Children Who Kill: Personality Patters Are Identified

''I don't know the girl so why should I have any feelings about what happened to her?'' According to Bryce Nelson, these are the impactful words from a 15-year-old boy who has been indicted for murdering a 6-year-old girl (“Children Who Kill: Personality Patters Are Identified,” par. 13). How does an innocent baby turn into a child or adolescent who murders? Children are not born to be cold hearted killers, they become this way due to their surroundings. While there seems to be a plethora of reasoning’s for this topic, one explanation is very evident; environment is the sole purpose these children commit such heinous crimes. In Visualizing Psychology, Siri carpenter and Karen Huffman stated, “our development is rooted in the concept of self

In a study done by Kenneth G. Busch, Adolescents Who kill, he noted that children who murder came from violent and aggressive families (484). Busch’s claim is proven factual by his research. Busch, studied 1,956 delinquents and out of the 1,956 delinquents 142 were homicidal. His study found that almost 60 percent of the teenage killers came from a violent home (476). He also found that 25 percent of child murders in his study were children who had experienced physical abuse, and this finding was significantly higher than the 20 percent rate found in the nonviolent family groups (476,483). If a child spends their entire life, which could be merely 16 years, with family members who are violent then how is a child\adolescent to know that it is immoral to act out in such violent ways? It is evident in Busch’s study that a child or adolescent doesn’t need to be physically abused to become a murderer. A child living in a hostile environment alone can turn a child into a killer. Like Busch, David M. Shumaker and Ronald J. Prinz concluded in their findings in “Children Who Murder: A Review” that exposure to violence may affect youth in two distinct ways. The first impaction may be that a child who lives in a home where abuse and violence are common may fail to experience adequate nurturance and socialization. Secondly, and most importantly, violence in the home may become normalized (qtd.

Without even realizing it, a child’s social status can determine the type of child that he or she will become. Unfortunately, children who are raised in low income families tend to live in lower class communities. There is an intense amount of pressure on parents who live in low income families. Parents who live in these low-class communities seem to consistently have more struggles. However, those struggles can affect a child negatively. It can even help mold them into murderers. “Influence of Child Behavioral Problems and Parenting Stress on Parent- Child Conflict Among Low-Income Families: The Moderating Role of Maternal Nativity” by Aileen S. Garcia et al., states that low income parents experience high anxiety due to their economic environment (315). When a parent has high anxiety, they tend to lash out more with anger against their child. In the previous paragraph, it is learned that children who experience violence become violent themselves. Similar findings were found in “How Parents Income, Time and Job Quality Affect Children’s Health and Development” by, Jan m Nicholson et al. Nicholson found that low income families affect the child’s development process. Nicholson stated, “Children whose health and wellbeing is most vulnerable to inter-generationally transmitted