Thread: As a Teacher's Aid, I encountered a child with sociopathic behaviour

I know that you are not a counselor. but if you were you would be governed by what is called duty to warn. The disclaimer given to clients is often, if you tell me you plan to kill or harm yourself, someone else, or if I hear of or suspect child or elder abuse I have to report it. These are conditions where it is acceptable and expected that a counselor will break confidentiality. So yeah totally I would mention it to someone. some of the empathy issue has to do with how children develop stages of morality such as going through kohlbergs stages of morality. But it also has to do with the idea of concrete and formal operations in piaget's cognitive development stages. A teenager is moving into formal operations and can think abstractly, where as a younger child is usually in concrete operations where they think of things in a very realistic manner. They follow the rules to avoid punishment, where as empathy seems to deal ore with a formal operations thought process involving abstract thought. A child under the age of 18 cannot be diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, as the criteria clearly state the individual must be older than 18. However a child can receive a diagnosis of oppositional defiant disorder or conduct disorder. Often children with conduct disorder grow up to become individuals with an antisocial personality disorder, in fact to have antisocial personality disorder symptoms of conduct disorder must be shown before age 15. Kohlberg's stages of mor development number 6 total and involve 3 stages, preconventional, conventional and post-conventional moral development. there is no set timeframe in which a child learns or fails to learn these stages. level 1 preconventional stage 1 obedience and punishment orientation. How can I avoid punishment stage 2 self interest orientation. Basically what's in it for me. level 2 conventional. stage 3 interpersonal accord and conformity. This stage involves social norms, what is often termed the good boygood girl attitude. stage 4 authority and social order maintaining orientation. law and order morality. Basically this deals with the letter of the law, less about whether a law is fair or just more strictly that this is the law. level 3 post-conventional It should be noted that even some adults never reach this level of moral development stage 5 Social Contract Orientation. This stage takes stage 4 and starts to say well there might be acceptions to the law, but laws should be followed because it is a social contract but sees there are exceptions and times when laws are not always right. Stage 6 universal ethical principles. principled conscience. This stage suggests that everyone should develop their own ethical principles, and do the right thing irregardless of laws. even if something is technically legal it does not necessarily make it right and this individual would hold themselves to their ethical moral standard. this might be slightly off topic also, but I thought it was relivant to take a deeper psychological look at where this kid is, has he developed any empathy or morality? is this kid really unique? with the rise of videogames and the like lots of people display aggression and the like in that setting and never grow up to do anything worse than that. Then again is it outside of the norm, perhaps, that would have to be a question you answered. Either way, the kid should learn that threats should not be taken lightly, ever, and if nothing else, if he threatened to hit his sister with a baseball bat, you should probably tell someone.