Adolescent Criminality Is A Developmental Signal, Not An Identity

The scariest part of adolescent criminality is how fast a family can start talking like the future is already decided. When a teen gets suspended again, fights again, or ends up on the radar for drugs or threats, “lost cause” can start to sound like a fact instead of a feeling. I want to slow that moment down and look at what it’s really made of: fear, anger, shame, emotional neglect, and a lack of effective intervention, all colliding inside a developing brain.

I walk through why adolescent criminal behavior is not a fixed identity. It’s a developmental signal, and what develops can change. You’ll hear a therapy story about a 15-year-old who keeps fighting, expects to be judged, and can’t describe what happens inside him until we start naming it together. The goal is simple but not easy: move from acting to thinking, from discharge to expression, and learn how to interrupt the sequence before consequences land.

Parents are not powerless spectators here. I explain why punishment, shaming, withdrawal, and predicting prison may feel like control but rarely produce lasting change, and what helps instead: steady, predictable responses, clear boundaries that hold, and a relationship that separates the unacceptable behavior from the still-worthy child. I also share how a parent’s own history can fuel a destructive loop, and how curiosity and reflection can open new options without turning everything into blame.

If this topic hits close to home, take one step after listening: ask for help and get informed about adolescent development. Subscribe, share this with a parent who needs it, and leave a review so more families can find support, and tell me what’s hardest to hold onto when your child’s behavior scares you.

Transcript

Why Labels Make Things Worse

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Hello and welcome back. This is Kim Lee, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist, and this is episode six in the series Understanding the Psychology of Adolescent Criminality. Now, the last episode I think was very important in as much as what it did was to provide a view of the context in which criminal activity, deviancy, delinquency, acting out very often has its roots. And I referred to emotional neglect. Children who reach adolescence and sometimes pre-adolescents who cross the line, so to speak, are on a pathway which leads them into repeat offending. And it's the lack of intervention, I think, which of course increases the risk. Well, whose responsibility is it for intervening? And the simple answer is everybody's. Now in the life of some families, there really does feel like there's a point of no return. Something's happened and the line's been crossed often frequently. And it can feel as if everything that came before has been replaced by what has happened now. And it's because of this that a kind of label begins to form. And it's it can very often become this is who this person is now, this is who this young person has become. And to me, that's like a sentence. When I hear parents describing children as a lost cause, or that they're a waste of time, or that they will end up in prison, or that they will come to nothing, or that they have wasted everything they've been given. To say my heart sinks is an understatement, because that is entirely the kind of emotional climate that almost fuels the inevitable outcome. Now, I would say alongside that I can understand why parents might feel this way. However, what you feel doesn't have to be what you think and then become. You have to stop and ask yourself, how has this happened? Just asking the question can open your mind to looking at the different factors, putting the pieces together. Because once we do that, then we know what we're dealing with. And I think alongside this, there's there are other questions, obvious ones, and they're painful and they're difficult, and we don't know the answers. And I think the biggest one is can this change? What will change this? Over the course of the series, we've moved through behavior, brain development, and attachment, shame, the environment. And today we come to the question that matters most. What happens next? But we must begin here because recovery doesn't begin with reassurance. I am not somebody who would be inclined to say don't worry because. I would say do worry because, and that because is because without intervention, children and young people grow into the difficulties that they have and then become them. And some of the behaviors we're talking about are really quite serious because they cause harm, they create fear, alienation, and they have consequences that are sometimes very serious. And these are realities that must be faced, not avoided, not minimized. Quite often in the consulting room, I will say to parents, where do you think this is going? What do you think will happen if this is not intervened in? And most parents will have an answer. But it's almost at that point that we say, okay, this is the reality, this is where we are now. We don't have to stay here, but we do have to acknowledge it. I'm not going to offer you a reassurance that this is going to get better. What I am going to do is to say that if we understand where we are now and also how we got here, then it becomes possible to look at what's needed to alter what is potentially an inevitable outcome. So what we what we have to first understand is that the child is not the problem or the offender or the one who always, whatever it might be. Because when we do that, something closes. You know, it's like the parent who says, I wash my hands of them. It's it's it's a kind of, although understandable, it's a position that keeps us locked. Adolescent criminal behavior is not a fixed identity, it is a developmental expression that can be complicated by other factors. And what develops can change. I had a 15-year-old boy a few years back who was constantly getting into all sorts of difficulties, but largely characterized by fighting. He had a particular penchant for aggravating and confronting older boys, who of course would weren't accommodating from the point of view of saying things like, Really, you don't want to do this. And so he got into lots of trouble, repeated suspensions, and ultimately excluded. And when he first came to see me, he was guarded, suspicious, dismissive. And I remember him saying, I can't help it, I just have to do it. And there was a kind of mischievous quality about it, but of course, there wasn't really anything funny as far as therapy was concerned. He said, This is pointless, it's not going to change anything. And in some ways, he's right. Because what he is expecting is that I, just like everyone else, will probably judge him. In the beginning of our work, he said very little about himself, but he did he did talk about things he was interested in, things that he was good at, from his point of view, things that he liked. There weren't many because generally speaking, he regarded himself as a failure, who just got into trouble. But gradually there was a there was a shift. I think because I engaged with him at that level, and that I was interested in wanting to know about those things that were healthy in him, it then became possible for him to take little steps into what wasn't working, but also to be able to tolerate me saying things like, Look, these things are great, you know, they're they're really good. I don't know that I I I've met someone who's quite as able and so talented in this area. And these were things to do with his hands and not just fighting. You know, this this is this is really good. And he did some woodwork and he brought it to the session to show me. And and then it was possible for me to say, you see, the thing is, you've got all these things that are really good about you. But what happens is that once you get into some kind of fight or something else, people don't see that. And it's a real shame because I can see it, I can see that it's there. And I think for the first time, he was face to face with the part of him that really he didn't know how to manage. But it was it was done in a gentle but truthful kind of way because it was coupled with, so this is where we are now. We've got two Benz. We've got the Ben who can do all these incredible things, and then we've got the Ben who doesn't feel very good about himself, who gets into trouble and fights and you know, people are afraid of. So this was, I think, like the beginning of a kind of relationship that was able to see who he really was and what he really did. So over time, we began to work on fundamentals, things like understanding what was happening inside him before the impulse occurred. This is the sort of psychoeducational approach. I'm trying to introduce children and young people to what is happening inside, what they're experiencing, what we call that, how we understand it, how we can slow things down, how we can stop and see, how we can think before acting. It's a not a simple process because very often we're talking about people with inflamed central nervous systems who just react. But by naming feelings with him and helping him to learn to pause and then think about consequence, it was possible for him to begin to foresee possible outcomes. And we must have replayed goodness knows how many incidents where when when we went back through them sort of microanalytically, in every instance he was able to say, Ah, now if I'd done that. And every time he would do that, I'd say, That's really good. You know, you can actually see what went wrong. Our task is now to learn to see the possibility of that before it happens. He would often say, I knew I was going to lose it. And I would say, lose it, what is it, what does that mean? What does losing it mean? And he said, I knew I would. And then he would describe the behavior. And I would say, look, before that happened, something got lost in you beforehand. It was something inside you that got lost. And he he he learned little by little that what I was talking about was the thing that was lost or was absent was the thinking. He had the impulse, then the behavior without the thought. And then, of course, he faced the consequences. But one day he came to a session and he said, I did really well. And I said, Tell me, and he said an older boy had say provoked him. I I think because he was good value for the all the other other pupils at the school, they would always get a reaction from him. I don't think it was so much a kind of provocation, it was more like a flick the switch and what him watch him go. And something had happened in class and he was being he he was being sort of mildly provoked. And I said, So what happened? He said, Well, I knew I was going to lose it, but I walked out instead, and I thought, you know, two things. I knew I was going to lose it, meaning I stopped and I thought, and I thought enough to realize leave. And that's exactly what he did. Now, not a perfect solution, but my goodness, what what what a million miles away from where he had been. And this is where change begins, not in perfection, but in the kind of interrupting of the sequence that normally resulted in him getting into trouble. So recovery isn't immediate or linear or complete. It's gradual, it's uneven, and it's built through repetition, repeatedly trying to get it right in a way that works. Now, this is where parents become central. This is incredibly important, and I say this pretty much to every every parent I work with, because the as soon as parents realize that there is that they are part of the solution, something changes. Now, what helps children to change isn't punishment, withdrawal, labelling, shaming, predicting horrible outcomes, withdrawing objects. That doesn't help change. It it might provide a sense of temporary control, but it doesn't work because if it did, you wouldn't keep having to do it. So what helps is something which is far more difficult. When the child is acting out in some way, they can't think. So if we meet that state with more intensity in ourselves, we just amplify it. So instead of why did you do that? Why would you, why would you have uh why didn't you think? What we do is we say, okay, let's have a look, what happened. And what what was happening just before that happened, like I did with Ben. What we're trying to do is we're trying to help insight and awareness. We're asking the child and teaching them that we have to make sense of things. Now, admittedly, when you have situations where the criminality has become quite embedded, by that time children are going to become more entrenched in this identity, and they're going to be hyper alert to criticism and gentle inquiry, however well intended, can also feel like criticism. So children don't need strong reactions, they need predictable, steady responses. They still need boundaries, but boundaries that hold, not reject and punish. Boundaries are essential, but they must communicate that there is a distinction to be made between the behavior that is not acceptable and the child who unconditionally is. One mother came to me and she was incredibly critical of her son. I can't use all the terminology that she did, but she was colourful in her language. But she said he's completely out of control. He's a waste of time. All he does is make life difficult. He argues with his stepfather, he threatens his stepfather. He's just like his biological father. He's aggressive towards me. He's aggressive towards his younger brother. He's involved in drugs. He's getting into trouble at school. He's he's been suspended more times than I can remember. Now, this is this was not a great picture, and everything that she was telling me was true, but everything she was telling me was was said with an almost venomous intent. I asked her about her experiences before she and the boy's biological father had divorced, and what I then heard was a very hurt woman who was really very damaged by her experiences, and her own background was not at all safe and was lit with experiences of neglect and judgment. She'd married somebody who was heavily involved in drugs and crime, and she described him as being very abusive and an addict. So her son, who was behaving in ways that were similar to the biological father, aroused in her all of the feelings of hurt and and hatred. And so she was then projecting this onto the son, and they got caught up in a loop where her fear was that he was becoming his biological father. His experience of her was that she had already already decided that was the case. The boy was stuck, and so was she. When we began to look at how all of this was put together, and we looked at why her son was really quite disenfranchised and was now in trouble with the police for possession and for making very significant threats of violence, we could see, we could put together how he had arrived at that point. And what I tried to do was, without sort of encouraging her to think that she was to blame, what I tried to do was to explain how these things evolve. And as I said before, once we have an understanding of that, then we open up options. Sometimes I just go straight in and I'm too hard. A bit like him, really. But that was that was a really important realization because it then made it possible for me to say, of course you do, because that's a reaction that you've learned. So what we have to do is see how we can learn something new. And she was really receptive, and I think it's because she she had a really significant moment, moment of awareness, and rather than turning it into failure, she had a real kind of sense of curiosity about herself. Now that is vital because that then can create a shift. She then began to respond differently, not permissively, but a bit more reflectively and quietly. And hard though it was for her, she learned to just stop in the moment. And gradually the dynamic between she and her son began to change. Now, the critical truth here is that children don't change in isolation, they change in relationship. When I began working with children, it was with young offenders, young people who had committed all manner of crimes. And the single most important thing they needed was a grown-up who could accept them as they were. And bit by bit, when they realized that they mattered to someone, and they mattered to a grown-up who could tolerate them and who could see who they were, the acting out behaviors decreased and really decreased. Parents, therefore, are in the most privileged position to alter the traject trajectories. They really are, because rather than being a sort of force of criticism, they can become a source of facilitating. Children make mistakes, you know, and and sometimes one of the best things we can do is say, look, it was a mistake. Okay, you didn't mean to have this outcome. It wasn't something you intended. It's a mistake. But with mistakes, we have to put them right and we have to learn. But you have to be alongside the adolescent when you're doing that because they need an anchor. They can't do it themselves. So they drift and they drift into pretty turbulent environments. So the work ultimately is this to help the young person move from acting to thinking, discharging to expressing, and defining themselves by behavior to understanding themselves, we have to provide a context in which they learn that. And I think. How we do that is by really paying attention to what's going on behind the behavior. And I know I say this in probably every podcast, and the reason I do that is because it's true. That's what we have to do. We have to make contact with the person behind the behavior. The behavior is concerning, but it is not the problem. It becomes one, of course. That means we have to we have to let go of some of our principles, or rather, the ideas we might parent by. Sometimes I hear parents say, well, they should be able to. And I think, which big book of wisdom does that come from? How that doesn't make any sense. I think what you're really telling me is that you don't know what to do. So somewhere there is a rule that the child will automatically know. Now that sounds like a really harsh thing to say of parents, but what I'm saying, and I do say this to parents, why should they? And they say, because he's 12, and I say, okay, and how does that make a difference? Because if we work on the principle of how things should be, we would have a very different world. What we have to do instead is say, things are the way they are. How did it get that way? And how do we intervene? Now, hope is really something that has to be underpinned by something which is reasonable and reasoned. Not every story resolves easily, and not every situation changes quickly, but many do, more than we might think. Because adolescence isn't a fixed state, it is a period of neurological plasticity, developmental movement, and possibility. If we lose sight of a child, we lose the child, particularly when the behavior becomes difficult, and particularly when fear and anger enters the picture. But the child is still there. We have to connect with the child. And we have to connect with the child with the child in a way that accepts them where they are. It doesn't mean that we're accepting what they're doing, but we are accepting where they are. Very often parents will try and fix things entirely understandable. I had a girl say to me recently, I don't talk about what I feel like because the moment I do, everybody jumps in. And I said to her, jumps in and she said, Well, everybody then tells me what I should do. And I said, Do you do you feel like saying I don't I don't need that? I'm I'm just sounding off. And she said, No. And I said, and why's that? And she said, because they'd be upset and they don't want to hurt their feelings. And I was thinking, what an unfortunate situation because the parents are doing what they think is a good idea because they love their daughter. But actually what they don't realize is they're closing her down. And so I said to her, look, maybe, maybe what you need to do is just say, I know you care, but all I want to do is I just want to say it. But if I need help, I'll ask. I don't know whether that happened, but I think the point here is very often we don't listen, or if we do, we don't, we don't hear, because we're actually thinking about, we're only hearing what we're thinking and what we're going to say next. That way lies conflict. Behind every act that disturbs us and every moment that alarms us, every behavior that feels difficult to understand, there remains something essential. It's not erased and it's not destroyed. It just becomes harder to see. And the work is not simply to stop the behavior, it's to find and reclaim the child again and to keep and maintain an attachment to that child which they experience. Because that's what reaches them. And when we hold them in mind, even when it's difficult and that who they're becoming isn't yet decided, that's incredibly valuable because sometimes the most important thing a child can experience is that someone somewhere still sees them as more than what they have done. In closing this series, I want to say not knowing what to do is okay. Doing nothing isn't. If you don't know what to do, ask. And when I say that, there are charities, there are adolescent parenting courses, there are professionals, there's literature, there are these podcasts that will help you to better understand. If you can remove yourself from the idea that you are guilty and at fault, which will keep you stuck where you are, then you might become open to looking at other possibilities, other ways of understanding. Once again, I would recommend the book The Adolescent Psyche by Richard Frankl. And I would also encourage you to really equip and inform yourself with how adolescent development works. Think about what's happening inside the family. Ask yourself what is it that's happening, even if I can't see, just being that kind of open-minded. And remember, this is your child we're talking about, and your child will always deserve the very best from you, regardless of how they demonstrate how they feel about who they are. Thank you for listening.