Deborah Capaldi, manager of the study since its inception, says even teen pregnancy can be traced back to their early problems. That matters, says Capaldi, because those adolescent boys often father children they are unprepared to raise. Sometimes they're too rough with the children, sometimes they have totally unrealistic expectations of what a child that age should be capable of doing. It's a pattern of child-rearing researchers observed in the boys' own childhoods. To discover why some boys were violent or troublesome, researchers studied how parents of the fourth graders disciplined their children.
Parents make a demand, then get angry and back down when the child refuses.
Parents who resort to physical violence or simply give in, she says, just make matters worse. The child often learns that getting angry helps him get his way, or that problems can be solved through physical violence. That poor parenting then leads their children into lives troubled by the same problems. But Patterson is optimistic. They don't need 49 years of training.