Sergeant Thorne wrote:Kilarin wrote:Sergeant Thorne wrote:I'm no parent, and I'm confident that even I could deal with a 'psychotic' child.
That's like saying, "I've never played a computer game, but I'm confident that even I could beat the end boss in Descent"
You're making a lot of assumptions, there.
Well, assumptions do seem to be an issue here.
I'm with Top Gun on this. Honestly, it's amazing how much I thought I knew about parenting before I became a parent. And then, after 9 years of raising a kid I thought I had learned something, and suddenly my son ends up in a wheelchair.
From my personal experiance I can say that being a kid and being around kids does NOT mean you understand what it means to be a parent. And raising an ordinary kid does NOT mean you know what is involved in raising a special needs kid. From that bit of personal knowledge I would further extrapolate that raising an only child does NOT teach you all you need to know about raising multiple children. And that raising a child in a wheelchair does NOT give you all the knowledge you need to raise a child with Downs Syndrome. Etc.
Sergeant Thorne wrote:in writing what I've written I've only meant what I wrote, and nothing more. If you think maybe I've disconnected from reality, then that is what it is,
The problem is that I'm not always the sharpest knife in the drawer, and sometimes I have a hard time following things. I'm not trying to read into what you are saying, I just honestly didn't understand it. That's why I asked for clarification.
Sergeant Thorne wrote:but unless I've explicitly denied the existence of physical chemistry problems... I haven't
So you DO acknowledge that some kids are born with physical problems that affect their behavior. Ok, good, we are on the same page here.
And you follow with:
Sergeant Thorne wrote:because I deny that those are ultimately the causes of severe or major character flaws in the face of an otherwise ideal environment.
And I may agree with you here as well. We have choices, even if our genetics predispose us to certain problems. Genetics can make it harder to resist alcohol, or easier to be violent, but those genetic predispositions do not excuse making the wrong choice. Some choices are harder than others, but you still have a choice. We ALL have a genetic predisposition to sin, that doesn't excuse our sin.
But its also obviously true that these physical problems make certain choices much more difficult for the people who suffer from them. A child with REAL hyperactivity will have to work much, much, much harder to learn self discipline and quiteness. This means you can fully expect the learning process to be longer and many orders of magnitude harder for them, so there will be correspondingly more failures and difficulties along the way.
ALSO, some really severe conditions seem to severly limit or even remove much of the element of choice. schizophrenia or bipolar disorder and the like. These diseases don't just make temptation more difficult, but they attack the power of choice itself. I don't know enough about these conditions to say whether the sufferers always have a choice, but I think the implications are that often do not. Without medication, they become victims seem incapable of making rational choices and no longer responsible for their own behavior.