How Do Spoiled Brats Come About?

We’ve all seen them. Today, at a CVS Pharmacy near work, I saw two of them. One little boy in his mother’s arms sobbing while complaining, “This is not very exciting.” The other, also a boy, was hanging on to his mother’s leg while she was desperately trying to run a credit card to pay for a prescription.

Because I have been sterile all my life, I have never had any children of my own. (And, no, I never did want to adopt anyone else’s children, either.) So I never was able to find out whether spoiled brats and other dysfunctional kids are born or just raised that way. Both my brother and I never fit into that category, if for no other reason than that my father ruled by terror, tempered with love.

Over my lifetime, I have seen both wonderful children and heinous brats come from the same families; and I knew the parents to be kind, loving people. Why does one child become a howling reincarnation of Satan, when all the others from the same brood are as gentle as can be? Did the parent spoil one of the children and clamp down on the others? I am truly perplexed by this phenomenon. I suspect that, if there is an answer, it may also provide an insight into troubled psychopaths such as Adam Lanza and other mass murderers.

We like to assign tags such as “mental health,” but we could just as easily use terms such as “evil” or “diabolically possessed.” If a child is so very troubled, it is sheer torture for the parents to continue raising that child. Do we punish them and society by insisting that it is all their fault and that they had better make the kid toe the line? Or do we take such children, give them a mallet and shovel, and have them clear mine fields, hoping that they set some of them off?

These are not trivial questions. Some of us think that anyone can be rehabilitated. Myself, I am not quite so confident that it is possible.