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human nature adapts to anything with a rhythm.
For people who must accept a fixed external reality, the only way forward is to adjust internal reality.
Mothering involves sailing between what Parker calls “the Scylla of intrusiveness and the Charybdis of neglect.”
A prodigy is able to function at an advanced adult level in some domain before the age of twelve.
Prodigy derives from the Latin prodigium, a monster that violates the natural order.
The designation prodigy usually reflects timing, while genius reflects the ability to add something of value to human consciousness. Many people have genius without precocity, or prodigiousness without brilliance.
Premature attainment and ultimate merit are, however, very different identities.
Norman Geschwind, the father of behavioral neurology, observed that prodigies often have a mix of abilities and challenges including dyslexia, delayed language acquisition, and asthma—“pathologies of superiority.”
musical predisposition is a function of an autistic-type hypersensitivity to sound. According to the Israeli psychiatrist Pinchas Noy, music is the organizing defense of such children against the clatter that assaults them. A number of the musicians described in this chapter likely meet clinical criteria for autism-spectrum disorders.
Many gifted kids have ADD or OCD or Asperger’s.
“She wanted to be in charge of where I was going to go to school, who my friends were going to be, what career I was going to have, whom I was going to marry, what I was going to wear, and what I was going to say. When I started to veer from her notions, it enraged her. She was mercurial, carnivorous, and boundary-disrespecting and thought of me as an extension of herself. My father was unable, or unwilling, or both, to protect me from her.”
citat pt carte mame
When he told his parents he was gay, they were livid. “I resented the parochial affection,” he said. “You get the whole package. You can’t pick the shiny bits from the other bits.”
“I understand why my parents turned against me. We all hate what we don’t understand.”
psychiatrist say about sex in a marriage: “If the sex is good, it’s ten percent. If it’s bad, it’s ninety percent.”
The violinist Yehudi Menuhin said, “Maturity, in music and in life, has to be earned by living.”
Horizontal identities usually originate in the child, then spill over to the parents. Children conceived in rape, however, acquire their horizontal identity by way of their mother’s trauma; here, the children are secondary, and they are much less likely to find others of similar exceptionality with whom to solidify that identity.
80 percent of rapes are committed by someone the victim knows.
“Part of being a mom is actually exerting a little authority over a kid. I’m submissive. I have no authority.”
It calls starkly into question how much of any woman’s love is inherent in mammalian DNA, how much it is a matter of social convention, and how much it is the result of personal determination.
Unfortunately, virtuous parenting is no warranty against corrupt children.
If people believe there is more crime, more police are hired, which leads to more arrests, which lead to statistics that seem to confirm that suspicion.
In most people, though, the criminal potential requires external stimulus to be activated; the intense, internally determined psychopath of the movies is unusual.
In the prefrontal cortex of a fifteen-year-old, the areas responsible for self-control are undeveloped; many parts of the brain do not mature until about twenty-four. While the full implications of this variant physiognomy cannot yet be mapped, holding children to adult standards is biologically naïve.
reinforcing antisocial behavior by creating a permissive atmosphere of denial.
Parental denial, ironically, may contribute to the unspeakable crimes that it later renders invisible.
The fathers who were missing from the lives of the boys I got to know seemed often to occupy more of their psychic energy than did other family members with whom they actually had daily interactions. No one else could substitute for the shortfall in paternal love;
So the gene appears to confer not criminal behavior, but a vulnerability to develop such behavior under certain circumstances.
In addition to innate predisposition, three risk factors wield overwhelming significance in the making of a criminal. The first is the single-parent family.
Kids from single-parent homes are more likely to drop out of school, less likely to go to college, and more likely to abuse substances. They will work at lower-status jobs for lower pay. They tend to marry earlier and divorce earlier and are more likely to be single parents themselves. They are also much more likely to become criminals.
The second risk factor, often coincident with the first, is abuse or neglect,
John Bowlby, the original theorist of attachment, described how abused and neglected children see the world as “comfortless and unpredictable, and they respond either by shrinking from it or doing battle with it”—through depression and self-pity, or through aggression and delinquency. These children commit nearly twice as many crimes as others.
The third giant risk factor, which often accompanies the first two, is exposure to violence.
Unlike adults, juveniles most often commit crimes in groups; less than 5 percent of early offenders act alone, and groupness often determines their criminal patterns, part of the youthful urges to fit in and impress.
Finding a horizontal identity can be life’s greatest liberation, but it can also be crushing,
The legend of crime is that it is spurred by parents who hurt their children. The legacy of crime is that children hurt their parents. Often, the pain attached to that transgression blots out all other remorse.
Only one of ten juvenile prisons uses family therapies, and only about a quarter of these do so consistently. We rail against the atrocities perpetrated by kids, but we consistently choose the satisfaction of retribution over the efficacy of prevention.
To discard the prison system in favor of therapeutic interventions would be crazy; but a prison system that is used without therapeutic intervention, as in much of the country today, is at least equally crazy.
Western culture likes binaries: life feels less frightening when we can separate good and evil into tidy heaps, when we split off the mind from the body, when men are masculine and women are feminine. Threats to gender are threats to the social order.
If we countenance people who want to chop off their penises and breasts, then what chance do we have of preserving the integrity of our own bodies?
The term transgender is an encompassing term that includes anyone whose behavior departs significantly from the norms of the gender suggested by his or her anatomy at birth. The term transsexual usually refers to someone who has had surgery or hormones to align his or her body with a nonbirth gender.
But trans children are not manifesting sexuality; they are manifesting gender.
Gender dissonance can manifest extremely early. By age three or four, sometimes even younger, children may notice an incongruity between who they are told they are and who they sense they are. That discrepancy has been called gender identity disorder, or GID. In early childhood, gender nonconformity is often tolerated, but by seven or so, children are pushed hard into gender stereotypes. Trans children may respond to such pressure by becoming anxious and depressed.
Scientists, psychologists, clergy, and academics argue about whether bodies should be altered to accommodate minds, or minds to accommodate bodies.
Parents who support their child’s transition—the shift away from a natal gender—must refer to that child by a new name; they must use new pronouns; and they must switch the words son and daughter. Linguistic chaos often ensues. “He’s my daughter,” one mother explained to me as she introduced her transgender son.
Trans people often refer to the nontrans population as cisgender, borrowing the idea from the cis-trans distinction in chemistry; the Latin prefix cis means “on the same side.”
Three early behaviors are often taken as indicators of fixed identity: what underwear the child selects; what swimsuits the child prefers; and how the child urinates.
Natal males who become females are often unconvincing as women when clothed because of their height and the thickness of their bones; however, their postoperative genitalia, sexual response, and urination patterns can be almost identical to those of genetic females. Natal females who transition can usually pass in public once they develop facial and body hair, deep voices, and, in many instances, male-pattern baldness, but their sex organs are noticeably different from the genuine article; most cannot urinate while standing up, and none can achieve a male orgasm.
Most professionals working with trans people follow the Harry Benjamin Standards, which require that the patient live in his or her preferred gender for at least a year and complete a full year of psychotherapy prior to surgery or hormone treatment, and that two clinicians, one a doctor, recommend medical procedures.
These safeguards are intended to weed out people at risk of postoperative regret, though many complain that they eat up time when a despairing person could be achieving happiness through a speedy transition. They also protect health-care providers from liability.
“We are who we are as a result of who we love,”
