I studied this book as my main source for preparing and writing my second crime / mystery book. That is one of the reasons I replaced the word “child” with “defiant.” The other reason is that I am trying to apply the context of the book to retarded adults rather than challenging children. Retarded adults are kids anyway, right?
In addition to so many children around me showing signs of becoming sociopaths, there are more adults acting like children. Many defiant children become psychopaths or adult sociopaths and then some become serial killers. I will use the book reviewed to explain why and how the criminal became a sociopath in my book.
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The whole family can lose affection for one another. Parents blame each other for the defiant’s destructive behavior. Siblings can end up being hostile towards parents and defiant sibling. This is how one challenger can bring down the whole family.
Important facts to remember
The defiant’s behavior is up to you. Why? Because the greatest potential for controlling the behavior of the challenger is in the environment and most of the environment is YOU.
The challenger acts the way he does because he cannot see things the way you see them, that is, the difference in perspectives.
The quickest way to determine why the challenger is acting the way he is is to look at himself. Can you see the defiant attitude in yourself? If so, you are the problem or the root of it.
You encourage misbehavior to get worse when you show that you have a breaking point and use cumulative punishment. He eventually loses his patience and decides to punish or give up and temporarily reward defiant behavior thus creating a time bomb: the inevitable physical violence.
Suddenly overreacting to the behavior of a certain challenger will prevent the challenger from learning specific consequences for specific types of misbehavior. The challenger cannot build a predictable framework of action and reaction without that learning. Offer incentives like ‘reward points’ instead of using punishments.
What I think the book missed is to emphasize the fact that failure is not bad. In fact, failing is really good because we can’t learn until we fail. I didn’t just miss my childhood. It was also a disaster because my father was a perfectionist. Guess how that affected me. Yes. He never taught me that failure is good, but forced me to be “perfect.”
Remember, this is only a fraction of what I learned from the book.