Napoleon Sleeps Alone

The parents of a five-year-old boy come to me asking for guidance. He’s highly oppositional—often responds with a belligerent “No!” or “I’m not going to!” when given an instruction—and throws mighty, mighty tantrums when things don’t go his way. In addition, he’s fearful of being alone, even being in a room by himself, and will become hysterical if, for example, his parents put him in his room for time-out.

Confronted with this set of vexes, your run-of-the-mill child psychologist is going to, first, pretend he can determine how and why things began going south, as if that matters, which it doesn’t. Once he has thus pulled the wool over the parents’ eyes (to wit, he has magical insight), he will then schedule weekly therapy sessions with the child. These sessions will still be happening a year from now, assuming the parents’ money and patience lasts that long, during which time the child’s problems will worsen both in number and magnitude.

During the first session with me, which lasted short of an hour, the parents told me he slept in their bedroom. He’s terrified, they said, of sleeping in his own room.