Avoiding the Domino Effect - safe guarding your children and others'

To the reader who wrote: "Pretty ironic this is also my first child, huh? Of course I've learned a great deal of patience and my other 3 children are not like him at all, quite the opposite actually."

I reply: It is even scarier when it is your oldest child.  Misery loves company and our son did everything in his power to entice his younger siblings (and the neighbor children) to join him. He provided them with substances and other things that would curl your toes.  He also constantly undermined our parenting.  Whatever we told our children, he'd pull them aside and tell them how awful and unfair and twisted our rules and standards were.  His younger brother was very lost for years and we nearly lost him physically because of it.  He is finding it a long, uphill climb to get out of the hole his brother drug him into at a very tender age.

It was horrifying to watch the domino effect taking place in our family.  We did everything we could, but it wasn't enough.  We learned to take a harder line with the first two and have been able to save the younger ones from falling in line.  Here are some of  the things we learned:

I would recommend that you limit the influence this child has on the others as much as possible.  It is not a good idea for him to be sharing a bedroom with a younger siblings where there is too much privacy and opportunity to "indoctrinate" them and share his substances if he is into them. I would recommend a very firm rule about him not being in their bedrooms and vice-versa, especially if you have a daughter!  You don't know at this point what his potential for wrong doing is, so better safe than sorry.  I wish I had learned that earlier, but I kept trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. 
There is much you can do to protect the younger ones without sending your son a message of complete distrust.  Rely on your parenting instincts.

I would recommend eliminating sleep overs.  Just like with measles, you do not want to be responsible for your sick child infecting your friends' otherwise healthy children, and  your sick child will try!

If you have good grandparents in the picture, enlist them to help you.  They can reassure the younger ones that big brother is temporarily lost and that mom and dad are not over-the-top in their discipline, etc. 

People kept telling us that sending the problem child away wouldn't help because he'd get into trouble where ever he was.  This is true, and we didn't have any place to send him anyway, but in retrospect, I know that it would have saved the younger one if we had sent the older child elsewhere to live.  We felt like he was our problem though, and that we shouldn't push our responsibilities off on anyone else, but hind sight is 20/20...

If your child has conduct disorder and you can afford it, boot camp or one of the other options for troubled teens is the best place if you have younger children.

If I Had It All To Do Over... Raising a Sociopath

The thought of living our sociopath son's teen years over again is absolutely horrifying.  They were such a roller coaster ride of emotions with a lot more time spent down that up.  Our home is generally a very peaceful place to be.  When he was home though, it was the opposite.   It was like he sucked the peace right out of a room upon entering and spewed forth negative energy.  We walked on eggshells, forced to be suspect of his every move. We had to safe guard our wallets, purses, vehicles and younger children.  We felt like prisoners whenever he was home.  It is was like having the enemy in our camp and being powerless to evict him!  Why secure the house each night when the one we feared most was within?

I ask myself frequently what I would do differently if I had it to do all over again.  At that time though, we didn't know how dire his diagnosis was.  We had hopes of saving him from himself, so we kept plugging away.  As a consequence, we lost our next oldest to drugs, alcohol and crime for quite some time. 

I don't know what we could have done differently.  We hung in there.  We tried it all.  We listened to every professional and tried every technique and method suggested.  We read and studied and fasted and prayed and tried to love him through it all.  I was blessed to be a stay-at-home mom so that I could stay on top of things and my husband changed careers so that he wouldn't have to leave town.

In retrospect, knowing what I know now, that we were fighting a losing battle, would I have done anything different?  The only thing I can imagine is that maybe I could have gotten a high enough paying job to be able to put him into a military school.  He went through several fabulous state-sponsored rehabilitative programs, from Therapeutic Group Homes to Detention Facilities to a Wilderness Trek, but they were temporary and I fear he just corrupted the other boys and manipulated the adults, especially the female ones.  What we needed was a place where they were paid to keep him, but it would have had to have been a high security facility and those don't come cheap!  All I've ever wanted in life is to be a full-time mom, but if it would have meant saving my other children from his influence, then I suspect that my returning to work for a few years might have been worth it.

So there you have it, but I have to chuckle, because being a mother, I realize that had we done that, I would probably live in guilt for having "abandoned" him!  There is no escaping the mommy guilt!  It is our lot in life, but I'll take it, for there is no greater calling in life than parenthood.  Though I'd not choose to repeat those years, I would never trade the education I received.  Now where can I go for an honorary degree?

Did you raise a sociopath?  What would you have done differently?  What advice would you offer?