Can kids be born bad?

Nigel Latta

There are (at least) two people you shouldn't ask for advice when it comes to raising kids who won't become criminals. They would be George and Augusta Gein. George was reportedly a violent alcoholic who was often unemployed. Despite this the couple stayed together because Augusta Gein was devoutly religious and so refused to divorce him. Instead she moved the family to an isolated farmhouse to restrict contact with the outside world and then proceeded to spend the rest of her life teaching her two sons that all women (herself excluded one can only assume) were whores, prostitutes and in league with the devil. Sex was dirty, according to Ma Gein, and was only for procreation.

Her youngest son, Ed, took these lessons to heart and in the 1950s, once the rest of his family were dead, he would go on to murder at least two women, and exhume a large number of recently deceased women he thought looked like his mother and then use various bits and pieces of them to construct articles of clothing and macabre little knick-knacks, things like soup bowls made from human skull caps, and socks made from human skin.

Ed Gein makes complete sense when you look at where he came from. If your old man is a violent drunk, and your mum is a religious nut who isolates you from the world and then fills your head with poison, it isn't too much of a stretch to think that one day you might end up drinking soup from a human skull and wearing socks that smell bad for all the wrong reasons.

But what about the rest of us? What about the normal mums and dads who aren't violent alcoholics or misguided fanatics? How do we make sure our kids don't grow up to become criminals?

The first thing to decide is whether we are born bad, or it's our parents who mess us up. I've spent most of my career grappling with this issue, because I work at both ends of the spectrum. In any given day I might be helping one family with strategies to get their completely normal 3-year-old to sleep through the night, then see a completely abnormal 10-year-old who is killing cats and generally scaring the bejesus out of anyone who comes across him. Later it might be a 13-year-old girl who spends her weekends riding in stolen cars with boys, and then I'll end the day with a 16-year-old boy who is stressed because he's doing six NCEA subjects and can't figure out how to fit in drama classes.

It is not out of the ordinary for my day to begin with toilet training and then end with attempted murder.

It's important you know that because a lot of the advice parents get these days is opinion dressed up as fact. Everyone claims to hold the high ground. Not me. I'm just a guy sitting under a tree who's seen some stuff and has some stories to tell. No more, no less.