CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Myth of the Bad Seed: The Dangerous Belief That Some Children Are Just Broken

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

“He's been hard since the day he was born.” “Something in her is just off, and always has been.” “Is there something broken with my child?” Whitney traces questions and the fears beneath them to a centuries old belief that some people are simply born bad. It’s a belief that has changed costumes across religion, science, and psychology but never fully gone away. Whitney brings questions like these into the present for the parents living with a child with a mental illness, an addiction, or a disability they can't fix.In this episode, you'll learn:- How the "born bad" idea traveled across history- Why temperament is real but more complicated than you think- How to recognize these fears if you were the "problem child" so you don't hand it downWhitney Goodman is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and the founder of Calling Home, a membership community that helps people navigate complex family dynamics and break harmful cycles.Have a question for Whitney? Send a voice memo or email to [e-mail] the Family Cyclebreakers Club: https://callinghome.coFollow Whitney on Instagram | sitwithwhitFollow Whitney on YouTube | @whitneygoodmanlmftOrder Whitney's book, Toxic Positivity: https://sitwithwhit.com/toxic-positivitySign up for updates on Whitney's new book: https://cmnyyv4kpyt.typeform.com/to/PHMzjy0oThis podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome back to the Calling Home podcast. I'm your host Whitney Goodman. I'm a licensed married and family therapist and the founder of Calling Home, the online community where we help adults build better family relationships. And this is the podcast for anyone that is trying to untangle generations of family dysfunction in their family and build better family relationships today. Today I want to talk about something that a lot of parents have said to me in different words over the years and even something that I have admittedly thought about myself. And it kind of comes out sounding like this. He's been hard since the day he was born.

I love her, but something in her is just off. It always has been. Or I don't know how to explain it. It's like he came into the world this way. And sometimes we're saying this about a toddler who won't stop screaming or about a teenager who's spiraling. And sometimes it's about your adult child, a grown son with a mental illness that you can't figure out.

or a grown daughter in active addiction, a child at any age with a disability or a diagnosis that's reshaped what the family thought their life would look like. And I think every parent at some point has had this troubling thought that is like, is my kid just bad? Are they broken? Was this always going to happen no matter what I did? And I want to be honest with you that I really think that this is one of the most human fears that there is, especially from a parent. And this belief that some people are simply born bad, wrong, or broken beyond repair is not new. It is centuries old, and it has survived by changing its costume, you know, throughout the different eras. Religion, science, and psychology have all dabbled in this theory. And more. More,

it into something else, that we still recognize as being like this belief. And sometimes it's a theory that an exhausted parent clings to when they've tried or they feel like they've tried everything or when they're so triggered by their kid's behavior. But I have to be honest, this belief is not helping you. And it's definitely not helping your kid no matter how old they are and it's not helping your family to scapegoat one person like this. So before we talk about what to actually do when you're raising or relating to a child who is struggling in a way that you can't fix, let's go way back to the root of this fear. The idea that humans arrive already flawed really goes back to the Christian doctrine of original sin. And the basic claim, if you're

we kind of dumb it down, is that all humans inherit a sinful nature from Earth. And Calvinism took this further and called it total depravity. And that is the belief that humans are born fundamentally corrupt and incapable of goodness without divine grace stepping in from the outside. This idea had enormous staying power for over a thousand years because it wasn't really challenged in any major way for a very long time. It shaped how children were disciplined, how bad behavior was interpreted, and what people believed they were allowed to expect from a child who struggled. And centuries later, philosophy started to push back on this. John Locke introduced the

idea of tabula rasa or the blank slate. And his argument was that children are born neutral. They're not corrupt, not sinful. They're just kind of empty, waiting to be shaped entirely by their experiences. And so children in this lens have no inherited badness, no inherited goodness either. They are just a canvas. And Jean-Jacques Rousseau, let's see how good my French pronunciation is there, went even further. He argued that children are actually born naturally good, and it is society that corrupts them. In his view, you if you left a child alone protected from the damage of civilization, they would stay good. And it's the world that does the damage, not the child's nature.

So for the first time, in a widely influential way, people were saying the badness isn't baked in. Whatever's wrong shows up later in the child's life. And that's a fundamentally different starting point than original sin. and it started to lay the groundwork for how we'd eventually start thinking about environment, nature, and development when it comes to children. And Locke and Rousseau weren't the first to challenge the idea of inherited corruption. There were theological arguments against it centuries earlier as well.

But what Locker and Rousseau did was move the conversation out of religion and into philosophy and eventually into science. And that shift from this is a matter of the soul to this is a matter of environment and development was a major change at the time. But as psychology and criminology emerged as fields in the 1800s, the bad seed idea didn't go away. It just kind of morphed again. At this point in history, we saw that eugenics and early criminology tried to link inherited traits directly to moral character. And the most well-known example of this is the born criminal theory that argued criminality itself was inherited and that a born criminal could actually be identified by physical traits like

facial structure and skull shape. And now hearing this now like, can you imagine? I mean, this still does exist in like very racialized discourse. We can see this happening. For sure, even today in the present. And the theory claimed you could look at it. You could look at at a person and see biologically that they were destined toward crime. And I want you to think about what that does to a kid. And this is still happening in a lot of ways today, right? That we see children and people born into certain bodies in certain communities, and we already start treating them like not only do they have the potential for criminality, but they are destined for it. what do you think that does to a child? And if you were treated like that within your own family

or in your own community, like tell me in the comments, what do you think that did to you? And how hard is it to break out of that mindset when someone has looked at you from a young age and said, like, there's nothing I can do. There's nothing you can do. You are going to be bad. So we had just spent, you know, a hundred years basically up to this point, arguing that children are shaped by environment and not born flawed. And then science kind of turned around and said, actually, we can locate the flaw in the body. We can see it. We can measure it. And it's not a sole problem anymore. It's a biology problem. But it's still framed as something a person is, not something that happened to them. And this is the era that gave us the phrase bad seed in the more literal sense. It sounds

outdated now, but I think there are a lot of people that actually still hold this belief and this bias internally without really realizing it. But thankfully, most of these specific theories have, of course, been discredited. But the underlying instinct that some people are simply built for dysfunction and you can identify it early, never fully disappeared. And it shows up in how we talk about certain kids and kids that are struggling in. saying like you could always tell. He was just always going to end up like this. Now, later on, Freud's work reintroduced the idea that we're born with innate drives. And Freud wasn't labeling this or framing this as a moral badness. The id isn't evil in his model. It's a moral. It doesn't

know right from wrong. It just wants things. So a newborn baby crying isn't, bad. They're hungry. They're driven by what's inside of them to get their needs met. And that's exactly what a newborn is supposed to be. So Freud was saying, like, yes, there's something innate here, but innate doesn't mean immoral. It's just raw material. And what happens with that raw material, how it gets shaped, channeled, regulated is another question. Now, this brings us to the 20th century, and there are two researchers named Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess, whose work, I think, is one of the most quietly important shifts in how we understand children today. Starting in the 1950s, Thomas and Chess ran what's called the New York Longitudinal Study,

and they tracked children over time and identified something we now call temperament. I'm sure all of you have heard of this. And they found that babies are, in fact, born with different traits. And if you're a parent of young children, like I can tell, you know, with my own kids, they all have little like nuances to them and certain ways that they are, especially as babies, around sleep and touch and eating. And all of this is real and is part of them. It's not just something that they come out totally blank.

You do notice these little differences in your children. They found, just like I'm saying, that some babies are easy. Some are more difficult. Some are what they call slow to warm up. And these traits were understood as being neutral, not moral. A quote unquote difficult baby in their framework wasn't a bad baby. It is specific and observable. It includes things like they have irregular routines, more intense reactions, slower adaptability to new situations. I have a child that's like that. And it doesn't mean that they are flawed or that there is something necessarily wrong with them. They are just different. And so this is the first time in that history where, you know, science was really validating that, yes, kids come out

different than each other, biologically from day one. But that doesn't tell you anything about their worth, their character, or their future. And the way that parents respond to these differences is extremely important in how they are going to develop in the future. Now, a lot of parents that I have spoken to in my work are kind of functionally somewhere back in that like eugenics era that we talked about without really realizing it. They see a hard baby, a hard toddler, a kid that isn't responding to the same parenting that worked for their other children, and they automatically start talking. about character. Something is wrong with the child. But today we know that attachment theory and

developmental science really broadly reject the born bad framework. When a child's behavior is difficult, we are focusing instead on temperament, nervous system regulation, and relational environment. And relational environment is the piece that I think matters most from the way that I look at these relationships in this conversation because it's the thing that you all as parents can actually work with. This doesn't give you full control over the outcome and we're going to get to that distinction in a minute. But you do have real influence over how safe, seen, and supported a child's experience in

their family is regardless of what they are struggling with. Now, religion ultimately made badness more. And I think there are a lot of shades of gray to this now today that not everyone believes this who is religious, and I don't want to frame it that way. But it used to be that it's in you, it's inherited, and only an outside force can fix it. And science tried to make this badness biological. It's your body. It's visible.

It's measurable. It's fixed. And now that we have more modern developmental science, we see that we have a more. honest and useful picture of this now. But I believe that the residue of this older thinking really hasn't disappeared completely. And it shows up in the phrases that we still use without thinking about it. So bad seed. He was just born that way. It shows up when parents interpret a more challenging temperament as a fixed moral trait instead of something that is shaped by genetics, relationships, and environment together. Now, that is something that you can change. And I also want to point out that

not all temperaments are difficult for the same people for the same reasons. If you are a very outgoing, gregarious, high-achieving parent, you might actually struggle a lot with a child that is more introverted, quiet, slow moving, likes to think about things more because that's not what you're used to. Where another parent might get that child and say, wow, this is very easy for me because I can relate. So it's not that certain temperaments are more difficult and some are easier. It's that they can be more difficult or easier for a certain type of parent, also depending on their personality and their temperament and the environment and the environment and,

and social context in which they are raising that child. So I want to shift now into the present now that we have covered sort of that historical context of how we got here. A lot of you are living with this in real time. So you might have a child with a heritable mental illness or a child that is an active addiction or a child with a disability that has shaped what your relationship looks like. you do not control the outcome of your child's mental illness. You do not control whether they get sober. You do not control the trajectory of a disability. You never did. No parent ever has that power,

all of that power, no matter how good, how devoted, how relentless they are. And I say this not to be harsh, but I think that a lot of parents, you know, are carrying the belief that like, if I just would have done the perfect combination of things, the outcome would be different. But on the flip side, you are not powerless. You don't have control, but you do have influence. And when a parent can't fix everything about the situation, it's very easy for that exhaustion and grief to become she's just like this. And the frustration with the situation becomes the child's identity and ultimately like their defect and you wash your hands of it. And I think family systems can do this as a whole.

Siblings can speak this way about each other. We can do this to our children. We can even do this to the other parent. And I don't say this to shame any parent. I think if you've had this thought, you know, it'd actually be surprised if you hadn't at some point. Like you can feel like maybe they are just doomed to be this way when they are in their worst moments.

It is human. And I want you to realize that, you know, even though you can't control all of this, you can control whether your child at any age experiences you as safe. As someone that is curious about their experience instead of only being frustrated by their behavior and trying to fix them. as you being someone who is on their team, even if it's something that you didn't choose or that you don't really know how to deal with or you're having to like roll with the punches and figure it out. I think that for a lot of adults that I speak to, you know, who are living

with a mental illness, an addiction, a disability. And when they feel like their parent is on their team instead of being managed like a project, this is often what makes the difference. in the relationship and allows them to stay connected. And I hear this a lot inside of our groups at calling home, you know, adults who say some version of like, I don't need my parents to fix me. I need them to stop treating me like I am the illness of the family. And so whether your child feels like a person to you or like a problem matters and it really impacts the relationship. And so the goal here is to make sure you're not adding to your child's burden by letting them believe that you think they were defective from the start.

And also that we realize as parents the level of influence that we do have, that even when we don't have full control over someone, something or someone, we influence their experience of living through and dealing with that issue. And if you grew up in a home where difficulty was always treated as defectiveness or being like the hard kid, the sensitive kid, the kid who doesn't respond to normal discipline got translated into something is wrong with you instead of something is happening. Let's work to try to understand it. It probably felt like for you that you were being labeled and there was nothing you could

do to step out of that because that was a fixed part of your. identity. So maybe you were the identified problem child in your family. You are the one that everybody points to when something goes wrong. And it could be that nobody around you had the tools or honestly like the will and the ability to ask what was actually happening underneath your behavior. And nobody asked if you were scared or overwhelmed or unsupported or dealing with something in the family that was not being named or deliased. with. And you might have grown up feeling like you were just a thing to be managed rather than a person to be understood. And sometimes these things aren't said explicitly out loud in a family,

but it is felt when the adults around you decided that you couldn't be saved and so they didn't try very hard to help you. And sometimes this isn't because of anything you did. It's not because you're unlovable or you weren't worth helping. But the effort of understanding you was more than they were willing to give. And that is very painful or more than they felt like they could give. If you are a parent now and you were this person in your family, watching your child's struggle now can also reactivate the terrible feeling of being unsavable yourself. And so instead of being the child who might be too much, you're the parent watching that child. And some old deep part of you might even start asking, like, can this be fixed? Is it worth trying? Did I pass this on?

Are they doomed? Like, these are natural fear-based thoughts that you can have. So it's not only fear about your child's future. For many of you, this is really like wrapped up with an old question about your own worth and whether you are worth the effort or if anyone believed that you could be helped or you could be loved. And a lot of times in these situations, what happens is that when the people in your family who have the power, which is usually the adults or the parents, decide that you are unfixable, unsavable, nothing is going to help you. Your quote unquote, bad behavior starts to get louder and worse and more extreme. You might start to have certain behaviors that then just continue to reinforce this bad narrative. You become more defiant.

You start having more struggles with substances. You're running away from home. You're yelling at people. You're reacting in these ways saying like, please help me. I am not doing well. I need help with this. Why can't anyone hear me or help me because children do not have the language at all of these developmental stages to say, hey, so I'm really struggling with anxiety or I think I might be neurodivergent. Would you mind taking me to a doctor? No, they don't react like that. They react in ways that we often label as being bad kids when it is them trying to get a need met. And so it's very important for you to understand where this fear comes from and your own history of being treated as the problem because you don't want to repeat this with your own children. And your history explains the instinct to think this or to even be overprotective and overly involved.

But it doesn't excuse what happens after that. And so being aware of that instinct can give you the time. to pause between that and your reaction with yourself and with others. You can even do this. This instinct can come up with your partner, with other friends, with your own children, and with yourself. So if some part of you has been quietly afraid, you know, in thinking that, like, your child is simply bad or unfixable or born wrong, or if you've been thinking that about yourself. I want you to really ask yourself, like, where did that fear actually come from? Did somebody tell me this? You know, is it something that I heard somewhere? Where did I start to

believe that this was true about me or about other people? Because you get to be the person who stops telling this story. And that's not by pretending that everything is fixable, but by separating our worth from what is happening with us. And you can also carry the belief that you are always worth trying for too. And you still are today. And that isn't over, even if someone in your life didn't do that for you. I hope you walk away from this episode knowing that you have a lot of influence to create safety and develop worthiness and love and connection and attachment in your families, even when people are struggling and even when you can't fix or change what they are struggling with, you can still help people have a good connection with you in the

midst of all of that. And you can also work on doing that for yourself. If any of today's episode resonated with you, I would love to see you inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club, our membership community at Calling Home, where we work on dismantling old generational patterns in families and building new healthy relationships today. Next month in August, we are going to be focusing on radical acceptance and you will learn how to accept your family for who they are, what to do with that information, how to grieve in the wake of acceptance and how acceptance can really set you free from continued disappointment and resentment in your family relationships. You can join the Family Cycle Breakers Club.

at callinghome.co. We will link that in the show notes. And please don't forget to like, subscribe, leave us a review or comment on this podcast. And I will see you all on Thursday for another Q&A episode. Bye, everyone. The Calling Home podcast is not engaged in providing therapy services, mental health advice, or other medical advice or services. It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified health care provider and does not create any therapist, patient, or other treatment relationship between you and Collincom or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Calling Holmes terms of service linked in the show notes below.