Tips for parents: how to deal with childhood fears and nightmares | Child health

Our expert is psychologist Yulia Konovalova .

Parents shouldn't worry too much about childhood nightmares. This is common to all children at a certain age to a greater or lesser extent.

At the age of 4-5 years, every third child shows minor sleep disturbances - be it shallow and interrupted sleep or nightmares. But any traumatic events in a child’s life - a sudden incident during sleep (loud noises, a fall), moving to a new place, conflict with parents or teachers - immediately affects the quality of sleep.

As a result of some event, the child may begin to wake up at night, have difficulty falling asleep, or have restless dreams. Which, naturally, affects his well-being.

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How can you identify psychopathic children?

Eric Smith. At the age of 14, he killed a 4-year-old child, thus deciding to “take revenge” on the whole world.

For a long time, in most countries, children and childhood were perceived differently than they are now. In social relations they were small adults, capable of working in the fields and factories. The downside is that the children still had insufficient life experience, so they could not be full-fledged “actors” of the community. It was possible to teach the fidget about life through disciplinary hard work and a reinforcing paternal slap on the wrist. If a child who joined a bad company took the path of robbery and robbery, then they treated him the same way as an adult. He could spend the rest of his life in hard labor, or even lose it altogether in a noose.

Experts began to think about whether children can be psychopaths not so long ago - since the middle of the 20th century. The reason for this was a series of brutal murders committed by teenagers with particular cynicism and in this case not inferior to the crimes of adult maniacs.

Outbreaks were recorded in almost all developed countries of that time: Great Britain, USA, USSR, etc. This led experts to the question of how, in “well-fed” societies, where there is no need to gnaw out a piece of bread with a knife in your hands, manic behavior arises among adolescents.

Kipland Kinkel - a 15-year-old teenager who shot his parents and then carried out a school shooting

What is more in the actions of young murderers: congenital pathologies, or acquired negative traits? It is obvious that a child raised in a family of sadistic degenerates receives a whole list of psychological traumas for the rest of his life, and when and how he will throw out the accumulated hatred into the world is only a matter of time. However, a close study of the problem has led experts to a striking conclusion: there are people who, literally from the first years of their lives, are potential serial killers.

Doctors discovered this by accident when studying young children with developmental complications: autistic children and infants with brain and central nervous system lesions. Scientists have noticed that some completely healthy babies have similar problems, although they did not have any serious illnesses during the period of fetal formation. For some reason, the children simply did not show typical reactions.

For example, when one of the other children in the group began to cry heart-rendingly, they did not try to console them or crawl away, as kids usually do. These children simply continued to go about their business, indifferently ignoring the screams. The strangeness of behavior also manifested itself in other ways, but it was not explained by heredity: their parents did not use drugs or alcohol, did not have schizophrenics in their family, and gave birth to a child without complications. The children had no birth defects and were of good intelligence and health, but were completely devoid of innate empathy.

Jordan Brown - the boy who killed his father's fiancée and calmly went to school after that

In the works of modern Western psychiatrists, this feature is called “heartlessness-unemotionality.” In the United States, in 2013, this term was officially included in the DSM list of mental disorders.

Specialists can detect it in a child who is barely 3-4 years old. Such children communicate with the world in a specific way: they do not know remorse or guilt for bad deeds, they are often cruel and extremely aggressive towards others. At the same time, children know that they are doing something bad, but they are also indifferent to punishment. For them, bad or good deeds are like images drawn on paper: they just exist, but there is no more meaning in them than in scribbles.

Scientists claim that there are no more such children in the world than autistic children or children with serious mental disorders - about 1% of the total. Not every one of these children will necessarily grow up into a cold-blooded maniac, but for those parents whose children show a lack of emotionality in infancy, experts recommend paying increased attention to the educational process. No matter how wonderful the environment at home may be, without careful supervision and painstaking work on upbringing, an indifferent child may well begin to manifest himself as a psychopath: practice dismembering animals or violence against weaker children. At the same time, aggression will not be limited to the usual “waddling in the mud” because of a taken away toy. Everything could end much worse.

A capricious child at 2 years old

At each age, whims arise for separate reasons. To understand how to behave with a capricious child who is 2 years old, you should know approximately what reasons may contribute to this:

Physical conditions, illnesses, discomfort. If a child is bothered by something, he may begin to endure, then want something in various ways (“I want one thing, no, I want another”), and then start crying. Parents naturally perceive this as a whim.
Body discomforts. For example, your shoes are pressing, your head is sweating, or your stomach hurts. All sensations in the body can also lead to moodiness.
Attention. If the baby at some moment receives more attention than at another, then with his whims he can achieve what he wants. If he is capricious, which is why his parents rush to him, then he continues to be capricious.

What should parents do with a capricious 2-year-old child?

Set rules and prohibitions. If you once forbade doing something, then continue to forbid it in the future. Moreover, this prohibition must be supported not only by one parent, but also by the second.
Leave a whim unattended. Often, a child simply plays to the public, that is, he is capricious when his parents are nearby or looking at him. If you deprive him of the audience, then the whim will pass by itself.

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How childhood psychopathy develops into adulthood

Graham Young. In 1962, he poisoned five people. Spent 9 years in a hospital, after which he poisoned, presumably, 70 more people

The term “child psychopathy” describes a group of pathological conditions associated with disorders in the psyche of a young child. When he gets older (8-12 years), we can already talk about “full-fledged”, actually adult, psychopathy. In addition to the signs described above, adolescents with this deviation are distinguished by attacks of sophisticated aggression and resourcefulness.

Usually the parents of such boys and girls give up on their upbringing. Some people work multiple shifts, not paying attention to what their child grows up to be; others are not averse to a drink and a good smack of their idiot’s head against a corner. Such educational measures only inflame the teenager’s hatred, giving him new reasons to throw it out on others. And sometimes hatred spills over.

On February 12, 1993, in Liverpool, two 10-year-old boys, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, took 3-year-old James Bulger to “play” on the railway tracks. The game consisted of the teenagers hitting the baby on the head, and after he stopped moving, the fanatics stuffed batteries found in a vacant lot into his mouth and butt. They doused the child's dead body with paint and placed it on the tracks to simulate an accident. At the trial, the juvenile killers, who tortured a 3-year-old child for several hours, blinked their eyes in disbelief: the court gave them 10 years in prison.

Venables and Thompson grew up in dysfunctional families, but in Liverpool there were more than enough such families, and only two of all the children there showed themselves to be frostbitten sadists. Someone will note: “This is the main reason, the children were simply not raised. There’s no point in making demagoguery about all sorts of psychological things!” Let me agree only partially.

In one of his works, University of New Mexico psychologist Kent Kiel, who studied the brain functioning of hundreds of psychopaths, came to the conclusion that several similar nuances are found in the brain functioning of emotionless children. In the limbic system, which is responsible for processing emotional reactions in humans, in both cases a reduced content of gray matter is recorded. We are talking about an underdeveloped amygdala, due to disturbances in which a person ceases to experience empathy.

The amygdala is responsible not only for emotions, but also for fear. Our ancestors, assessing a predator or enemy, received a signal from there: fight or flee, depending on the size and danger of the enemy. Disturbances or injuries to this part of the brain lead to the fact that a person literally loses fear, which means he can rush at the wrong person and die. At the same time, he loses the ability to recognize fear on the faces of others. Many psychopaths and unemotional children harm others not out of cynical disregard, but because they generally do not understand the negative component of fear as a category. Hence a certain feeling of the “toy-like” nature of violence.

Amygdala (in red)

Another similar aspect of the brain functioning of maniacs and problem children follows from the first. Sooner or later the brakes in their lives fail. Excitement and dubious pleasures in the absence of fear are purely positive for them. A teenager with an amygdala disorder can easily lose every last pair of pants at cards due to the fact that he is not aware of the fear of the damage of losing. Sexual satisfaction for a psychopath is only a pleasant stimulus, which means he can easily take a woman by force. Or a man. Or something else. Then he might be sent to prison, so what? As a result, both the first and second are practically unable to learn from their mistakes. They just don't understand where the mistake was.

Of course, each case has its own specific characteristics, but a problem with the limbic system of the brain is important in the list of causes of antisocial behavior.

Treating Psychopathy with Video Games and Compassion

Treatment Center in Mendota

The treatment center for teenagers in Mendota, Wisconsin, opened in 1995 thanks to psychologists Michael Caldwell and Greg van Rybroek. The outbreak of teenage violence in America in the 90s led these experts to a disappointing conclusion: no matter how much you put juvenile criminals in jail, when they leave prison they will return to the path of robbery and murder. Could it work in reverse?

In Mendota there are teenagers accused of serious and especially serious crimes; they are transferred here from prisons for correction. Most of them grew up in bad families and were exposed to violence, but there are also those whose parents are worthy members of society. As the hospital workers say, these are the most dangerous psychopaths.

There are no punishments as such. Every teenager who is guilty of something is deprived of the privileges issued before. They don’t let you play Xbox, they take away your favorite baseball cards, but not for long. Local doctors claim that they have found the best option for putting young criminals on the right path: rewards for good behavior. The “prize” stimulus works much better on the brains of children with psychopathy than the “damage” stimulus.

One of the students at the center in Mendota

If the teenager doesn't throw shit at passing orderlies for a while, he is allowed to play video games. Those who have eliminated swear words from their vocabulary are allowed to stay awake longer at night. Experts say that this technique is bearing fruit: in Mendota, only newcomers are especially raging, the rest are quite quiet. Of the “graduates” of the hospital, only 64% return to an antisocial lifestyle, while the same percentage of those released from prison reaches 97%.

An important part of therapy is drug treatment. This is especially true for teenagers with an underdeveloped amygdala: they are fed drugs that stimulate this area of the brain, thanks to which they calm down and do not become violent.

Some time ago, The Atlantic magazine interviewed one of Mendota's former wards. He lived to be 37 years old, some of which he spent in various correctional institutions in America. Growing up in a good family, this man tortured animals from an early age, beat other children, and eventually ended up in the dock. He was diagnosed with the same “childhood psychopathy”, after which he was sent to Mendota.

Treatment Center in Mendota

Fortunately, rehabilitation yielded results. The boy improved, but could not completely get rid of the attacks of aggression. He learned to suppress his urges with a cold mind, and not at all because he realized and understood that he was doing something bad. In an interview, his wife described him as a "nice guy" who seemed to have fallen from Mars. He doesn’t drink, he works regularly, but sometimes he brings home other women with whom he fucks right in front of her. He doesn’t understand his wife’s indignation, because he loves her, and the girls simply give him additional pleasure from life. The problem that we wrote about above is obvious: a person has no fear of exposure of adultery. Or the man simply covers up his sexual adventures with a certificate from the madhouse.

American experts believe that not only can and should be treated for childhood psychopathy, but it is also necessary to create all the conditions to minimize the risks, both for the patient himself and for society. Psychologists emphasize that an unemotional child does not necessarily turn into a maniac. Some psychiatrists estimate that only 1 in 5 problem children become psychopaths who are dangerous to others.

Katrina and Curtis Jones are the sister and brother who shot and killed their father's mistress.

Fairytale therapy against whims

Reading or telling fairy tales to your child helps correct many problems. To get rid of whims, you can use stories from the Internet or buy a collection. Usually it is called “Tales from whims” or “from tears.” Listening or reading about capricious heroes, the child will recognize himself in them and understand how not to behave. At the end, you should definitely discuss the behavior of the characters and draw an instructive conclusion. But do not reproach the child, do not compare him with the hero, you can only mention: “Do you remember, and you once behaved just like a capricious little bear?”

If you can't find a suitable story, come up with one yourself. Or better yet, imagine with your child. This will allow you to better understand each other and open up new facets of communication. You can use a toy for demonstration, for example, a frog or a pig, which you will endow with certain characteristics. The toy will become, as it were, a double of the baby, a collective image of negative qualities: whims, laziness, greed. In the process of composing a story, a child, through a fictional character, will learn to overcome his own shortcomings.