What causes a child to behave this way?

[Unbroken1]

I had a very close childhood friend, a boy who lived two houses away on our street. This was during the 60s and everyone within a 4-5 house radius knew everyone. We as kids were allowed off-leash pretty much everywhere and parental supervision outside the house was pretty lax (shockingly so if compared to today's standards).
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My friend, who was probably MENSA material at 10 years old, had a gift for electrical engineering but was also so disruptive and unruly that our Cub Scout pack had an event one time in which he was not included and his parents not informed, but all the other Scouts and parents were.

As besties I never saw this side of him except once. It was common to walk a mile to and back from school as a 6-year old starting in the first grade. The only basic rule was: don't get into any cars with strangers . We were walking home from school one day and had stopped to talk to another younger boy from school who live in our neighborhood. My friend asked him if he wanted a picture drawn on his hand, and then stabbed him in the palm with a ball-point pen. The other boy ran off screaming and crying. I don't recall my reaction at the time as we were maybe 7 or 8 years old, but my friend thought it was hilarious.

Later when we were both older at 10-12, we were both doing things like shoplifting and minor vandalism, graffiti etc. We were both from solidly middle class households and were not poor. When we both moved away from the neighborhood we stopped being friends. I realize now how impressionable I was and that all the stuff we did was at his suggestion.

Recently my old school friend contacted me through social media. I replied back and sent a couple of photos of us as kids, but there was nothing but silence in reply. Now that I recall the incident with the ball point pen, I'm thinking maybe the silence is not a bad thing.

Thinking back on it, this is troubling. Up until I started learning about people with NPD and it's connection with sociopathy, it rarely came to mind. Why does a child act this way and what type of adult do they become?

[easterncappy]

Doesn't have to be sociopathy, but it could be.

A lot of the time, little kids are so impressionable that they get into bad stuff just because they're around bad kids. I remember hanging out with a boy who would graffiti things in the neighborhood when I was in the 3rd grade, and when he moved away, I never participated in that kind of thing again. I never really felt right doing it but he made it out to be cool and I trusted him. Made sense to my little brain.

Sometimes they're copying their mom and dad. I had a... well, wouldn't call him a boyfriend, more like a nuisance that my parents really wanted me to marry, whose family had a tradition of really humiliating pranks. I hated being on the receiving end of them, but when I met his parents, I understood why he thought it was normal to act that way. They were abusive and cruel pranks, but totally normal to him. This can be a flea or a PD behavior or lots of other things, really. Depends how much it fits into their regular behavioral patterns.

It's true that a lot of kids from troubled homes act terribly when they live with their parents, but grow up to be otherwise normal people. If you met high school me you wouldn't believe it was me. That's why I'm usually merciful with poorly behaved minors, because unless their behavior regularly crosses the line into abuse, it's usually because their home life is terrible... they're definitely fixable. Sometimes it happens on it's own when they move out. I did things as a minor that I feel crippling regret and remorse for as an adult, although none of them involved stabbing people with pens. You can have a rough home life even if you are middle class or wealthy. Celebrities and rich people come out all of the time with stories of being abused as children.

Or, like you said, it could be sociopathy and/or NPD. There are stories of people being psychopaths or sociopaths from shortly after birth. There's no real way to know now, but it's difficult to figure out what motivates a 10 year old to behave poorly, since they're impressionable and tiny and gullible and you sort of just copy people around you in your formative years.

[square]

I don't onow but the two major possibilities that came to my mind were antisocial personality, or being raised in a chaotic home leading to antisocial behaviors.

I'm not really worried about the descriptions of disruptive and unfuly which can be explained by any number of things including perfectly normal behavior.

The pen stabbing incident, that he did it and felt it was hilarious suggests to me a predatory mindset. A naturally antisocial child could do that, or one who has been modelled this behavior by parents and/or siblings. With modelling, this child would have been on the receiving end of humiliations and learned to relish turning the tables to play the predator rather than the prey (having learned you are one or the other, champ or chump, eat or get eaten, no other ways of relating).

Shoplifting and vandalism also fit into the theory of ASPD or being raised in chaos.

Other signs include thrill-seeking, chronic boredom, and parasitic lifestyle.