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Rating: 
Summary: Seen it in my family
Review: Do you have to shootup a school to ruin lives??
My greatgrandma's family around 1910, had a very large farm in our state, the kids grew up with a ton of money. The kids were idle, spoiled and spent all their inheritances on booze, and lavish partying hunting trips--ending in squalor later in life. When an older family member died, or passed his farm onto his caretakers, since family didn't want to get dirty with helping, the other family members would spy from the nearby hilltops with binoculars, seething with hatred. Funerals were nice times for family thieving trips where family antiques were stolen. My greataunt was buried in her mother's wedding dress, ending decades of fighting over it.
My grandparents were overly lax with their children, and allowed them to be very violent with each other. Grandma would sleep a lot and socialize, letting the children roam unsupervised. My mom was the oldest, and assumed a lot of responsibility. Her sibs were super-spoiled, and never grew up, always trying to extort their parents even in extreme old age.
My aunt's oldest boy, she spouted everywhere that he was a GENIUS, and never controlled him. He was spoiled, bullying & violent towards his sibs and us cousins. Occasionally, he would go too far, and his dad would beat him, but other than that, ignored or indulged. My aunt indulged all the kids and herself so much with goodies and junk-buying that the family was always in financial and health crisis. Dad ran off.
The violent cousin dominated the family, they lived in fear of him, he bullied the mom and sibs. We even think he sexually bullied his brother and sister, as there is a lot of rage and dysfunction. Still the mom spouts that he is a genius----even though he is now 43, chronically jobless, porn-addict, drugger, married to a pretty-coke-hound, has 4 female children, showered with the youngest girls until atleast age 7 (as reported by his sister), has custody of grandma and is cleaning her out while keeping her on happy pills. He did the exact same with his paternal grandma as well, charmed his family's way in with her, and liquidated the household and finances. We have reported it, but grandma's on so many happy pills, the authorities think she's fine.
While grandpa was alive, the protector of the $$, even though he was in his 90's, he was hit up repeatedly by his children and grifter grandkids. He would say no, but these same relatives would always be too busy to bring food or help out, but kept us from hiring extra help. The Drs said his cancer & diabetes was accelerated by malnutrition. The minute he was dead in his bed, they jumped in the car and tried to empty the bank accounts. Grandma was easy pickings.
I also live in an area where many Billy-Bobs are spoiled by their indulgent parents, and they are going through the exact same things, with the children becoming sociopathic and predatory, ranging from 20's-60's and still grifting, beating up wives, drugs, extorting parents.....
I do think predators are made by loving too much, not enough responsility, etc....and families have to be responsible enough to know when they can't handle a predator...for his own Lifelong sake as well as the family and sibs.....If you could save somebody's life by getting a Remedial alternative living arrangement, or remedial boarding school.....This stuff lasts FOREVER...
Rating: 
Summary: Not about "troubled kids"
Review: Filled with sensational phrases (beginning with the title), this thin little book purports to be reflections on violent children. Beyond dropping a few names, Kellerman has little to add to the question of how to deal with severely troubled children. Instead, he fans the flames of fear and loathing of youthful offenders with sensationalism and rhetoric by alluding to Hitler, Butch Cassidy, and Ted Kaczynski. Maybe the readers of USA Today can find something worthwhile in this drivel, but I found Savage Spawn to be a wasted effort. Try Angry Young Men by Aaron Kipnis for some true insights into "bad boys."
Rating: 
Summary: Kellerman should stick to novel writing
Review: Filled with sensational phrases (beginning with the title), this thin little book purports to be reflections on violent children. Beyond dropping a few names, Kellerman has little to add to the question of how to deal with severely troubled children. Instead, he fans the flames of fear and loathing of youthful offenders with sensationalism and rhetoric by alluding to Hitler, Butch Cassidy, and Ted Kaczynski. Maybe the readers of USA Today can find something worthwhile in this drivel, but I found Savage Spawn to be a wasted effort. Try Angry Young Men by Aaron Kipnis for some true insights into "bad boys."
Rating:
Summary: I expected more
Review: Jonathan Kellerman's comments on NPR's "Fresh Air" convinced me to buy this book. While it was a good introduction to the nature of psychopathy, I found most of his policy proposals politically infeasible, at best. Admittedly, the issue of what to do with budding psychopaths is a difficult question, but Kellerman's suggestion to aggressively place such children in orphanages (or foster homes) rather than waiting to send them to prisons (or cemeteries) begs challenging legal, moral, and social questions that Kellerman all but ignores. He also, naively presumes that such facilities could reasonably be staffed by people as compassionate, dedicated, and insightful as he. Most mental health care workers I know would avoid dealing with such difficult charges. Similarly, his views on the importance of gun control (which I wholly agree with) suggest that Kellerman remains surprisingly ignorant about the strength of the gun lobby in this country. I do believe that Kellerman may have a chance to diminish the hyperbole around the relative importance of violence in the media, if he can teach enough people that correlation is not causation. I hope books like Kellerman's spark some debate in the upcoming election year, but I doubt many of his ideas will be achievable in the foreseeable future.
Rating:
Summary: I expected more
Review: Jonathan Kellerman, best known for his psychological fiction is actually a highly qualified child psychologist. In the non-fiction examination of Violence in Children or "Savage Spawn" as Kellerman titles his work, readers are offered a no nonsense overview of some of the salient issues at play when discussing the contribuors to childhood violence. Having worked with Juvenile Delinquent Adolescents in a residential treatment center for five years of my career, I feel that I have some good insights into the issues Kellerman addresses. Kellerman is appropriately realistic in the need to acknowledge that there is no causation that can be attributed to only nature or only nurture in the causation of male childhood violence. He believes, and I agree, that we have to factor both of these causative contributors together in order to get some insight into violence in kids. I am reluctant to be particularly ready to dismiss the psychiatric role in the prevention and treatment of violence through the treatment of faulty neurotransmitters in the brain. The reality is that millions of people have been helped by the new class of drugs known as SSRI's. Further, Jonathan Kellerman's truly subjective bias against the psychiatric profession on a wholesale scale is somewhat inappropriate on a professional level and actually inaccurate when dismissed completely in the extent in which Kellerman takes his argument. Interestingly or perhaps more ironically, Kellerman is an obvious supporter of treatment of kids with the drug Ritalin -- a psychiatric drug -- which is particularly controversial, certainly overprescribed and questionably effective in a large majority of cases of children under its influence. However, Kellerman has clearly recommended this drug for many of his young patients and often cites his observations of its effectiveness. I support Kellerman's practical advice that what we do not need to see are blue ribbon commissions to study childhood violence. He accurately represents the fact that much is known about problems in children and monies could be better utilized in direct education for kids and even more importantly, parents. We don't need to wait for violence to intervene with children. Early intervention when warning signs are obvious is a very realistic and far underutilized approach to preventing the escalation of patterns of violence in children. There is much to be said for Kellerman's points about family environments which indirectly give children a poor culture for the development of appropriate values. In working with Juvenile Offenders, I often found that the healthiest members of a kid's family was the kid himself -- the one who got into trouble and was removed from the home! They got out of extremely dysfunctional situations that aren't always apparent to the casual observer. My own experience with troubled kids left me with far more empathy for them and an often overwhelming impatience -- even anger -- with their families, particularly parents or parent who seemed to be more immature that their adolescent sons. Kellerman makes some excellent points about the availability of guns to kids and is again quite pragmatic in rejecting convoluted arguments about the "right to bear arms" and the NRA. He simply states he believes guns should not be available or accessible to children until a reasonable age -- similar to our approach to driver's licenses and alcohol. Five and Six year old kids should not be around guns! And, sadly, too often, they are! Kellerman does an excellent job of explaining the difference between psychotic behavior and psychopathology (the primary group considered to be the main perpetrators of the most heinous crimes.) Offically known in the psychiatric profession as those suffering from Antisocial Personality Disorder in the DSMIV, or earlier as Sociopathology, Kellerman makes a strong case that it is in this group we find our most serious offenders. He effectively characterizes sub-sets or types of psychopaths and recognizes that there is indeed such a thing as "evil." I believe Kellerman becomes unnessarily caught up in briefly citing statistical analyses of childhoood violence. However, boiled down, he makes his point that we can't simply accept one causative factor in seeking the roots of violence. I was extremely disappointed that Kellerman failed to address effects of suburban, homogeneous living, and its potential danger for kids, nor the entire -- very important area -- of low self esteem as causative contributors to childhood violence. Kellerman also fails to discuss the impact of the peer violence in the vebal and physical abuse suffered at the hands of peers by those kids who were "different" or issues of the unacceptability of difference of any kind -- behavioral, interests, sexuality, etc. -- and the violence too often present in the peer pressure which lets the kid who is -- in any way different -- know that he is a "reject" or "freak" in the eyes of his peer age group. Aren't some of these kinds of issues extremely significant in the ignition of unexpected retaliatiatory violence. We witnessed some of this type of retaliation in the selectiveness with which the two killers in the Columbine massacre chose who was to live and who they wanted to see dead. Intolerance of difference is often a message clearly delivered in varying forms of violence -- mostly verbal, not atypically verbal, but also commonly physical. Overall, I believe Kellerman's text is a worthy brief overview of some of the major areas to be covered in really examining and learning more about how we should anticipate and prevent violence in children. He provides a very fine bibliography for the interested person who wishess to go beyond his 120 page work on this very urgent and real problem in our country at the close of this century.
Rating:
Summary: Not about "troubled kids"
Review: This is not a book about troubled children in the usual sense of that phrase, meaning children who are who are angry, lonely and unhappy and who act on those feelings in destructive ways, such as getting into fights or taking drugs. This is about a much smaller group: children who are so psychologically damaged that they simply don't experience the normal range of human feelings. Troubled teens might hide their anxieties behind a facade of cool contempt for others; but for child psychopaths, Kellerman suggests, there's nothing behind the facade. They see other people not as fellow human beings, but as objects to be manipulated or dominated for their own ends. Kellerman's most interesting hypothesis here is that such children have not been produced by a general decline in moral or social values; instead, he postulates that this psychological abnormality has probably occurred in a small percentage of the population of every human society that has existed. (This certainly would explain why the vast majority of children who are teased or bullied at school, or who watch violent movies and play violent computer games, etc., are nevertheless nice kids who grow into kind, decent adults.) The main difference now is that adolescent psychopaths on a killing spree have access to more sophisticated, efficient weapons than existed in the past. As other reviewers have suggested, some of the interventions and remedies Kellerman suggests don't seem feasible. That doesn't necessarily mean he's wrong; it's possible that our only other option is to endure periodic school shootings (though that's certainly an upsetting thought). I do think Kellerman might have dwelt more on the question of diagnosis; he's good at describing his own (rare) encounters with child psychopaths and how they differed from his (much more numerous) encounters with troubled boys, but it's unclear whether someone with less experience, training and sensitivity would be able to see and articulate the distinction. Still, the distinction itself, as Kellerman delineates it, is persuasive; and it might at least keep educators and school psychologists from lumping every unpopular, unhappy kid who likes to play shooter games or set off bottle rockets (which is a whole lot of kids) in with mass murderers (which, despite the seeming frequency of school shootings, is a very small number of kids). In any case, this is interesting reading for anyone curious to know how evil arises in individual human beings.
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