Behavioral Disorders In Children - Are They Avoidable?
Posted on February 22, 2008 - Filed Under Women
I have met half a dozen children rumored to be suffering from such disorders, and on all of these occasions I was interested to note the parents’ behavior was exactly cloned, one from the other. In every case the parents were attentive, well meaning and affectionate, passionately devoted to their children.
In two cases, the children had brothers and sisters who were very well behaved, but in both cases the problem children were the youngest in the family. I am not suggesting this disorder is a result of over affectionate parenting, I am merely pointing out that many of these children seem to come from secure and comfortable surroundings.
In one case, the father was a well contracted local plumber with considerable resources to pay for private professional advice. His son was a nightmare, whose anti social behavior was nearly always put down to the mother’s inability to control her children.
In fact, I thought she displayed remarkable calm and handled the child’s awful temper as well as could reasonably be expected. She locked him in the car one day beside the pavement we were standing on, when he refused to allow her to finish her conversation with me. He had begun by pinching her legs through her skirt and eventually started punching her when she would not cut her conversation short and get into the car. His mother gently put him into the front seat and asked him quietly to wait for two minutes, but when he swung the door open violently she closed and locked it, and perhaps that was too confrontational for him.
This small six year old boy applied his boots with some force to the dashboard of the car and before his mother could open the door to pull him out he had totally destroyed the stereo panel, snapped the locks on the glove compartment and smashed the electric window switches. He writhed, kicking and screaming, in the road, before attacking a nearby tree still in the early stages of planting and surrounded with chicken wire fencing. The tree was bent double to the ground and the wire fence uprooted and stuffed into a hedge before his temper was spent.
I watched a documentary on this distressing condition a little while later and a local teacher was advising parents to just apply one short, sharp, slap when such tantrums arose. The little boy I had seen throw this temper would not even feel a slap - short, sharp or otherwise, and I think if he did, he would retaliate with tragic results for himself and his mother.
However did such conditions appear in our society? When I was a child absolutely nobody would behave in this way. One occasionally heard of a child being a little naughty and the very naughtiest of children were considered to be those who stole apples from local orchards or sweets from the Post Office counter. Naughtiness never manifested itself in evil, or if it did then it must have been very well covered up because we never heard about it.
Food additives have been blamed for much of the problem but I really cannot see the connection. In my time a dozen friends have joined me in consuming a gallon or so of fizzy drinks, accompanied by about three tons of sugar and junk food throughout a day spent on the beach or on a picnic; nobody ran riot afterward, as far as I can remember.
Someone surely has to find the solution to the breakdown in our social structure that causes such calamitous behavioral patterns in young children. An alarming thought is that the criminals and law breakers who rose from my own generation came from the social cross section in which I myself was raised. If the grossly dysfunctional young adults who are around today are allowed to propagate, what chaos will be the outcome?
Jan Gamm writes reflections on life with an emphasis on world travel. She has lived in many countries and traveled extensively in the Far East, the Middle East, America, South America and throughout the South Pacific. She writes for fun and for money whenever she can manage it.
Tags: Behavioral, disorder, dysfunctional, tantrums, temper
Related Posts
- Exactly What Is An Eating Disorder
- Natural Remedies And Practices To Help You Fall Asleep
- Poverty Needs To End For All People
- Play It By Ear (or Eye)
- Term Life Insurance - A Short Guide
Comments
Leave a Reply
