Are some children just born horrible?

[Courteneycrocs]

Hear me out. I know there are environmental reason, poor upbringing for example. Learnt and even taught poor behaviour being another. Attention seeking being a common cause too.
But aside from those reasons causing poor behaviour/bullies, have you come across children who are just plain horrible for no reason and with no cause?
As there are adults who are just generally nasty whether at work, relatives, acquaintances and the likes, everyone is capable of being horrible and it isn’t age dependent, sometimes it’s a choice.
If you ever mention a child who is known for poor behaviour or attitude, they’re often labelled SEN or ‘they can’t help it, it’s xyz’. Sometimes noted as the ‘naughty child’ if no excuses are made. But the general gist is that there are always excuses. The parents are always blamed even if they have done their best. No one ever stops and thinks, actually that child is just horrible.
If a 10 year old child broke your baby’s toy, damaged something expensive in your home and laughed, stole something from a shop, told lies to hurt someone, called someone names, disrespects rules and adults and never uses manners would you consider them a horrible child or just raised poorly? Would your answer be based on assumptions from seeing the parents or only if you know how they’re being raised?
If the same child was 5 years old would your answer be the same?

(No offence meant to anyone who may not like this post, it isn’t aimed at anyone or to start a heated debate, posting out of genuine curiosity after a conversation I had with a teacher friend).

There's a girl in DD's class who can be really unpleasant towards the other girls. I suspect it's learned behaviour particularly as her parents are both known to be nasty pieces of work. They have had a massive falling out with another family and have been hounding them on social media.

@Wastedagreatusername I hadn’t read your post before I wrote mine - that’s exactly what I meant.

I forgot to say I also broke/destroyed things.

I wanted to see how and why things work, what is inside them etc. but I was really crap at putting it back together. Or once opened, that was that.

I'd cut my dolls' hair and hands... because in my roleplay they needed a haircut or nails cut. I was really crap at that too, hence the disfigurement.

I'd draw on my dolls in weird dark colours, including disgusting things like worms because I was playing doctor and they had various strange diseases. I also ruined carpets from making potions and medicine to cure said diseases.

Everything and anything in my room was a toy or a prop if that's where my imagination took me.

I remember one incident at 7. I had a tablecloth with tassels on my desk , and while doing homework and bored out of my mind I developed this story that the tassels were trapped princesses, tied up by their hair by the bad guy. When a new princess was captured, she managed to escape, get rid of the bad guy and she freed all the other princesses by cutting their hair. Which resulted in a ruined table cloth and a bunch of tassels on the floor. My mum was furious, so much so, that on top of punishments and stuff she told my teacher all about it. Not the backstory, just me ruining and cutting up a table cloth. One day when the teacher was cross with me she also told the story to the whole class as an example of how bad ,awful and unmanageable I was. That was fun.

Where do psychopaths, serial killers, rapists, arsonists and animal torturers come from? Not all of them came from broken homes or were abused. To suggest that every human being in the entire world is born without any degenerative capabilities and that they are always the result of social conditioning is simply not true. Take, for example, Lucy Letby (and there are others like her) who had good parents, no childhood trauma, a comfortable home and was assessed to have no mental illness.

@PaperDoIIs

Yeah I guess we all give and take , it's not black and white depending on the situations we are in but I do find that people tend to lean to either being a taker or a giver .

@ginasevern psychopathy is considered genetic. Some children will indeed be born with that gene and be at risk at developing in full blown psychopaths. There are several additional risk factors while in the womb and also the environment after birth which can exacerbate the risk/traits.There are also protective factors that can ameliorate it. It's not as simple as being born bad or you have the gene you'll end up violent, or a rapist, murderer etc.

Your OP conflates many different things:poor behaviour, poor ‘attitude’, deliberate nastiness, bullying, ‘being just plain horrible’, causing physical damage to things, violence.

It also seems to assume that if possible reason(s)/cause(s) are not obvious to you, as an acquaintance / parent of a classmate, that it must be due to genetics.

That’s fair. In this area we should all be very careful about what is meant, how and why.

But the trouble with ‘it’s always upbringing’ is that you can always cast about for some reason why twin 1 was parented differently to twin 2, and so on. It’s just as dogmatic as believing that there is such a thing as inherent personal badness.

Indeed PaperDolls, I have somewhat simplified it. However, I refute the fact that all children are born inherently good which was the assertion I responded to. Children are actively taught a moral compass. Their overriding natural instincts are self gratification.

A mixture of reasons but I think some children are naughty, won't tie the line, and in most cases it's their home life that is the cause, not necessarily because it's a "bad" home, often it's permissive parenting, child led this and that meaning that don't know how to follow rules. SEN diagnosed and not obviously explains a fair amount but poor parenting can have the same "symptoms" as Sen in my experience but no amount of Ritalin or other meds will cure what isn't adhd.

Often parents don't realise that that by giving their child no boundaries they are setting them up to fail, just my humble opinion

I listened to a very interesting podcast about psychopaths by Dr. Kevin Dutton

The Dr found that quite a few 'good' people are psychopaths. Such as brain surgeons. Imagine having to look at an operation like that dispassionately- more of us couldn't do that. Knowing that if you are 1mm out, someone could die.

However, some psychopaths, at a key stage in their life, had an event happen to them which sent them down the 'other' route. He said these high level psychopaths had a lot of early 'good' intervention which made them functioning members of society. It's an interesting concept.

@Courteneycrocs Some people are born with a part of the brain missing that deals with empathy and such like. Studies on brains of people who have committed terrible crimes show this to be the case.

However, the parents are usually blamed.
Whether the child is born and raised in poverty with many adverse childhood experiences, or born to parents who are able to meet all of their child’s needs, they are blamed. Either feckless or too soft..if one parent (usually the father) is not on the scene, the other parent (usually the mother) will take the brunt of judgement from all and sundry..

I watched a documentary about a boy who killed his sister and the mother was describing how he was like this from birth.....she even had him on camera saying to his little sister "I'm going to kill you" and he did. He shows no remorse as an adult it was terrifying 😳

Yes. Quite a few of them, actually.

I am quite disturbed by these posts from people who held a newborn baby and felt repulsion and dislike. I really hope it is not true and the people posting are either making it up for attention or rewriting their memories in line with their current appraisal of the child.

@Westsussex what traits can a baby exhibit exactly that show they are "like that" from birth? They cry eat shit sleep.

How exactly can a newborn express badness and evil, especially to such a level that it can be picked on by others ?

I don't know as it didn't happen to me, I've not experienced that.

@PaperDoIIs you sounded like an intelligent inquisitive child.

And i remember doing things like cutting my doll’s hair, pulling things apart etc… Maybe not at the same level than you (or I had learnt to control my impulse to do that) but yay. I can relate to that.

Their overriding natural instincts are self gratification.

Thats an interesting thought.
I can think of a few philosophers who thought the opposite - mainly humans are good but are ‘corrupted’ by society 😁😁

I’m not sure how I feel about that actually.

It was me that mentioned about the baby.

I’m not an ass hole I promise.

I can’t explain why I felt like I did. I just remember holding him and I felt really uneasy. I couldn’t wait to give him back.
He obviously did nothing but act like a baby… it was just a feeling.

I can’t help how I felt and that was how I felt.

His mum said as a baby is was completely different from her other 2.

It might be an unpopular opinion but I believe a very very small percent of people are born evil.

Attention seeking being a common cause too.
That comes from them not getting enought attention!

But aside from those reasons causing poor behaviour/bullies, have you come across children who are just plain horrible for no reason and with no cause?

Nope

I’m sorry if my post as made people annoyed.

I remember when he was about 2 and he’d just sit and stare at me. He creeped me out… he’s just always made me feel uncomfortable

Yes I think people can have a 'nasty' personality. I think it can run in families. Apparently my great grandmother was a nasty woman. My grandmother had her moments too. My mother and one of her sisters are also quite unpleasant. As is one of my sisters. I try really, really hard not to be, but I do have bitchy thoughts sometimes and I know that's the nasty gene surfacing. But I shut it down. 🙂

Isn't perspective interesting though?This is where nurture comes in . You treat a child as bad , evil, horrible ,destructive, "the enemy" etc. and sometimes that's exactly what they end up as and it's a self fulfilling prophecy.I don't know why I didn't, pure luck I guess, or maybe no psychopathy gene (despite doing some awful things) and "just" trauma. Who knows? What I try very hard to do for the kids I work with , is to be the adult I never had. Not surprisingly, I do have better relationships even with our most troubled children and some success in correcting their behaviours. I'm not an expert or professionally trained so I'm limited in what I can do.

Giving up on kids, be it at birth, at 3 , at 5 , at 10 ,at 15 is the only sure fire way to end up with a dysfunctional adult. It's just the levels that will vary.

My mother taught young children , 5 to 7 years old. Small school, middle class area, very calm environment ( 1960’ s). She had a boy in her class, upper quartile intelligence, quiet , well behaved but not very ‘sociable’ ; we would say now, no empathy.

He murdered his baby brother by holding a pillow over his face. He didn’t seem to be sorry, he admitted it quite openly. He said the baby’s crying annoyed him.

There didn’t seem to be any trouble or bad feeling at home ( before that, obviously).