Customer Reviews

High Risk: Children Without A Conscience

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I want to start out by saying that I feel the review from August 1997 did an extreme injustice to this book. They said that it was a partial review. Their statements made 2 things very obvious. The first is that they did not really know or understand or know what they were talking about with regard to the holding therapy. The second is that they have never dealt with a child that has significant attachment problems.

This is an excellent book, and should be required reading for all divorce attorneys, all parents going through a divorce, and all judges who deal with divorce cases involving children.

The book discusses what attachment is, and what can happen when attachment (bonding) to people does not occur. It helped my wife and I to understand what was happening with a foster daughter we had that we later adopted. We received her at 10 months old, and she had never been with a person long enough to bond. Picking her up was like picking up and cuddling a large board. The little girl did not want to be with anybody that she knew. She would reach out and ask any stranger to take her.

This little girl's problems were severe enough that if she had been older, she would have been very likely to kill. It has taken years of work and patience to help her to develop a deep attachment with people.

One of the problems that this book addresses and helps people to understand is the typical length of time that a child can be apart from their primary caretaker without significant attachment difficulties being likely to occur. This is very important for parents and judges to understand.

After years of trying to deal with and straighten out my stepdaughter's ADHD, I discovered this book while searching for more written material on discipline techniques, and more books on ADHD. I read a lot of books on ADHD, and tried to work through her problems.

When I discovered this book and took it home, I felt my adrenaline begin pumping as I read further. After I was done with this book, I realized that although my stepdaughter did not have fascination with blood and gore, she fitted into all of the other catagories. She didn't physically hurt people, she mentally and emotionally hurt those who she had a beef with. For the first time, I felt like I KNEW what was really happening.

Keep in mind that this book is not stating that everyone is going to become a serial killer. Just like with any syndrome, there can be anything from mild to severe symptoms.

I feel that anyone who feels "sorry" for children going through holding therapy have no clue as to how serious it is. I have one suggestion: try borrowing an unattached child for a couple of weeks and see what you think then. Actually, try it for a few years. Then you'll REALLY know what it's like. It is pure ignorance to turn these children into "victims". They may be children, but they are the future perpetrators. Wake UP!

Unlike the above reviewer (who didn't finish the book) I feel this was an extraordinary book that should be required reading to anyone who has any connection to children. I mean, if you ever were a kid, had a kid, taught a kid, or adopted a kid you must read this book. I adopted an 8 year old with an attachment disorder, and let me tell you, it ain't pretty.

As a personal life coach and elementary school teacher, I found this book extremely helpful for both parents and professionals who want to know more about high risk children and positive parenting. I have heard Dr. Magid speak and his personal approach with children is to positively engage them and to look at their strengths. Although he reported in the book about many different treatment processes, he did not endorse one over another, and I like the fact that he clearly discussed how early consistent love is the best treatment for children. His empathy for children in trouble and their frustrated parents is clearly evident to me.

Thank you so much for putting into easy to understand words so that regular people will know what 'unattached' and 'unbonded' mean. We were dealing with many of those issues with a child we became guardians of. We knew something wasn't right but did not know what. We looked on the internet, talked with friends and family, asked at our local library for help. After reading 20 books on the subjects of adoption and foster parenting we finally came up with 'High Risk' and everthing came together. We were in shock at first until we read that not all psychopaths exhibit all the symptoms outlined in the book. Our child had many of them and we felt better because we became empowered by this knowledge and were able to move ahead and try to help him and our situation. I recomend this book to anyone who can read. It should be a must for anyone contemplating becoming a parent. Please help these children by not creating them first. Please help them by reading this book and taking the next steps.
The doctor tells us it will be years of therapy before he may bond again. Until then we will do whatever it takes to help him.
Good luck to those who suffer with this problem.

This book was a lifesaver for my family. I had unknowingly adopted a daughter with Reactive Attachment Disorder and this book was the insight I had into what was wrong. This book is well written and extremely accurate. My daughter who is now grown has read this book and feels that it is a very accurate representation of RAD. Unfortunately, the realities of RAD can be very frightening and often people try to discredit the information in the book due to their lack of knowledge.

I highly recommend this book for any parent who is considering adopting or has adopted an older child. Knowledge will help you adopt a child that is appropriate for you family or provide you with the support you need to help a child you already have in your family.

I am a child therapist with expertise in the area of attachment disorders. This book has been exceptionally useful to many parents of the children who I treat. The implications for a society that does not value high quality parenting on a national basis are shocking. If you ever wondered why so many "gangster types" can terribly harm other people without remorse, wondered how 6 year olds can molest babies, wondered what the implications are when young teens with poor parents become poor parents...then this is your book. Clear and concise. I have met the auther and attended one of his workshops and he is a heck of a nice guy who really cares about kids

I stumbled across this book when it was first issued in 1987 and have found the information contained in it to be extraordinarily useful and accurate. It is a book about how sociopaths are made. When you consider that many of the 20th century's most prominent personalities have been sociopaths (Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot), it becomes clear that this is not a trivial subject. That said, it is amazing how little good information is available on sociopathy (now called "Antisocial Personality Disorder," once called "Psychopathy"). Dr. Magid really nails it. One of the perverse pleasures of reading this book is that he describes the typical childhood of the sociopath so well that every time you read about the life history of a tyrant or serial killer, you can basically predict what will be said: Abandonment & rejection by the parents, brutal physical punishment, and frequently a history of head injury and torturing animals. This book is essential reading for anyone who must deal with personality disordered individuals, which is to say, for everyone on the planet (they often rise to positions of considerable power -- ever wonder about your boss?)

The Nightmare is here. How many times have you wondered...will the end of life as we know it come with a nuclear holocaust, or a meteor, or a worldwide epidemic? An epidemic: perhaps a super tuberculosis, or an antibiotic resistant salmonella, or a mutant STD. A disease that will burn through us and leave the world silent. We are preparing for such a disaster as best we can, investing in vaccines, seeking methods of detection and cure. We grow pahtogens in test tubes and study them, gaining confidence in our control over their brutal powers. But the epidemic we fear is here, now, eating us away. It grows in no test tube, fears no medicines, and thrives on its own waste. It began several thousand years ago, in small pockets of humlan misery, making a carrier of each sufferer who helplessly transmitted the disease life-long to...children. And they, growing up, became carriers and expanded the range of destruction. No one knows where it started, but certainly it spread across the steppes of Russia, through India and Africa, and to Old Europe from whence it sailed to the New World bringing far worse than smallpox to the native peoples of America. It is here, with us, now, in the schoolyard bully and the child who murders, in the con man and the avaricious politician. It glimmers dully in the pale light of CAT scans and in the chemistry and structure of the brain. It is a failure to thrive, a loss of opportunity, a malnutrition of being. In their book, Dr. Magid and Carol McKelvey compile the data of destruction, the epidemic of our failure to our children. They note: "Infants deprived of...important sensory stimulation during the first months of life suffer dramatically. Severe mental retardation is often the result: with lesser degrees of abuse leading to children (and then adults) who can neither give nor receive affection, who are cruel, who engage in self-destructive behaviors, who lie, steal, and who themselves may continue the cycle of depravation on their own children. The aut! hors state that, "...prior to birth the fetus possesses a full complement of neurons and if these neurons are damaged there is virtually no regeneration...the goal during the later months of pregnancy and during infancy and early childhood is to get the neurons organized into patterns of responsiveness." Minimal brain damage may be caused by organic problems, or it "...may occur in a child who has not experienced the (parenting) necessary to get a reasonably organized nervous system", leading to 'unattached children'. "It is impossible to tell which unattached children will become serial killers, but we do know that some will become murderers. Others will become manipulators, thieves, con artists, wife-beaters and child abusers." This book includes life histories of both adult and child murderers, the causes and symptoms of failed development as well as the consequences of interrupted brain development and states: "The killers are just the tip of a massive iceberg. The message this book has for you is that the chances for increasing numbers of psychopaths are escalating. We must search for answers to the pressing social problems that are helping to create unattached children." If you only have time and energy in your life to become knowledgable and involved in one public issue, there can be no more urgent one than this. "High Risk" not only explains the biological basis for the rise in violence among children in our country, but also sets out reasonable and viable methods for turning the trend around. This is an excellent read and one of the important books of our time.

This book is the largest compilation of studies ever done on the study of unattached children. Although it was published in 1980, still today it is the most in depth study to attachment disorders across the board. It may have outdated methods but critical readers know better than to not look beyond that. The theories about unattached children may not be answered but anyone working with children, or have any close relationships with children need to read this to understand why the attachment bond is so critical to a child's development, not only for the rest of the worlds sake but for the child's sake as well. All of my childhood development classes have had this book on the must read list for the last ten years.