The Mind column, by Dr. Richard A. Friedman, a professor of psychiatry at the Weill Cornell Medical College, in Manhattan, tackles a subject few doctors or teachers go near.

As the full column notes, there is a lot written about how resilient children emerge whole although they have what are called “toxic” parents.

What happens when bad kids happen to good parents? That’s Dr. Friedman’s topic.

It is an important one.

Americans are advice-givers. We are fond of offering drive-by opinions. Ask any pregnant woman how much advice, commentary and questioning she has faced from total strangers. The world has opinions about how to rear an unborn child.

Then the fun really starts. As soon as the child arrives, more advice, opinions and, at times, judgments are made by those close and those who don’t even know the parents.

In the South I grew up in, a grown man who was guilty of something as small as a slight slip in the manners department all the way up to a full-out scandal, was assessed this way. “I know his mama taught him better than that.”

Some of those mamas did try to teach their sons better than that.

It just didn’t always take.

This column is worth reading if you are a parent with a child who is not mentally ill or criminal—he or she is just a “toxic” person. Miserable. Determined to see others as miserable as he or she is.

This column is worth reading if you are a member of the free-opinions-here club, too. They don’t need to be told they have a bad kid. They know that better than anyone.

The New York Times

“Professionals were trained to see children as mere products of their environment who were intrinsically good until influenced otherwise; where there is chronic bad behavior, there must be a bad parent behind it.

“But there is little, if anything, in peer-reviewed journals about the paradox of good parents with toxic children.”

Source: New York Times, July 12, 2010