Legal issues can negatively impact children, leading to their development of antisocial personality disorder, which can greatly increase a child's chances of becoming a psychopath. Risk factors for psychopathy are all interrelated with each other, which Karen Appleyard and colleagues (2005) explore: “These person-level risk factors are correlated with broader contextual variables such as family money and legal problems, residential instability, parental conflict and divorce, and neighborhood characteristics such as poverty and crime” (Hicks et al 2012). Legal issues are connected to child conduct problems and parenting techniques. They are issues that involve you getting in trouble with the law, such as going to court. The legal problems cause stress on the parents which they would show on their children through aggression. The antisocial …show more content…
The upbringing people have can influence how they fare later in life: “For example, academic failure is an outcome of conduct problems in childhood, which then creates a context and serves as a risk factor for deviant peer affiliation and continued antisocial behavior in adolescence” (Hicks et al 2012). Academic failure results from conduct problems in childhood. These problems can lead to the child being ostracized by their peers, negatively impacting the child’s mental health. Small circumstances like these can build the path to psychopathy. Hicks and colleagues, from a variety of universities working in the field of psychology describe a cycle of risk factors that can lead to the development of antisocial personality disorder. The process begins with poor parenting, leads to child conduct problems, which then lead to academic and social problems. This cycle can increase a child’s risk for depression and negatively affect them (“Psychopathic Personality Traits and Environmental Context”). All of these risk factors coupled together create a powerful and connected cycle which can affect the child’s mental health and lead to them becoming a psychopath through the development of mental disorders. Child conduct and academic problems have harmful effects on the child. Child conduct problems can potentially lead to a child becoming a psychopath by making them be rejected socially