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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Good-natured, well-behaved, polite kids...

...are kids who are paid attention to by their parents.  So they are secure in knowing that they are important and loved.[/quote]

As a clinical psychologist who spends 90% of my work day doing neuropsych evaluations on children from all types of families this is a constant education process i have to go through on a daily basis. Barring major dysfunction, personality traits are genetic. Your assessment is a common, but ignorant and very antiquated one.

The other side of the coin is that I sometimes see very compliant children who are pleasers because they are walking on eggshells around their parents. They actually don't feel valued and accepted. They come to me as "good" kids with some educational issues and once you peel the onion back it's the compliance that actually is the root of the problem.

The reality is, if you work with families, you often see a huge spectrum of children in the same family raised the exact same way, in loving supportive homes (every family who comes to me spending 3k in an evaluation have parents who pay attention to their kids and love them).

There is a lot of arrogance in many of these responses as if some of you deserve credit for having a compliant child, when in fact you are either lucky or have simply systematically torn your kid down.

I do find the anonymity of this forum quite relieving. I'd love to say this to your face, but cannot.[/quote]

Another child psychologist here. Thank you for writing this. Some of these responses were so off![/quote]

Yes, but aren't you seeing a select portion of the population?  Any parent who is taking their kid to a neuropsych evaluation for behavior problems is the kind of parent who wants to have well-behaved polite kids and has probably tried a lot of things and failed.  I know a lot of parents who have pretty neurotypical kids who simply let them run wild.  I do think if their parents exercised some discipline over them, they would be far better behaved but they do not.  One parent explained to me that they did not want to "break his spirit".  I failed to see why imposing some sort of consequence for running through someone else's house and screaming at the top of his lungs would do that.  She is the kind of parent who just watches while her kid misbehaves and always has an excuse for it.

So I think it's possible that you can do a lot right as a parent and end up with a badly behaved child because of nature, but you could also have a child that is that way because you don't do any parenting.  [/quote]

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