Humanities Homework Help

As a future counselor, I seek to assist diverse clients in positive self-development. An essential part of that positive development is acquiring values, establishing self-esteem, and developing a moral self. Developing a solid moral identity seems to predict a person’s capacity to lead a prosocial life (Broderick & Blewitt, 2020). Prosocial behavior is defined here as acting in ways that benefit not only yourself but also others. Antisocial behavior is characterized by aggression and any number of behaviors that harm others, such as cheating, lying, stealing, vandalism, risky behaviors, substance abuse, violence, etc. While the term morality takes on various meanings depending on individuals, groups, and cultures, in all successfully functioning societies, it shares the principles of a common concern for others, a sense of justice, honesty or trustworthiness, and self-control. Like all of development, developing a guiding inner moral self that offers capacity for prosocial conduct is influenced by the coaction of genetic factors and outside influences. A common concern for others, a sense of justice, honesty, and self-control are abilities and behaviors formed and executed by a complex interplay of our emotions, cognitions, and behaviors, so morality goes back to our development of successful integration of all those functions. As a counselor to understand someone’s conduct, what motivated them to act in moral or not moral ways, in prosocial or antisocial ways, I have to step back and look at the bigger picture of my client’s complex, individual history, makeup, and current developmental stage. Understanding normative development will help me determine if and what kind of intervention my client may need. Kohlberg suggested that teens who are on a normative developmental trajectory between the ages 13 -16 are in the stage of social- rational perspective-taking, meaning that they have higher levels of empathy that causes them to consider other’s needs, be more helpful, generous, and forgiving (Mathes, 2019). Preteens who are a little younger, 9- 12 years of age, who are on a normative developmental trajectory are more driven by self-interest and the principles of fair exchange. In reality, we see many preteens and teens struggling with conduct issues and not falling nicely into these descriptions, pointing towards influences that disrupted and derailed normative development. As a counselor, this leads me to seek the answer to the question: What happened to this child?

Description of event and immoral behavior

On June 1st, 2021, in Volusia County, Florida, a 12-year-old boy, and 14-year-old girl broke into a private home, found multiple guns inside that house, and opened fire on deputies who were trying to de-escalate the situation (Levenson et al. 2021). The owner of the house happened to be at Publix with his two daughters during that time. The boy and girl vandalized the home, breaking windows, shooting into the ceiling, and destroying furniture. When officers tried to establish rapport with the children, the children launched several rounds of gunfire inside the house, and at one point, the girl came out armed. She was unresponsive to the police’s requests to put down her weapons, went back inside, and when she came out a second time, she pointed the gun and threatened to kill the officer who tried to talk to her. Subsequently, the police opened fire, injuring the girl and taking both children into custody. The girl was shot in the arm and abdomen but was in stable condition, and the boy was unharmed. When interrogated, the boy stated that when he and the girl realized that police were surrounding them, they wanted to hurt the police officers. He stated that the girl said, “I’m gonna roll this down like GTA,” referring to the video game “Grand Theft Auto”, and they both started shooting, purposefully aiming at the officers.

Clearly, these two young people acted in antisocial ways, violating all kinds of moral standards. There seems to be no logical rationale behind what they did. These actions are hard to comprehend, are shocking to the average, law-abiding citizen. Understandably, the immediate gut response may be that these are “bad children.”

However, the antisocial, immoral conduct the children engaged in is only part of the story. The story starts with the children being born into unstable homes. Both had escaped from their group home when breaking into the house (Levenson et al. 2021). The boy had been in foster care ever since he was two years old and was known to struggle with severe aggression, at one point threatening to throw a brick at his teacher and to kill a student by” spreading his guts all over the bleachers.” The girl who was raised by her single mother was placed in foster care on and off because the mother was unstable and “unable to handle her daughter,” and was brought to the children’s home after having set fires in a parking lot that almost spread and could have burned down homes close by. The story continues with the group home the children were placed in, not being staffed with enough well-trained people who would have the knowledge and capacity to care for children who need a high level of intervention. The home was a child well-fare facility and not a closed facility, resulting in over 300 calls the home placed in 2020 to police, asking for assistance with children having run away from the property or requests for escalation support.

Factors contributing to immoral behavior

One of the officers in the article said: Where have we gone wrong that a 12-year-old and 14-year-old think it is OK to take on law enforcement? (Levenson et al. 2021).

This statement indicates an understanding that antisocial conduct, the lack of development of morality, depends on the context of the larger environment children are influenced by (Broderick & Blewitt, 2020). Children need personal relationships and healthy attachment to caring adults to develop in normative and positive ways. Morality is one, the capacity to make judgments about what is right and what is wrong, and two, to feel motivated or obliged to act accordingly. This capacity develops largely through experiences with adults and how they model behavior, uphold and reward or enforce standards and principles.

Morality requires regard for honesty and trustworthiness. Children who grow up in unstable homes, who form insecure attachments with their caregivers do not learn how to trust others (Wasserman, 2017). As a result, lying and manipulation become functional strategies to stay safe and get one’s needs met. At age 14, the girl in this article, according to Kohlberg’s stages of moral development should have developed a concern for others to a level where that is a motivating force in her conduct (Mathes, 2019). However, clearly, the opposite is the case; she threatened people’s lives and destroyed a stranger’s house. This girl was not thinking about how her actions were harming others. Research increasingly confirms that the development of empathy in children is sustained by attuned parenting/caretaking (Levey et al., 2017). Longitudinal studies have shown that particularly the first years of life shape a child’s later capacity for empathy. I assume that the girl and the boy had not experienced such attuned caretaking in the early years or years after. Therefore their moral developmental trajectory was disrupted.

Self–regulation is another component of morality development and stems from integrated functioning between the brain’s limbic system and cortex functions (Broderick & Blewitt, 2020). Children who have had adverse childhood experiences, who have been subjected to high levels of toxic stress develop over-reactive stress response systems (Wasserman, 2017). This causes them to lack impulse control and resort to fight, flight, and freeze behaviors, which look like aggression, running away, lying, shutting down, and being oppositional, to name just a few that we see the girl and boy engage in here. Broderick & Blewitt (2020) explained the concept of hostile attributional bias (HAB) as the tendency of humans to create stories about events that help us make sense of things. Repeated experience patterns of how the world works and what to expect become the background of our mental operations and influence our behaviors. When surrounded and cornered, the girl did not have the capacity to draw from empathy, a sense of honesty, nor deploy self-regulation skills. Instead, in her mental operation that has formed over years of negative experiences with police, she perceived the police as the enemy. The scene she found herself in was familiar to her through hours and hours of playing life-like video games, and she did what her inner wiring, reactive threat system, and HAB dictated: fight and shoot.

This learned sense of self via feedback loops from adults, like parents, teachers, and peers, also significantly contributes to our self-esteem, which is yet another critical piece in moral development (Broderick & Blewitt, 2020). To be able to value others, we have first to value ourselves. The teaching of James Cooley pointed towards the harm words can do to developing children. It is safe to assume that both children in this article have heard and therefore internalized many messages concerning their value as a person and their behaviors. As Broderick & Blewitt (2020) phrased it, those messages became internal voices that resonated in their psyches and turned into a chronic, negative self-approach. Children who have insecure, disorganized attachments have not had many chances to develop empathy. They are in a constant state of survival and act from an activated fear response system. They have low self-esteem, marked by shame and self-deprecation. They have learned that honesty and trusting others put them in danger and did not have the chance to develop a rational and universally acceptable sense of justice. Their whole life has been unjust. The above factors lead to the type of non-normative aggressive behaviors the children in this article displayed (Broderick & Blewitt, 2020).

Interventions

Considering the many and varied complex processes that contributed to developing the antisocial behaviors the children in this article displayed, it can seem overwhelming to know where to start and how to bring about change. Research has shown that antisocial behavior is often life-course-persistent and that self and relational schemas are resistant to change (Broderick & Blewitt, 2020). Research also established that early conduct problems in children are serious, they need to be treated early, and intervention needs to be multifaceted. Children develop stable moral and prosocial behaviors when homes, schools, and communities speak with one voice. The intervention for these children, therefore, beyond one on one counseling, needs to include their caretakers, their bio parents, their teachers, their social workers, and justice system professionals who interact with them, and it needs to be in stages. The children’s conduct results from years of toxic stress, disorganized attachment to adults, and possible genetic influences, and there will be no quick fix.

In the one-on-one work with the children, working on self-regulation skills to learn to control your body and actions when triggered and angry would be a viable starting point. However, the problem with these kinds of skill-based interventions is that they are generally practiced and carried out in a cold cognition state. Cold cognition describes the mental state when a child feels safe and is not triggered, therefore in charge of executive function and has the capacity to use breathing or other mindfulness techniques. However, in real-life situations, the internal HAB mechanism often kicks in; the child will likely be triggered, therefore have minimal access to cortex unction, and will probably not be able to execute the mindfulness strategies reliably. The effectiveness of such skill practice depends on the children being able to recognize one’s own state, which is hard when other flooding emotions compromise self-awareness. Therefore beyond the isolated one-on-one skill practice with a counselor, children need an attuned regulator, a person who will help them calm and model appropriate behaviors during real-life daily situations (Levi et al., 2019). Self-esteem and morality cannot be acquired in a social vacuum (Broderick & Blewitt, 2020). Therefore, using real-life conflict situations with peers instead of hypothetical ones can increase the child’s ability to apply the skills learned in one-on-one sessions.

In addition to working with the children one-on-one and assisting them with co-regulation, the interventions need to impact all children’s environments. In the case of the children in this article that would be the home or foster care families, the social workers, teachers, and justice system professionals. All these parties need to understand the impact of trauma on development and behaviors, and I would recommend their participation in workshops.

Beyond that, in my opinion, their teachers and their immediate caretakers would benefit from using Restorative Justice practices to teach the children aggression-free conflict resolution, to give the children a voice, and help them get back on the trajectory of normative moral development. Restorative justice is a conflict resolution method based on building trusting relationships (Miller-Jones & Rubin, 2020). It focuses on repairing harm and creating a sense of belonging to a community. There is a growing body of research-based evidence of the positive impact on academic outcomes and reduction of aggression when establishing a culture of restorative justice in group homes and education systems.

Lastly, I would suggest placing the children in a care facility that uses a trauma-informed, authoritative caretaking model or train the staff of their home or foster care parents in such an approach. Caretakers or parents who are demanding without warmth and sensitivity (the authoritarian style) are suspected of interfering with prosocial development and developing empathy (Broderick & Blewitt, 2020). Trust-Based Relational Intervention, TBRI, is an evidence-based therapeutic caretaking model that trains caregivers, parents, and professionals in orphanages, justice systems, schools, and any setting where at-risk children are served, how to provide effective support and treatment for children with antisocial behaviors (Crawley et al., 2021). The staff in the children’s group home they had escaped from did not know how to support the children effectively. That ultimately resulted in the terrible events on June 1st, 2021. TBRI is a holistic approach offering practical intervention tools that assist children in moving away from insecure attachment patterns and getting back on track of normative social-emotional development. TBRI’s pillars are empowering: creating felt safety by meeting physiological, sensory, and regulatory needs consistently; connecting: offering nurturing relationships that hold children to a high moral standard while delivering the attunement they need; and correcting principles: a host of tools to proactively teach social and life skills, to set boundaries based on the child’s capacities and how to respond in trauma-informed ways in moments of crisis (Crawley et al., 2021). TBRI combines practical intervention tools with many of the best practices, Dr. Jackson recommended when helping clients through a lens of morality development (Laureate Education, Producer, 2019). Dr. Jackson stressed the importance of offering time, space, and a calming regulatory presence for the clients, which create the ability to think through a complex issue versus impulsively reacting or shutting down overwhelmed by emotions

Offering this combination of the above-discussed interventions to the children in this article directly and to the adults in their lives is in line with the recommendation for the treatment of children with conduct problems to be multidimensional and targeted at all areas of influence (Broderick & Blewitt, 2020).

Personal closing comment

It stands out to me how complex, time-intensive, and highly skillful the care for children with this level of conduct issues has to be to achieve change. At the center of successful treatment of children, such as those in this article, are trusting relationships. As someone who works in the public system, and in international foster care and orphanage systems, I am shocked that despite all we know about healthy child development, each home, school, office, and child welfare system I encounter is chronically understaffed and underfunded, resulting in horrible scenes like the one described in the article.