Nope, I read the article and in this case it is the parents:
“Watching Anne ride herd on her two younger boys that afternoon, I found her to be brusque and no-nonsense. When Allan started running around the living room and then crashing into the sofa cushions, she spoke sharply: “Allan! Stop it.” (He did.) When Jake and Allan grew whiny about a shared toy, she arbitrated the dispute with a tone of patient exasperation familiar to most parents. “Just let him play with it for five minutes, Allan, and then it’ll be your turn.” And when she grew touchy about parenting strategies — Anne favors structure and strict rules; Miguel is inclined to be lenient — Miguel listened quietly, then conceded that his relaxed approach might be “optimistic.”
It certainly seemed so. As the night progressed, Michael’s behavior grew more violent. At one point, while Michael was downstairs, Jake clambered goofily onto the computer chair and accidentally unpaused Michael’s Pokémon video. Allan giggled, and even Miguel smiled affectionately. But the amusement was brief. Hearing Michael on the stairs, Miguel said, “Uh oh!” and whisked Jake out of the chair.
He wasn’t fast enough. Seeing the video playing, Michael gave a keening scream, then scanned the room for the guilty party. His gaze settled on Allan. Grabbing a wooden chair, he hoisted it overhead as though to do violence but paused for several seconds, giving Miguel a chance to yank it away. Shrieking, Michael ran to the bathroom and began slamming the toilet seat down repeatedly. Dragged out and ordered to bed, he sobbed pitifully. “Daddy! Daddy! Why are you doing this to me?” he begged, as Miguel carried him to his room. “No, Daddy! I have a greater bond with you than I do with Mommy!” For the next hour, Michael sobbed and screamed, while Miguel tried to calm him. In the hall outside his room, Miguel apologized, adding that it was “an unusually bad night.”
“What you saw, that was the old Michael,” he continued. “He was like that all day long. Kicking and hitting, slamming the toilet seat.” But he also noted that Allan had provoked Michael, at one point taunting him for crying. “He loves to poke at him when he can,” Miguel said.
From the bedroom, Michael called out: “He knows the consequences, so I don’t know why he does it. I will hurt him.”
Miguel: “No you won’t.”
Michael: “I’m coming for you, Allan.”
An hour later, after the boys were finally asleep, Miguel and I sat down at the kitchen table. Growing up, he said, he had also been a difficult child — albeit not so problematic as Michael. “A lot of parents didn’t want me around their kids, because they thought I was crazy,” he said, closing his eyes at the memory. “I didn’t listen to adults. I was always in trouble. My grades were horrible. I would be walking down the street and I would hear them say, in Spanish: ‘Ay! Viene el loco!’ — ‘Here comes the crazy one.’ ”
According to Miguel, this antisocial behavior lasted until his late teens, at which point, he said, he “grew up.” When I asked what caused the change, he looked uncertain. “You learn to pacify the rough waters,” he said at last. “It just happens. You learn to control yourself from the outside in.”
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The parents are, apparently unknowingly, using reinforcement to create Michael. He gets a ton of attention for acting “crazy”, therefore you get more craziness. The father’s a goof and the mom’s a controller.
There is no doubt that he is clinically pyschopathic (2 standard deviations in definition above others who are described as clinically pyschopathic).
Blaming the parents for the child's behavior is certainly rational in terms of a search for causality.
But the problem is not who caused it...but who has it.
Michael has it!
It sounds like someone needs a good ass whipping.
Spot on.
Let's see, the older brother screams and yells...and brandishes a chair over his head, threatening his brother, WITH NO NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES???
Then after being over the top angry for an HOUR (!!!), calms down, and threatens his brother openly in front of his father (whom he clearly doesn't respect...)?
Sounds like years of neglect of discipline (including spankings) to me...