Behavior in Children – Conduct Disorder
Puppies are playful—whether they be puppy dogs, puppy whales, puppy dolphins, puppy elephants, puppy humans, or the puppy members of most of the other higher species. The behavior of juveniles is always more active, disruptive, law breaking, and risk taking than it will be when they grow up and eventually wise up. Particularly, this is true for young males, who across almost all species earn a well-deserved reputation for rambunctiousness and troublemaking.
Nurture and nature both play a role in either discouraging or encouraging disruptive behavior. Young male elephants on one of the African game preserves were recently found to be teasing, bullying, torturing, and sometimes even killing white rhinos for no apparent reason other than the raw fun of it. This was surprising because elephants are usually among the best behaved of animals, accustomed to comporting themselves with punctilious manners and exquisite discretion. The explanation for their unusual behavior provides a fascinating illustration of how social organization helps to keep us all in line. It happens that the young bucks in question had just been moved from another game preserve because it had become overcrowded. In the process, they had been inadvertently removed from the tutelage and social restraint usually provided by the senior bulls and the wise matriarchs. Although previously well behaved, the sudden lack of structure allowed the youngsters to act like juvenile delinquents off the set of West Side Story.
The tendency toward misbehavior also has strong biological roots. The proclivity for male destructiveness is probably mediated mostly through testosterone. Shortly after birth, males across most species display much more exploratory, risk-taking, and aggressive behavior—so much so, that they are much more likely than females to be killed off before adulthood by predators or by their own kind. And within the brotherhood of any given species, individual males are born with marked differences in aggressiveness that determine their place in the dominance hierarchy. All of this seems to be equally true among humans, who have great innate variability in aggressive and exploratory tendencies. Early differences in aggressiveness measured in infancy remain pretty good predictors of how the child will turn out later in adolescence and adulthood—although most people do quiet down at least a bit with aging.
Nature and nurture interact. Just as with the delinquent elephants, the presence or lack of parental and social structure can play an important role. At the margins, appropriate discipline influences whether a high-spirited human youngster eventually becomes the socialized leader of the tribe (or corporation); the socialized leader of an outcast gang; a solitary rogue criminal; or the early victim of fatal violence.
All of this has recently been made even more complicated by two very powerful social forces that seem to increase the rates of behavioral disturbance among the young. The first is the rapid decline of the moderating influences exerted by the family. During the first half of this century, the development of extraordinarily convenient means of travel and long-distance communication resulted in a remarkable job mobility that virtually eliminated the extended family as a powerful influence in the lives of most children. In the second half of this century, the nuclear family has been threatened by rising divorce rates and an increase in single mothers. There is much truth to the cliche that takes it a village to raise a child. Increasingly, that village has become the teenage peer group or gang rather than a nurturing and controlling family. And the worship of violence on TV does not help teach behavioral restraint.
The second social force is the unprecedented availability of illegal drugs. Substance abuse promotes disruptive behavior in any number of different ways that reinforce one another. The direct intoxicating effect of drugs causes accidents, crimes, assaults, murders, suicides, and every other form of human mayhem. The high cost of drugs requires the young addict to work illegally to earn the money necessary to finance his habit. The high profitability of the drug trade creates a criminal business bureaucracy with job opportunities that are so unbelievably lucrative that ordinary jobs seem almost silly or quaint. Finally, the widespread flouting of the nation’s drug prohibitions evaporates any sense of awe or respect that our children might otherwise have had for other laws.
Boys display Conduct Disorder at least three or four times as often as do girls. The rising rates of Conduct Disorder appear to be occurring in both genders, but take different forms in each. Among boys, the most distinctive disruptive acts include violence toward people and the destruction of property. Girls with Conduct Disorder can occasionally also be aggressive or destructive, but most often they indulge in more non-confrontational behaviors such as lying, running away, truancy, prostitution, unsafe sex, theft, drug use, and drug dealing.
