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看了这篇文章后，不再纠结了。。。
【纽约时报】接受“好父母会播下坏种子”
“I don’t know what I’ve done wrong,” the patient told me.
一个患者告诉我：“我不知道自己做错了什么。”
She was an intelligent and articulate woman in her early 40s who came to see me for depression and anxiety. In discussing the stresses she faced, it was clear that her teenage son had been front and center for many years.
这是个40岁刚出头的女性患者，言谈睿智，发音清晰，她来就诊是因为情绪低落，精神焦虑。谈及她面对的压力，很明显，多年来儿子一直是她压力的核心。
When he was growing up, she explained, he fought frequently with other children, had few close friends, and had a reputation for being mean. She always hoped he would change, but now that he was almost 17, she had a sinking feeling.
她解释说儿子在成长过程中，屡次跟别的孩子打架，几乎没有亲密的朋友，名声卑劣。她一直盼着儿子改变，可是现在儿子快17了，她要绝望了。
I asked her what she meant by mean. “I hate to admit it, but he is unkind and unsympathetic to people,” she said, as I recall. He was rude and defiant at home, and often verbally abusive to family members.
我问她所说的卑劣是指什么。她回答到：“我羞于承认这一点，可是我儿子真的是刻薄，没有人情味。”儿子粗鲁、叛逆，经常开口辱骂家里人。
Along the way, she had him evaluated by many child psychiatrists, with several extensive neuropsychological tests. The results were always the same: he tested in the intellectually superior range, with no evidence of any learning disability or mental illness. Naturally, she wondered if she and her husband were somehow remiss as parents.
在儿子成长的过程中，她几次把儿子带到儿童精神病学家那里诊断，还做过几次详尽的神经心理学检查，得出的结果几乎都一样：儿子属于高智商的范围，不存在学习能力障碍或精神疾病。对此，她自然联想到是否她和丈夫两个人，在担任父母的角色时存在失职，造成了儿子 现在的情况。
Here, it seems, they did not fare as well as their son under psychiatric scrutiny. One therapist noted that they were not entirely consistent around their son, especially when it came to discipline; she was generally more permissive than her husband. Another therapist suggested that the father was not around enough and hinted that he was not a strong role model for his son.
这对父母经过精神病学的详细检查后，得出了检查结果，父母的检查结果没有儿子的好。一个临床医学家注意到他们在对待孩子上，不是很协调，尤其是涉及到遵守原则的时候；她通常比丈夫更容易动摇。另一个临床医学家指出父亲跟孩子相处的时间不够，暗示他没有给儿子树立坚强的行为榜样。
But there was one small problem with these explanations: this supposedly suboptimal couple had managed to raise two other well-adjusted and perfectly nice boys. How could they have pulled that off if they were such bad parents?
但是，在这些解释之外还有一个问题：这对夫妇，按照刚才的结论，并不是最理想的父母，可是他们成功地养大了另外两个儿子，那两个儿子调整得很好，非常正派。那么如果他们是不称职的父母，又何以把这两个儿子培养成这样呢？
To be sure, they had a fundamentally different relationship with their difficult child. My patient would be the first to admit that she was often angry with him, something she rarely experienced with his brothers.
有一点可以肯定，他们跟困难儿子的关系有根本性的不同，这名患者几乎是第一时间承认她经常对困难儿子发脾气，但很少对另外两个儿子这样。
But that left open a fundamental question: If the young man did not suffer from any demonstrable psychiatric disorder, just what was his problem?
但还遗留下一个基础问题：如果这个儿子证明没有任何精神性混乱，那他的问题在哪里呢？
My answer may sound heretical, coming from a psychiatrist. After all, our bent is to see misbehavior as psychopathology that needs treatment; there is no such thing as a bad person, just a sick one.
一个心理学家给了我解答，答案听起来可能不合常理，毕竟我们倾向于把品行不端看成是心理疾病，需要治疗，我们认为没有品行恶劣的人，只有需要治疗的病人。
But maybe this young man was just not a nice person.
可是，这个年轻人本质上可能就不是个好人。
For years, mental health 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.
多年以来，心理健康专家一直受到教导，要求把孩子看成纯粹是环境的产品，他们本性善良，直至受到外界影响才会改变；如果养成了坏习惯，那么背后一定有一对坏父母。
But while I do not mean to let bad parents off the hook — sadly, there are all too many of them, from malignant to merely apathetic — the fact remains that perfectly decent parents can produce toxic children.
让人心痛的是，的确有许多坏父母，其中有的给孩子带来不良影响，有的对孩子冷漠，等等不一，——但是，我不是为坏父母开脱——还有个事实存在，那就是品行正派的父母也会养出有毒的孩子。
When I say “toxic,” I don’t mean psychopathic — those children who blossom into petty criminals, killers and everything in between. Much has been written about psychopaths in the scientific literature, including their frequent histories of childhood abuse, their early penchant for violating rules and their cruelty toward peers and animals. There are even some interesting studies suggesting that such antisocial behavior can be modified with parental coaching.
我说的“有毒”，不是指的精神疾病——而是指的这些孩子长大后轻则会犯小罪，重则杀人放火，什么都干得出来。精神疾病的科学著作对这方面已有很多论述，包含了童年时代就表现出频繁的辱骂行为，暴露出违反规则的早期倾向以及对动物和同龄人表现出残忍。甚至有一些有趣的研究表明，这些反社会的行为，通过父母的引导训练，能够改正。
But there is little, if anything, in peer-reviewed journals about the paradox of good parents with toxic children.
但是刊物上少有提到这种好父母和毒孩子之间的矛盾关系。
Another patient told me about his son, now 35, who despite his many advantages was short-tempered and rude to his parents — refusing to return their phone calls and e-mail, even when his mother was gravely ill.
另一名患者给我讲述了他的儿子，他儿子今年三十五岁，虽然有很多优点，可是脾气暴躁，对待父母粗鲁无礼——拒绝给父母回邮件，打电话，甚至母亲重病的时候也无动于衷。
“We have racked our brains trying to figure why our son treats us this way,” he told me. “We don’t know what we did to deserve this.”
“我们绞尽脑汁，想儿子为什么这么对待我们。”他告诉我，“不知道我们做了什么，应该受到这样的惩罚。”
Apparently very little, as far as I could tell.
显然找不到线索，我也无能为力。
We marvel at the resilient child who survives the most toxic parents and home environment and goes on to a life of success. Yet the converse — the notion that some children might be the bad seeds of more or less decent parents — is hard to take.
有恢复能力的孩子，也让我们惊讶，他们在“毒”父母的家庭环境下长大，可是他们生活得很成功。可是反过来——还有一些孩子可能或多或少是正派父母播下的坏种子，这个概念——很难接受。
It goes against the grain not just because it seems like such a grim and pessimistic judgment, but because it violates a prevailing social belief that people have a nearly limitless potential for change and self-improvement. After all, we are the culture of Baby Einstein, the video product that promised — and spectacularly failed — to make geniuses of all our infants.
这与现今社会有些格格不入，不仅因为结论悲观、严酷，而且跟社会的主流观点不符合，主流观点认为人具有自我修复和改变的无限潜能。毕竟，我们社会的文化是《小小爱因斯坦》式的，正如其视频产品中承诺的——虽然相当失败——把我们的孩子都培养成天才。
Not everyone is going to turn out to be brilliant — any more than everyone will turn out nice and loving. And that is not necessarily because of parental failure or an impoverished environment. It is because everyday character traits, like all human behavior, have hard-wired and genetic components that cannot be molded entirely by the best environment, let alone the best psychotherapists.
并不是每个人都会辉煌灿烂——也不是每个人都会完美仁爱。这不是由父母的失败教育或是贫穷的环境必然造成的。只是一种平常的性格特征，就好像人的其他行为一样，有直接的遗传因素，就算再好的环境，再好的精神治疗专家也不可能彻底重塑。
“The central pitch of any child psychiatrist now is that the illness is often in the child and that the family responses may aggravate the scene but not wholly create it,” said my colleague Dr. Theodore Shapiro, a child psychiatrist at Weill Cornell Medical College. “The era of ‘there are no bad children, only bad parents’ is gone.”
“儿童精神病专家的核心观点是，这种疾病经常是儿童时期发病，家庭对孩子的反应，可能会恶化这些病症，但病根并不是家庭导致的。” 我的大学同学，西奥多博士这么说。他是康奈尔大学医学院的儿童精神病专家。他表示“‘没有坏孩子，只有坏父母’的时代过去了。”
I recall one patient who told me that she had given up trying to have a relationship with her 24-year-old daughter, whose relentless criticism she could no longer bear. “I still love and miss her,” she said sadly. “But I really don’t like her.”
我回忆起一名患者告诉我，她已经放弃了跟24岁女儿的母女关系，女儿对她的无情责难，让她再也无法忍受，“我还是爱她，想她”，她悲痛地说，“可我真的不喜欢她了。”
For better or worse, parents have limited power to influence their children. That is why they should not be so fast to take all the blame — or credit — for everything that their children become.
父母对孩子的影响力是有限的，这点不知是好还是坏。这也是为什么父母不要急于把孩子所有的过失——或是成绩——都揽于己身，
Dr. Richard A. Friedman is a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in Manhattan.
理查德博士是曼哈顿康奈尔大学医学院的精神病学教授。
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