teach him how to feel it.

I am curious to why seeing a professional was not the first priority for you guys.
It's almost like standing around waiting for more to come.

[nicoleflynn]

Does his mother not understand that killing animals is a HUGE red flag (not to mention his lack of empathy)......He is headed towards more serious trouble, if there isnt an intervention. She is obviously i denial. All you can do is talk to her; maybe give her some material on serial killers (as outrageous as that sounds), she needs to understand how dangerous this situation is. I am surprised social services wasn't called regarding the hospital situation.

[Leed]

This child needs professional help, and Im not kidding. Children like this are the ones that turn into serial killers/murderers. There is something seriously WRONG with this child, and if it isn't dealt with now, there will be serious consequences later.

Try to convince the mother of this child that she had BETTER get him some professional help NOW before it is too late. I'm not kidding. Too many kids slip thru the cracks and end up like Charles Manson any of the other serial killers. Don't let this child end up like this!

I hope you can get this mother to do something about it. If you can't, I think I'd call Children's Protective Services. This is serious. God bless and please take care. Hugs, Lee

I was pretty much all of that, other than the more extreme acts of violence (arm breaking, smothering, & killing animals). The problem was that I was being abused/neglected. I'm sure that this kid is raising up red flags, but I'd personally be more concerned about where these behaviours were adopted from. No child is born to be "evil". No child just learns to take life with such ease. Children are, first & foremost, mirrors. It takes a combination of mental scarring & poor control on the parental units' part in order for this to happen. If the parents aren't responding to your concern, there is a reason. Who's to say that some of the injuries to the other children weren't caused by the parents & blamed on him? I'd call social services or something similar. It's a difficult decision, but if his behaviour can be reversed & he can be retaught/renurtured, the best time would be now. Before his hormones kick in & he has a chance to get worse.

[Raindropvampire]

The only time that I know of that child protection was brought in was when I caught him hurting the baby. I made an anonymous tip because I was worried he'd end up killing her. As far as I know nothing ever came of it. His mom is afraid if she takes him in for therapy he will end up locked up or taken away. She is terrified of him but doesn't want to lose him. The only abuse I know that he's been around is his dad beating on his mom. That stopped when he was about 14 months old when his dad went to prison for throwing her out of a moving car. I just wish I could force her to get him help.

[Contrast]

Lol like father like son. (jk)

I don't know how nonsensical and idiotic the mother of this child can be, she is asking for more and something will happen - it's predictable and you don't need to be a professional to know that.

At at least the age of 5, children are attuned to basic morality and understanding of their actions including the contemplation and scrutiny of consequences/results and if they will affect others.

Another possible issue is that at his age, a lot of children would tend to avoid (most of the time) doing anything mischievous because of the fear of the consequences, since there is little-to-no consequence (to which I'm assuming), he is running over them like the Alpha leader.

I know that psychiatrist to patient confidentiality is firmly secured under the oaths and regulations they are meant to follow and the only time any issue would arise is when there is imminent danger to himself or others.

[Raindropvampire]

I've tried telling her. I'm bipolar and my mind can go dark. I've told her some of the things that I've told my T (well when I had one). I truly think she knows he's a danger to her other kids. That's why she's convinced he'll get taken away. His brother wants to be at my house all the time and since I've run out of meds....he's a good kid but I can't handle change right now. I feel horrible. I'm stressed to the point of breaking and I just want to shut down so I've had to tell him right now he can't come over. But I hate leaving him where he's at too. And there's nothing I can do for the baby. I'm not capable of taking care of one anymore I know it. I think my only recourse is just to sit back and when he hurts one of his siblings just keep calling CPS. I had truly hoped when he started school they'd see something was wrong and make her get him therapy. She circumvented that by homeschooling him.

Originally Posted by Leed

This child needs professional help, and Im not kidding. Children like this are the ones that turn into serial killers/murderers. There is something seriously WRONG with this child, and if it isn't dealt with now, there will be serious consequences later.

Try to convince the mother of this child that she had BETTER get him some professional help NOW before it is too late. I'm not kidding. Too many kids slip thru the cracks and end up like Charles Manson any of the other serial killers. Don't let this child end up like this!

I hope you can get this mother to do something about it. If you can't, I think I'd call Children's Protective Services. This is serious. God bless and please take care. Hugs, Lee

Excuse me...I did not, as a child, and still to this day not possess the gift of empathy. I wish that I was able to place myself where another human stands and say, "Oh, so this is your pain, what distresses you. I understand now.", but I do not. I can not even understand or feel my own emotions, so it makes it quite difficult to have empathy for yours. Rather than chalk this young man up to being a future serial killer, why doesn't the family have him checked out for a mental health concern. I have Borderline Personality Disorder. We are notoriously apathetic. And yet, I have never killed an animal, but my really good friend in school used to kill the neighborhood cats. He is now teaching at USC. Go Trojans!

[junkDNA]

yeah, calling this child a future "serial killer" is basically just implementing all the stereotypical bull **** that people with mental illnesses deal with on the daily

[eskielover]

I wonder how much of that that child is going through might be a genetic issue.....mate with poor genes & then continue in the breeding line....human or animal.

It's obvious that the mother has no self-esteem because she picked a guy who abused her, then she allows her child to walk all over her & abuse everything around him without anything more than grounding.

She's dealing with a dead hamster now.......in this childs later life, it sounds to me like she's going to be dealing with a lot of human lives that will have been taken because she refused to take action at this point in his life.

Sounds to me like she has been abused in her younger life or she wouldn't have such low self-esteem & would not be willing to do nothing to protect herself or take care of her son just for fear he might be taken away.

Got news, a child of 14 months has learned a whole lot from the environment he was around.....they absorbe & understand more than we can even imagine.

My daughter at 10 months was walking......somehow, my keys came up missing.....I am sure she threw them in the trash because I never did find them....so I put a new set of keys together. I came home from school & put my keys down in the front room.....went into the kitchen & heard my keys jangling......I yelled at my daughter to put my keys back in my purse & leave them alone (10 months old). I heard her running down the hall. I thought my purse was in the front room so I went running down the hall after her.....there she was standing at the end of my bed.....putting MY KEYS into MY PURSE that was laying on my bed......that was at 10 months old.....so you can only imagine what that little boy learned by the time he was 14 months.

Originally Posted by eskielover

I wonder how much of that that child is going through might be a genetic issue.....mate with poor genes & then continue in the breeding line....human or animal.

It's obvious that the mother has no self-esteem because she picked a guy who abused her, then she allows her child to walk all over her & abuse everything around him without anything more than grounding.

She's dealing with a dead hamster now.......in this childs later life, it sounds to me like she's going to be dealing with a lot of human lives that will have been taken because she refused to take action at this point in his life.

Sounds to me like she has been abused in her younger life or she wouldn't have such low self-esteem & would not be willing to do nothing to protect herself or take care of her son just for fear he might be taken away.

Got news, a child of 14 months has learned a whole lot from the environment he was around.....they absorbe & understand more than we can even imagine.

My daughter at 10 months was walking......somehow, my keys came up missing.....I am sure she threw them in the trash because I never did find them....so I put a new set of keys together. I came home from school & put my keys down in the front room.....went into the kitchen & heard my keys jangling......I yelled at my daughter to put my keys back in my purse & leave them alone (10 months old). I heard her running down the hall. I thought my purse was in the front room so I went running down the hall after her.....there she was standing at the end of my bed.....putting MY KEYS into MY PURSE that was laying on my bed......that was at 10 months old.....so you can only imagine what that little boy learned by the time he was 14 months.

WHAT? Really, 10 months! Not 9 and 3/4 months or 10 months 12 days? No kidding. Wow.

[junkDNA]

it amazes yet frightens me so much to know that people can assume a whole life about someone based on one post,

what gives?

[nicoleflynn]

If you read anything about serial killers, you will see they started out the way this kid is behaving. It doesnt mean he WILL be a serial killer, but the indications are there, and need to be dealt with now. This isn;t a child with a mental illness (it sounds like; only a psychologist can diagnose), but he has HUGE problems.

[junkDNA]

ok, i see ur correlation, but seriously though?

do MOST ASPD people (to whom i assume we are referring to as "psychopaths" and "sociopaths") end up harming someone else?

no.

serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, et cetera were rare characters, severely abused and severely mentally ill. homicidal maniacs, even. but just because the media has blown these cases up so largely in the picture of society as to what to LOOK OUT FOR in your kids, or STUDY UP ON THESE BEHAVIORS, cause u might have them.... it doesn't mean that every kid that has inflicted harm on someone else is going to murder people

hell, i broke my neighbors arm when i was a pre-teen. did i feel badly? no. am i a sociopath?

you ****ing judge.


all i'm really trying to say is that we shouldn't LABEL this child with a diagnostic name before we know the true story in detail, a luxury we cannot find here, because OP is not the child, OP has her own perceptions about what happened, and we are all just stigmatizing it all and lumping it into one broad category labeled

POTENTIAL SERIEL KILLER.

[Leed]

Just to clarify things I DID SAY to get the child PROFESSIONAL HELP!!! Sheeesh.

[junkDNA]

sorry.

it was early...

i got spazzy

[beauflow]

I think this is a concern validation for seeking treatment and to be under the belief that if left untreated in some fashion that it will only get worse.

Yeah it may be statically speaking that serial killers harm and kill animals, have no empathy and so on.. yes i will shout out loud that statics are not an individual... but still, plus this child is 5; it MAY be a little easier with treatment and to "nip these problems" while they are young..

I like Eskilover's post-- she is explaining on how much babies pick up, with her own experiences of witnessing it -- there are plenty of studies out there to prove what Eskilover is mentioning.. Kids brains are like sponges they adsorb what they have around them

[junkDNA]

Originally Posted by beauflow

Kids brains are like sponges they adsorb what they have around them

kids can also turn their sponge off subconciously and create alternate realities........

i did it.

as for the stereotypes and stigmas implicated in this post-

yes the issue at hand is very serious and should be looked at by a professional immediately.

people on this website who seem to judge outright and blatantly degrade people who post simply because they hurt in a different way than U do...

just irk me.

[Perna]

Originally Posted by Raindropvampire

The only abuse I know that he's been around is his dad beating on his mom. That stopped when he was about 14 months old when his dad went to prison for throwing her out of a moving car.

The child definitely needs help. It could be the father has psychopathic tendencies (as opposed to sociopathic which are "learned") and he has inherited them, who knows. He definitely needs something he isn't getting from just his mother.

Even if he DID have some sort of psychopathic "gene", the chances are slim he'd be doing this **** if his mother wasn't doing something blatantly wrong. Not trying to be the asshole here. (Well, not that I really mind, but still...)
You don't have to have a sense of empathy in order to not be a danger to other people. And many people WITH compassion are a danger to the people around them. This is certainly the case with the mother because she clearly cares for her son so much that she doesn't really give a damn what he does to her other children or to other people in the world.
Either "nip it in the bud" while he's young & can still learn at the very least how to acknowledge a conceptualization of human suffering, or be an idiot & find out what happens next just because you're SCARED. Scared? Yeah, so are your other kids, but apparently they should be treated as lesser beings in this situation.

And I'm not even going to get into the whole "omg, every heartless person is a serial killer lying in wait" stuff because that is so delusional even I can't give it the liberty of a well thought-out response.

[junkDNA]

not to pick a nerve with anyone but,

i was under the impression that something like ASPD is NOT genetic? factorered in more by nuture, and role models, and environment

Psychopathy & ASPD are sliiightly different. ASPD is a learned set of behaviours, though some say it can also have genetic factors. Though I don't understand how this could be differentiated if you were raised by said ASPD parent?
Psychopathy is associated usually with a more extensive set of symptoms that also go into general cognition, not just as a response to stimuli/interpersonal interaction, as is the case with ASPD. Most psychopaths have ASPD, but most people with ASPD aren't psychopaths. I'd grab research but I don't have it handy right now. Evidently there are a few signals in the actual structure of the brain of a "born" psychopath. Something about the frontal lobe. And there is a larger split inbetween the hemispheres; so they do not converse as much to perform functions necessary in generating compassion, fear, or anxiety. And smaller areas of the brain that are normally associated with emotions/memories.
Regardless... He can't be diagnosed with **** all until he's 18, so it's laughable that everyone's calling him a psychopath with such a limited perspective on the situation. I'm only responding as far as I can see the situation through the post itself.

[junkDNA]

thank u for that explanation. it makes a lot of sense to me-

psychopathy is more of a personality TRAIT while
ASPD is a personality D/O.

emotional regulation, the hippocampus (memories), etc, is called the limbic system. it controls our sensations of emotions, decision making and "reward" centers. its a strange thing to read about. i used to research a lot of psyhological things as well as neuropsychology. i spent a lot of time in college doing this. i eventually was forced to drop out because i was then comitted.

Well... Psychopathy is more extensive & far-reaching as far as the behaviours/thought processes go. And it's a lot more specific. ASPD is just a personality disorder with no associated structural abnormalities & is a bit more broad in its symptomology. But yeah, it's really splitting hairs to see the intricacies of it as far as this post in particular goes.