Relevant.

[Gob]

But a new Australian study is challenging the view that parents can make no difference. It shows that nurturing can win out. What works is exactly what exasperated parents find hardest to provide: emotional warmth.

The findings of a three-year study of 113 boys aged two to four will be presented at a conference of the International Association for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Allied Professions in Paris next week.

A University of Sydney psychologist, David Hawes, will tell the conference that contrary to earlier studies which found that the quality of parenting had no bearing on the behavioural problems of deviant children, parents who maintained a warm and emotionally engaged parenting style could protect their children from developing aggressive and anti-social behaviour.

''The children's callous and unemotional traits cause parents to become harsher in their discipline and to emotionally disengage,'' Dr Hawes said. ''This is the opposite of what parents should be doing.''

The children in Dr Hawes's study show signs from a very early age of becoming psychopathic adults. They are at risk of becoming the children who stone birds to death, and beat their siblings till they bleed.

''Most strikingly, they will show no guilt, remorse or empathy. They are different from badly behaved, hot-headed children who lash out in reaction to events.

''They are manipulative and calculating. They use aggression in order to get their own way. They are different from children with autism.

''These children can read other people's emotions; they're just not moved by them,'' Dr Hawes said. ''They don't care.''

They are described as having a ''callous-unemotional temperament.'' And they can be identified before they start school.

The usual discipline techniques that work with aggressive hot-headed children, such as time-out for bad behaviour, are much less effective with this harder-to-reach group.

Hoping they will grow out of their problematic traits and behaviour - as is frequently the case with the hot-heads - is also a gamble not worth taking.

''Adults with similar characteristics are disproportionately responsible for violent crime,'' Dr Hawes said.

International research with twins has shown genes do play a strong role in predisposing children to these traits that rob them of a capacity for empathy.

''Callous-unemotional traits are to a large extent under genetic control,'' Dr Hawes said. ''But they are also shaped by the parent-child relationship.''

It was important for parents to curb overreactions and harsh discipline. But they were likely to need professional help to learn how to stay emotionally engaged with children they might not feel connected to.

The research, based on long hours of observations of child-parent interactions, begs the question of whether a label is being misapplied to very young children.

Dr Hawes said parents knew when something was wrong, when their child was an outlier on the continuum of normal empathy.

[dgs49]

I'm quite frankly curious about these "...earlier studies which found that the quality of parenting had no bearing on the behavioural problems of deviant children."

Yet another example of two profound truths of life:

(a) Some ideas are so incredibly stupid that only an "intellectual" could take them seriously, and

(b) You can find a study that "proves" just about anything you would care to prove, no matter how ridiculous.