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Emotional inteligence

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opportunity at all, let alone equal opportunity, to

claim the possibilities of the world as his own. 9

HOW TO RAISE A BULLY

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Much can be learned about the lifelong effects of emotionally

inept parenting—particularly its role in making

children aggressive—from longitudinal studies such as

one of 870 children from upstate New York who were

followed from the time they were eight until they were

thirty. 10 The most belligerent among the children—those

quickest to start fights and who habitually used force to

get their way—were the most likely to have dropped out

of school and, by age thirty, to have a record for crimes

of violence. They also seemed to be handing down their

propensity to violence: their children were, in grade

school, just like the troublemakers their delinquent parent

had been.

There is a lesson in how aggressiveness is passed from

generation to generation. Any inherited propensities

aside, the troublemakers as grown-ups acted in a way

that made family life a school for aggression. As children,

the troublemakers had parents who disciplined

them with arbitrary, relentless severity; as parents they

repeated the pattern. This was true whether it had been

the father or the mother who had been identified in

childhood as highly aggressive. Aggressive little girls

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