Living with a sociopathic child or the child of a sociopath. Some advice for parents.

Living with a sociopathic child is a lifelong endeavor, that can be a major stress and sorrow both for the parent, and the child alike. There are many elements that contribute to this: failing to understand each other leading to the lack of trust; the child being the constant reminder of how his or her sociopathic parent acted; and the actions of the child himself, which may cause some social problems for the parent. I will try to sum up my thoughts on the natures of these problems, and try to give some advice to the parent.

Firstly, nobody is born a devious manipulating “monster” that grown-up sociopaths typically are. These are the things that a sociopath learns during childhood. And these traits won’t really change once into adulthood. There is no way that you will be able to “therapy the child to love you”, the results will likely be the exact opposite. We are dealing with a biological condition here. Dealing with the situation, solely relies on the level of trust that you will be able to establish with a sociopathic child. You will have to be able to position yourself as an ally, rather than another enemy – and go from there. I firmly believe, that the potential negative impact of the sociopath on the people that he will meet in his life, as well as harm to self, can be really decreased via parent activity. So, I will try to give some background info on causes of problems, as I see them, and some possible things to do.

The childhood of a sociopath sucks on many levels (sorry, no other way to put it). A sociopath would likely come from a household that is dysfunctional on some level: with being abandoned or neglected by the father as the most common case. Not being able to form social bonds naturally, a sociopathic child would likely be bullied at school. Sociopaths can't comprehend and are incapable of violence without a clear tangible purpose, so the reasons for them being bullied would completely escape them.

As sociopaths can't naturally form in their minds a cause and effect relationship between doing something that is perceived by others as bad and receiving a negative stimulus, they don't respond to punishment normally. Any punishment that they may receive is seen as an act of senseless aggression. And furthermore, as the person delivering the punishment would not see a normal emotional feedback, they are more likely to intensify punishment in hopes to incite this feedback. But a sociopath is simply incapable of such a feedback and this situation may well spiral out of control. And as the positive stimuli don't really work either, such a child is likely to get totally demotivated, leading to study problems and delinquency. Forcing such a child to apologize for something or demand remorse from him or her is also seen as an act of emotional violence.

Having essentially the same emotional needs as any child, dealing with all of this may be very hard and consequently sociopaths are suicidal and are very likely to inflict some form of self-harm. Such a child is likely to adopt very early a mindset of "the whole world is against me" and will be very hesitant to ask anyone for help and always try to rely only on him or herself. This in turn may lead to petty crimes, as doing so may seem as the only reasonable way of getting something they may need.

So, what do you do? Some things may be hard to swallow, but I hope you give it a shot. I’ll try to sum up some of things that worked or did not for the cases that I know of:

·       A sociopathic child absolutely needs a “safe zone” to get away from all the stuff that is going on in his life. So some place that nobody can enter, unless invited by him is absolutely critical. By doing that you will appear as an ally, who understands him.

·       You need to make it crystal-clear that you will not punish him for whatever he does, or for what other people say he did. This goes double for school: you should absolutely disregard his grades. If you are to come to a parent-teacher conference, and whatever they say, take the child for some ice cream. And pretend that you do not care about whatever. That is how you get trust and instill the sense of security.

·       The only goal for going to school for the sociopathic child is to attempt to socialize. But that would be the source of constant grief for the child because of many reasons. Social acceptance is one of the biggest issues at that age. So giving him some tools to help out with this would make sense. You should buy something that he can share with kids: something that they like. I am not talking about the new iPhone or a PSP, but something cool for group activities, like board games or whatever the kids play together with these games. So getting a crowd around him would help a lot with his self-esteem. I am unconvinced about hobby clubs’ merit, but this may surely work if the child is the one to choose it: so give him some options to choose from.

·       Moral/ethical issues. “Normal” ethics and rules and religious commands simply do not apply to such a child. Although it may seem otherwise, sociopaths are born extremely rational and logical. And they will have problems doing something or following rules that do not seem logical to them. The only thing that would apply is the internal moral code that many sociopaths actually have. One way to go around this is explain to the logic behind some important rules. I.e. lying to neighbors may be beneficial in the short term, but is detrimental in the long term, because when you would need something important, you would not get it.

·       Understanding the motivations. As I wrote above, sociopaths are extremely logical and rational. They won’t do anything without a clear purpose/goal in mind. I.e. the purpose of saying mean things to you or lying is to get you off their backs or avoiding immediate punishment. And they world typically know exactly why they did what they did. If you are even somewhat successful with points 1-4, you should be able to ask motivational questions directly. Though I would recommend that you do it in the most unemotional and logical way possible. Such questions could be: “What was the purpose/goal of you doing XX? Why doing that was important to you? What other options of getting what you needed did you consider? Why did you think that acting the way that you did was the best way to do it? et c.”

This the post too long already. So if you have questions on this, I’ll follow up.