I don’t know Lyman, but I do know positive reinforcement and behaviorism. It works, but can be destructive if misused. You’re right, I don’t have all the information and perhaps the writer is skewing the story and misreporting (I’ve heard that some liberals even lie in print).
That said what’s happened here sounds like this couple had a challenging child, like many others have had. The dad is passive, the mom’s aggressve, they both use game playing and reinforcement to bring out the worst in Michael. They’ve had plenty of opportunity to redirect him and praise him for being good. Instead they’ve got a drama going on.
Read again how the dad reacts to the littlest child messing with Michael’s game. The little kid deserves to be stopped and redirected. The dad should respect Michael’s game, which was paused so he could continue playing. Instead you get what sounds like a daytime drama directed by the dad. Michael’s simply acting accordingly to the inputs of his environment. He’s being created through reinforcement.
Now I’m not saying that Michael isn’t on the spectrum. What I’m saying is that his parents could act in such a way as to reduce his tendencies to extinction. Worse, the “experts” are ruining the dozen children in their “experiment” by mixing negative and positive reinforcement. The negative reinforcement is amplified for normal people and is known to be ineffective. In “callous-unemotional” children it is like catnip. You get more, not less of the abnormal condition.
So here’s this kid, my heart goes out to him, where every adult in his life is failing him.
There is always the wild card of the news reportage itself, which can tell us black was white and we never would know because we weren’t there and had nobody else to verify it for us.
But it sounds like they’ve looked at some Dr. James Dobson works. That ought to take care of the “oh, they never looked at spanking” angle if nothing else does.
Anyhow if the boy’s actions are so wild he literally wounds his own self, even the bible recognizes such conduct as beyond mere human moral failure. Jesus delivered several such persons from either real or figurative demons.