But studies that have followed children from the preschool years into the teenage ones find that up to half of first graders who are disruptive, unable to get along with other kids, disobedient with their parents, and resistant with teachers will become delinquents in their teen years.15 Of course, not all such aggressive children are on the trajectory that leads to violence and criminality in later life. But of all children, these are the ones most at risk for eventually committing violent crimes.
The drift toward crime shows up surprisingly early in these children's lives. When children in a Montreal kindergarten were rated for hostility and trouble making, those highest at age five already had far greater evidence of delinquency just five to eight years later, in their early teens. They were about three times as likely as other children to admit they had beaten up someone who had not done anything to them, to have shoplifted, to have used a weapon in a fight, to have broken into or stolen parts from a car, and to have been drunk—and all this before they reached fourteen years of age.16
The prototypical pathway to violence and criminality starts with children who are aggressive and hard to handle in first and second grade.17 Typically, from the earliest school years their poor impulse control also contributes to their being poor students, seen as, and seeing themselves as, "dumb"—a judgment confirmed by their being shunted to special-education classes (and though such children may have a higher rate of "hyperactivity" or learning disorders, by no means all do). Children who on entering school already have learned in their homes a "coercive" style—that is, bullying—are also written off by their teachers, who have to spend too much time keeping the children in line. The defiance of classroom rules that comes naturally to these children means that they waste time that would otherwise be used in learning; their destined academic failure is usually obvious by about third grade. While boys on a trajectory toward delinquency tend to have lower IQ scores than their peers, their impulsivity is more directly at cause: impulsivity in ten-year-old boys is almost three times as powerful a predictor of their later delinquency as is their IQ.18
By fourth or fifth grade these kids—by now seen as bullies or just "difficult"—are rejected by their peers and are unable to make friends easily, if at all, and have become academic failures. Feeling themselves friendless, they gravitate to other social outcasts. Between grade four and grade nine they commit themselves to their outcast group and a life of defying the law: they show a five fold increase in their truancy, drinking, and drug taking, with the biggest boost between seventh and eighth grade. By the middle-school years, they are joined by another type of "late starters," who are attracted to their defiant style; these late starters are often youngsters who are completely unsupervised at home and have started roaming the streets on their own in grade school. In the high-school years this outcast group typically drops out of school in a drift toward delinquency, engaging in petty crimes such as shoplifting, theft, and drug dealing.
(A telling difference emerges in this trajectory between boys and girls. A study of fourth-grade girls who were "bad"—getting in trouble with teachers and breaking rules, but not unpopular with their peers—found that 40 percent had a child by the time they finished the high-school years.19 That was three times the average pregnancy rate for girls in their schools. In other words, antisocial teenage girls don't get violent—they get pregnant.)
There is, of course, no single pathway to violence and criminality, and many other factors can put a child at risk: being born in a high-crime neighborhood where they are exposed to more temptations to crime and violence, coming from a family under high levels of stress, or living in poverty. But none of these factors makes a life of violent crime inevitable. All things being equal, the psychological forces at work in aggressive children greatly intensify the likelihood of their ending up as violent criminals. As Gerald Patterson, a psychologist who has closely followed the careers of hundreds of boys into young adulthood, puts it, "the anti-social acts of a five-year-old may be prototypic of the acts of the delinquent adolescent."20
SCHOOL FOR BULLIES
The bent of mind that aggressive children take with them through life is one that almost ensures they will end up in trouble. A study of juvenile offenders convicted of violent crimes and of aggressive high-school students found a common mind-set: When they have difficulties with someone, they immediately see the other person in an antagonistic way, jumping to conclusions about the other person's hostility toward them without seeking any further information or trying to think of a peaceful way to settle their differences. At the same time, the negative consequence of a violent solution—a fight, typically—never crosses their mind. Their aggressive bent is justified in their mind by beliefs like, "It's okay to hit someone if you just go crazy from anger"; "If you back down from a fight everyone will think you're a coward"; and "People who get beaten up badly don't really suffer that much."21
But timely help can change these attitudes and stop a child's trajectory toward delinquency; several experimental programs have had some success in helping such aggressive kids learn to control their antisocial bent before it leads to more serious trouble. One, at Duke University, worked with anger-ridden grade-school troublemakers in training sessions for forty minutes twice a week for six to twelve weeks. The boys were taught, for example, to see how some of the social cues they interpreted as hostile were in fact neutral or friendly. They learned to take the perspective of other children, to get a sense of how they were being seen and of what other children might be thinking and feeling in the encounters that had gotten them so angry. They also got direct training in anger control through enacting scenes, such as being teased, that might lead them to lose their temper. One of the key skills for anger control was monitoring their feelings—becoming aware of their body's sensations, such as flushing or muscle tensing, as they were getting angry, and to take those feelings as a cue to stop and consider what to do next rather than strike out impulsively.
John Lochman, a Duke University psychologist who was one of the designers of the program, told me, "They'll discuss situations they've been in recently, like being bumped in the hallway when they think it was on purpose. The kids will talk about how they might have handled it. One kid said, for example, that he just stared at the boy who bumped him and told him not to do it again, and walked away. That put him in the position of exerting some control and keeping his self-esteem, without starting a fight."
This appeals; many such aggressive boys are unhappy that they lose their temper so easily, and so are receptive to learning to control it. In the heat of the moment, of course, such cool-headed responses as walking away or counting to ten so the impulse to hit will pass before reacting are not automatic; the boys practice such alternatives in role-playing scenes such as getting on a bus where other kids are taunting them. That way they can try out friendly responses that preserve their dignity while giving them an alternative to hitting, crying, or running away in shame.
Three years after the boys had been through the training, Lochman compared these boys with others who had been just as aggressive, but did not have the benefit of the anger-control sessions. He found that, in adolescence, the boys who graduated from the program were much less disruptive in class, had more positive feelings about themselves, and were less likely to drink or take drugs. And the longer they had been in the program, the less aggressive they were as teenagers.