... maybe this young man was just not a nice person.
For years, mental health professionals were trained to see children as mere products of their environment who were intrinsically good until influenced otherwise; where there is chronic bad behavior, there must be a bad parent behind it.
But while I do not mean to let bad parents off the hook — sadly, there are all too many of them, from malignant to merely apathetic — the fact remains that perfectly decent parents can produce toxic children.
We marvel at the resilient child who survives the most toxic parents and home environment and goes on to a life of success.
Yet the converse — the notion that some children might be the bad seeds of more or less decent parents — is hard to take.
Not everyone is going to turn out to be brilliant — any more than everyone will turn out nice and loving.
And that is not necessarily because of parental failure or an impoverished environment.
It is because everyday character traits, like all human behavior, have hard-wired and genetic components that cannot be molded entirely by the best environment, let alone the best psychotherapists.
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