As a Teacher's Aid, I encountered a child with sociopathic behaviour

So I'm helping teach an animation/video game designer summer camp, and of course, a lot of the kids are game fans and youtube lovers. So during our breaks (and often during class) we have a lot of kids playing games and watching videos.

We get a lot of kids playing things like Minecraft, and then we get a lot of kids playing flashed based violence games (First Person Shooters, beat 'em ups, the random stuff from Newgrounds) and yesterday I watched a kid play something where, after a brief discussion with him, I was a bit disturbed.

It wasn't the game where everyone's cursing and getting head shots, it wasn't the overly bloody beat 'em up, it wasn't fighting games with spine removal finishing moves.

It was Minecraft.

The kid was playing on a server owned by someone else, and he was playing 'Hunger Games' mode. He eventually dies, and goes into what looks like the open world area, inputs some console commands and pulls out his diamond pick axe.

He finds 3 guys just building a dirt bridge across the lake and goes 'This is what I like to do for fun' and proceeds to swap to a shovel, input the fly command, dig out the dirt under the two guys FIRST, and once they fall, fly backwards demolishing their bridge. Then, waits for them to come back, once they start trying to rebuild it, dig out the ground, open the water and says 'Did I drown them?' with a hopeful voice.

So I ask him 'Why are you being a jerk to those other guys?' noticing that they're not trying to troll him back, but say things like 'Stop being a jerk' and 'Go away', but he ignores them and says 'It's fun.'

'But then no one's going to want to play with you.'

'There are four hundred people on this server, I don't care if two hundred don't like me,'

Then he proceeds to explain how he paid 50 real dollars to get access to a bunch of powers, like flight, x-ray vision, instant access to a giant storage chest with console commands, etc.

He goes on to talk about how he and his cousin trolled the entire server by killing people with lava, then the admins turned off lava, but only in the method of dropping the lava block on people. So they'd put lava under ground, use x-ray vision and wait for people to walk by, dig out the ground and they'd die. Admins turned that off.

So next they'd start surrounding people with obsidian, and filling it with water, admins turned that off. So they did it with sand.

I'm sitting there, thinking 'This kid's doing the modern day equivalent of beating the crap out of animals.' A 12 year old with no empathy for other people he's interacting with. He constantly tests the limits of how he can be abusive towards other people but remain within the rules. The only negative he seems to have is getting punished, not what his actions do to other people.

The more I thought about this, the more I felt significantly disturbed. Kids getting free form access to the internet at such early ages seem to devolve into a self serving, empathy free state and I worry that it could translate to real life easily, moreso than what we have now, especially with how easily they gain access and understanding to all these things they find online.

Doing whatever they want to whoever they want within the written word of the law, with the only restraint the fear of punishment and not the worry of inflicted discomfort or pain onto others.

That is extremely disturbing to hear, especially as a parent. I wonder if there is a delicate way in which you can either approach the parents--though I know sometimes that can result in a back lash or even be considered inappropriate depending--or try approaching the child again, but perhaps with a different tactic, maybe one that won't place him on the defensive. I'd possibly try the redirect approach or just suggesting alternate ideas of 'fun' without going into things... at first... just to see if you can get through on some level. But, I'm no child psychologist, merely a parent as that's probably what I'd do if my son or daughter did that and I found myself faced with the situation. Either way, if there's a way to make note of it in a file or something, I'd probably do it just so that it can be addressed or looked into. Better to be realized earlier than later since it might be a learned behavior or a coping mechanism as opposed to something else.

People like to assume that sociopathic behavior only appears in adults, but it doesn't. It starts practically at birth, and these are the signs that people tend to miss, so I would approach the parents about it and ask them to see if he's going to therapy. Nothing can change sociopathic behavior, it's inherent, because if he's 12 and thinking this way, then he's been thinking this way since he was able to find an outlet for such behavior. Does he act like this outside of playing games? Probably but he might be better at hiding it since responses in real life are usually much faster.

It's not necessarily fear of punishment, to be honest, that makes him stay within the realm of the law. It's having his "Toys taken away" that he doesn't want to happen. It's his own selfishness that keeps him within the limits. That's how some sociopaths work. They do only what works for them, manipulate others, and feed their narcissism.

I have a sneaking suspicion that if you told him that you already came up with what he was doing, he would probably get angry and say he had come up with it first. Or something along those lines.

As I said, sociopaths are a selfish lot because they don't have any real emotions other than anger, pride, and narcissism. That's usually why they get caught after committing crimes because they hate when others try to take away their spotlight by saying they did them.

It is disturbing behavior, however, I have my own tendencies of this nature, so it's more analytical to me.

I'm a teacher's aid at a one week summer camp program. The kid's not even apart of our educational district. We're a college, he's in like...grade 8.

I really think it's out of my hands.

I know I'm a new user, but I'm super interested in psychology, so I thought I'd drop by here first. Sorry if this is against a rule of some sort. :blush:

Empathy does not develop before the teenage years. This means that every child is, to some extent, a sociopath.

Now, you may say 'but my child has feelings towards me and shows me empathy!', and I'll tell you why. Sociopathy does not completely exclude emotions or empathy; That is called psychopathy. Sociopathy means that you don't naturally feel empathy towards people you do not know or does not fit a certain set of requirements; A mother will almost always fit these requirements. So, you can say it's a narrow scope of empathy.

It's difficult to tell if a person is a sociopath or not before he's an adult because of this, as empathy develops around the teenage years. Sadly, during that time the sociopath is likely to have found ways to satisfy 'empaths' as to not awake any suspicion of their sociopathic nature.

This kid is not necessarily going to be a sociopath as an adult, even though his actions are worrying. It is likely that his parents aren't taking proper care of him. Sociopaths with good parents tend to be able to function in society without causing too much harm... Or become politicians and ruin everything, of course.

I'd say children have plenty of empathy before becoming a teenager, it's how they learn to share and know when people are upset, but it's not always the case since they have to learn these things like everyone else. As children, none of us really know anything and social patterns are learned but not everyone "learns" them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Rader

Just a wikipedia on the BTK killer because this kind of behavior is noted in "quieter" types and even "the good guys."

But then he's an odd mix of what I believe to be psychotic and sociopathic.

And sorry for kind of veering off topic with this. <.<

I just tried to search for the article where I had read otherwise, but instead found something that confirmed your idea, so I bow in embarrassment. Haha.
(About empathy in children)

Also: I'm sorry if I derailed this thread as well.

It's all good, it's an interesting thought disturbing topic.

The kid told me today he'd hit his sister with a baseball bat. I said 'No you wouldn't. That could kill her.' and he said 'I would...well...it depends which sister.'

I kind of wonder if he's fucking with you. Still, I'd mention it to someone.

Agreed. That sounds pretty bad.

Dameon said:

The kid told me today he'd hit his sister with a baseball bat. I said 'No you wouldn't. That could kill her.' and he said 'I would...well...it depends which sister.'

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Did he have a reason why he wanted to hit his sister with a baseball bat? Was it just because he wanted to hurt her? If so, then I'd think he has some mental health issues. I think he might have a reason if he said it depends on which sister so it might be anger issues. Is he lying or manipulating other children or adults?

I would mention it because if he meant it, that could be serious and if he's doing it just to mess with you, then he needs to learn that such behavior is highly inappropriate and can result in severe consequences.

I know that you are not a counselor. but if you were you would be governed by what is called duty to warn. The disclaimer given to clients is often, if you tell me you plan to kill or harm yourself, someone else, or if I hear of or suspect child or elder abuse I have to report it. These are conditions where it is acceptable and expected that a counselor will break confidentiality. So yeah totally I would mention it to someone.

some of the empathy issue has to do with how children develop stages of morality such as going through kohlbergs stages of morality. But it also has to do with the idea of concrete and formal operations in piaget's cognitive development stages. A teenager is moving into formal operations and can think abstractly, where as a younger child is usually in concrete operations where they think of things in a very realistic manner. They follow the rules to avoid punishment, where as empathy seems to deal ore with a formal operations thought process involving abstract thought.

A child under the age of 18 cannot be diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, as the criteria clearly state the individual must be older than 18. However a child can receive a diagnosis of oppositional defiant disorder or conduct disorder. Often children with conduct disorder grow up to become individuals with an antisocial personality disorder, in fact to have antisocial personality disorder symptoms of conduct disorder must be shown before age 15.

Kohlberg's stages of mor development number 6 total and involve 3 stages, preconventional, conventional and post-conventional moral development.



there is no set timeframe in which a child learns or fails to learn these stages.

level 1: preconventional
stage 1: obedience and punishment orientation. How can I avoid punishment
stage 2: self interest orientation. Basically what's in it for me.

level 2: conventional.
stage 3: interpersonal accord and conformity. This stage involves social norms, what is often termed the good boy/good girl attitude.

stage 4: authority and social order maintaining orientation. law and order morality. Basically this deals with the letter of the law, less about whether a law is fair or just more strictly that this is the law.

level 3: post-conventional (It should be noted that even some adults never reach this level of moral development)
stage 5: Social Contract Orientation. This stage takes stage 4 and starts to say well there might be acceptions to the law, but laws should be followed because it is a social contract but sees there are exceptions and times when laws are not always right.

Stage 6: universal ethical principles. principled conscience. This stage suggests that everyone should develop their own ethical principles, and do the right thing irregardless of laws. even if something is technically legal it does not necessarily make it right and this individual would hold themselves to their ethical moral standard.

this might be slightly off topic also, but I thought it was relivant to take a deeper psychological look at where this kid is, has he developed any empathy or morality?

is this kid really unique? with the rise of videogames and the like lots of people display aggression and the like in that setting and never grow up to do anything worse than that. Then again is it outside of the norm, perhaps, that would have to be a question you answered.

Either way, the kid should learn that threats should not be taken lightly, ever, and if nothing else, if he threatened to hit his sister with a baseball bat, you should probably tell someone.

I participate in a program called Big Brothers Big Sister, my husband and I are paired up with a 12 year old boy and what you described at the beginning sounds frighteningly close to some of his behaviour the biggest difference being when he realizes that we are not mad at his behaviour but disappointed in him it improves.

He once told us in such an offhand way that it scared me that he thought shooting people would be fun. We were in the car and I turned around and looked right at him. I asked him why he would think that, he answered that it was fun in games like Battlefield (which personally I am very upset his mother lets him play) and he thought it would be just like that in real life. Right after he mentioned war being fun as well. My response was to explain to him that wars were not done for fun, that soldiers did not shoot people for fun nor did they enjoy it. My husband and I tried to impress upon him the devastation that shooting people causes, that it hurts the victim physically and mentally if they survived, it hurts the families and friends, in the case of a soldier it may even hurt them emotionally or mentally. After the discussion he was clearly bothered by the talk and by the fact that we did not find it amusing at all.

We are lucky in our situation because if things ever progressed to a point where we were very concerned for his behaviour we can go to the BBBS organization and ask for help. I could not imagine what I would do in your circumstance but I know I would want to bring it to the attention of someone who could potentially intervene.

It is things like this that make one realize why this nation was never supposed to be a total democracy. There are just too many very disturbed and (I have the guts to say it) outright evil people out there.

It is not a games fault, lack of proper parenting, nor lack of observation. The child described is at best a sociopath, and at worst a psychopath. He was allowed a consequence free environment, and he went with the progression himself. I know that one thing that can help is positive re-enforcement on proper behavior, and disappointment but not anger at the bad, but at this point, it is a very dicey state. No one knows what DPD (Dissociative Personality Disorder) or APD (Antisocial Personality Disorder), the two primary classifications of disturbed individuals like this boy and others, is always started by, nor what either nurtures them away from it to stop it or nurtures to continue, but I can say with simple certainty that the fact his cousin is similar to him and that he is now in a codependent sociopathic relationship with said cousin this early in life is truly the most disturbing fact of this.

He may already need specialized medications as it is, is what I am saying.

dissociative personality disorder? I've read the entirety of the DSM IV TR and have never come across this diagnosis or heard another disorder or personality disorder described in such a way. I'm not saying you are wrong, I am just curious what you are referring to. I have heard of dissociative identity disorder (which is what people might call multiple personality disorder) but am pretty sure this is not what you are referring to.

Hahvoc The Decepticon said:

As I said, sociopaths are a selfish lot because they don't have any real emotions other than anger, pride, and narcissism. That's usually why they get caught after committing crimes because they hate when others try to take away their spotlight by saying they did them.

It is disturbing behavior, however, I have my own tendencies of this nature, so it's more analytical to me.

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Narcissism is separate from sociopathy, when they appear together it gets called malignant narcissism.

It's often possible to work with a sociopath. They're fascinated by emotions in others and have a drive to 'win', whatever they decide that to be. They typically have a really odd way of handling and synthesizing information.

So usually if I encounter a sociopath who doesn't have narc tendencies, and have to deal with them, I try to direct their motivation somewhere where it can have a positive impact both for them and others. Unfortunately their lack of empathy means that they tend to make invalid assumptions about people they are not very familiar with, so this has blown up on me on occasion.

Even if it's cases like the original post. How many people are going to stick around on a minecraft server where someone can pay $50 for console commands? Much better that they spend time wrecking some pretend world rather than the real one.

Malignant narcissists... I have no idea how to handle them, at least in terms of directing behavior to somewhere positive.

Vekseid said:

...

It's often possible to work with a sociopath. They're fascinated by emotions in others and have a drive to 'win', whatever they decide that to be. They typically have a really odd way of handling and synthesizing information.

So usually if I encounter a sociopath who doesn't have narc tendencies, and have to deal with them, I try to direct their motivation somewhere where it can have a positive impact both for them and others. Unfortunately their lack of empathy means that they tend to make invalid assumptions about people they are not very familiar with, so this has blown up on me on occasion.

Even if it's cases like the original post. How many people are going to stick around on a minecraft server where someone can pay $50 for console commands? Much better that they spend time wrecking some pretend world rather than the real one.

Malignant narcissists... I have no idea how to handle them, at least in terms of directing behavior to somewhere positive.

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Sociopaths are an interesting group of people to study, even for sociopaths themselves. They are usually driven by a desire to 'win' or to be the best at whatever they have decided to dedicate themselves towards. The ability to be able to portray connections where necessary, and to be able to display an abject lack of them -- especially when they can remain hidden -- is something that if trained properly can lead to extremes, whether they be depraved horror stories or intense stories of successes.

When someone is only displaying sociopathic or APD typical behavior online, this is usually less of an issue. An absurdly large number of people behave much differently online than they do when in personal interactions. The number of trolls, griefers, and otherwise 'sociopath stylized behavior' online, would lead psych majors to claim much higher numbers than the usual "up to 5% of the population [exhibit] strong psychopathic and sociopath traits." (Cited Article with sources)

It may just be that the child felt the need to exert some dominance in the online world, because their own reality was so controlled by other people. It could also be that the child was merely one of those types of people who, while there is nothing directly wrong with them, are just a pain in the backside, metaphorically speaking.

Vekseid said:

It's often possible to work with a sociopath. They're fascinated by emotions in others and have a drive to 'win', whatever they decide that to be. They typically have a really odd way of handling and synthesizing information.

So usually if I encounter a sociopath who doesn't have narc tendencies, and have to deal with them, I try to direct their motivation somewhere where it can have a positive impact both for them and others. Unfortunately their lack of empathy means that they tend to make invalid assumptions about people they are not very familiar with, so this has blown up on me on occasion.

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Heh heh, it's weird to read it worded so clinically.

Re: Daemon's 'sociopathic' child, I think it's a bit of an overstatement, no? I can think of a hundred reasons a child would want to hold power of any sort, and not many of them relate to sociopathy.

Also holy fuck at a thread full of people using words like 'evil' and suggesting contacting authorities. You're talking about a child who trolls in Minecraft. Find some perspective, please.

I don't think it's anything to contact authorities for and I wouldn't call the kid evil but I DO think it's stuff like this that can be signs of something. And this is the problem with kids (or well, eventual adults) who go apeshit and kill or harm people. Most of the time this crap can be avoided if the adults in their lives paid attention to their kid, looked out for signs, and found ways to deal with it without criminalizing the kid. With a lot of mental issues, there are little signs that people will shrug off because the single sign on it's own isn't alarming, but a group of behavioral traits can mean something.

If he's 13, you have to remember that... he's 13. Boys in that age group can be such cocky assholes. They're no longer kids, they're teenagers, they're almost an adult. They think they're the shit and have it all together. They want to feel in control, they like to test their boundaries now that authority is becoming less intimidating to them. They're going to do stuff and they're going to test the limits simply because they can. I have a nephew who's 13, and he can be like that.

Plain and simple, as a teacher, teachers aid, anyone working with children you are required to bring certain things up. If it was a situation of the child getting abused, you wouldn't just sit going ok and just sit on your hands about it. You would need to get tell someone, and get people involved.

It is the same thing with this, if it is something bad or not going on with this kid it doesn't matter. Someone needs to be told about this, and the kid needs to be looked into. Especially with the threat against his sister, because if you just sit and do nothing that means you are in your own way responsible if he does go and do something bad to his sister or anyone else.

Please I urge you to bring this up to someone higher then you, to find out the best steps to take. You doing this, if there is a problem with the kind may be the first step to getting him some help. If there isn't an issue, then this is the first step into getting help for the kid of why he thinks this is ok.

Alright. I suppose I can input as someone whom actually has a derivative of psychosis as a psychological disorder. I... Wouldn't panic about it too much if it was just a games-based thing. It just sounds like he's dicking around with people. Granted, that's not a nice thing to do, but I think he's more enjoying the idea of pissing people off for attention. Which is normal for a child.

I would... Suggest keeping on eye on what he does off the game. If he emulates the behaviour he does within the game, of being a cruel, conniving, plotting, scheming, unempathetic creature, then perhaps yes it would be best to investigate routes with getting him to a therapist to investigate, to ease him back to the real world... But something to realize is that a lot of sociopath or psychopath behaviour is built-in. It's something that is there from birth. If he has it, the internet and games didn't cause it; it was merely a catalyst for awakening it.

...Aaand then I read the part about the baseball bat.

Okay. I would go investigate any potential methods by which you can get him introduced a therapist. Therapists know exactly what questions to ask and what to look for to find psychopathic behaviour. They have it down to a bloody artform. They identified me in less than an hour. That's how effective they've gotten.

A real hint though is... Does he want to do it just for the sake of doing it? If that's why, then... Yes, I would be perturbed in your situation. If he wants to do it because he hates his sister that's one thing, that's eighth grade hormones raging furiously at a sibling. IE. Fairly normal. However if he wants to do it just because... He wants to, because he would feel a thrill in doing it, because it excites him, or just because of boredom... Those are potential signs of some serious problems.

Also, yes, if anyone is curious, you may inquire as to my own psychological disorders. I don't mind answering questions. Just don't do the whole "gasp, you're a monster, oh god, stay away from my kids" routine. That gets very old, and also exacerbates the problem. So. While you're considering getting a therapist and talking to the parents about this... Also make the suggestion to keep being nice to the kid, to easing him into a few sessions with a therapist, and just keeping the environment friendly. In case you're wrong, you could do some sincere damage to his psyche throwing him to the wolves out of panic.