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Mark Dadds, a global expert on child behaviour issues, was a naughty boy himself. As a boozing, pot-smoking teen he almost got expelled from his school – which was set alight five times in his first year and “where we had teachers butting our heads together” – because he had become, in his own words, a delinquent. “I was good, until that,” he says. “I was the golden child. Then I just went a bit nutty.”

After high school he “ran away with a band” to Brisbane, where he followed a girlfriend into psychology and fell in love with it. An internationally successful career followed. But 20 years ago, when his work was featured on the front page of the Herald, a former schoolmate tracked him down. “He’d been traumatised by me,” Dadds recalls. In a raw conversation that lasted hours, he asked the man what he’d done. “He said, ’well, you didn’t do anything … just, you had a gang, and I was so scared [at] Fawkner High School.”

University of Sydney Professor Mark Dadds at Two Chaps in MarrickvilleCredit: Dominic Lorrimer

Dadds had been scared, too. But the two boys responded differently to their fear. “He became withdrawn, and I became the opposite,” he says. “This is one of the great things we’re learning about psychology; everybody has built-in vulnerabilities.” In a chaotic environment, “you’ll have some children that go in a direction I went, which was to try to be a delinquent leader. And then you’ll have kids that are terrified of it.”

There are no traces of a terrifying teen gang leader in the bespectacled, warm man across the table at Marrickville cafe Two Chaps, whose work has fascinated me since I read about it in a New York Times story a decade ago. That feature was headlined, “Can You Call a Nine-Year-Old a Psychopath?”, and cited examples such as a boy from Florida who pushed a toddler into a hotel pool because he wanted to watch someone drown.

The answer, from Dadds and others, was yes. He has found that early intervention can help children with so-called callous and unemotional traits, but only a bit. “It’s very hard to get moral conscience training into those kids,” he says. They don’t read other people’s emotions. They don’t care about them. Rewards can work, but only certain types.

“Stuff that you and I might find rewarding, like a parent going, ‘thank you’, they don’t care about,” he says. “They want cash. We get change in those kids – positive parenting makes them nicer – but the changes are less drastic.”

Dadds’ expertise is not limited to children with sociopathic traits. He welcomes a wide array of challenging behaviours at Sydney University’s Child Behaviour Research Clinic; most of the kids have conduct disorder and oppositional defiance disorder, often with autism, anxiety and ADHD thrown in. Families credit him with saving their kids, their sanity, and their marriages. “Give me a child up to eight, 10 years, and parents who want to change, and we get fantastic results,” says Dadds.

It’s fascinating stuff, but as our sandwiches arrive, I’m stuck on how Dadds himself evolved from troubled child to rescuer of troubled children.

“I think it happens a lot,” he says. When he was a kid, his parents were strict on his older sister and banned her from dating a boy she fancied. “She, of course, became pregnant and fell into his arms,” Dadds recalls. “My mother was totally horrified by that. She was like, ‘don’t ever tell Mark what to do’. So I was allowed to run wild.”

A rule of thumb for raising teenagers, he says, is to always know where they are. Dadds’ parents didn’t. “I would come home drunk, and smoking, and they would not say anything,” he says. His Melbourne school, then called Fawkner Secondary College, was wild too. “It was brutal. [There was] bullying. The school got burned down five times in my first year. We had a teacher who used to smoke pot and play Vanilla Ice records. Girls were treated really badly. I was kind of scared, too, but my way of reacting to being scared was to try to get it under control.”

Two Chaps’ brekkie ciabatta with grilled mushrooms, beetroot relish, fresco halloumi and poached egg.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

A turning point for Dadds came when he was on the verge of expulsion due to a series of misdemeanours, “wagging and stuff like that”. He cut a deal; if he passed the exam for the selective University High, the principal would not tell his parents about his near-expulsion. And he did. “I went from being this thoughtless kid to seeing inner-city Melbourne and culture, it was wonderful.”

The accidental child psychologist’s work has helped thousands. Given this glittering career, I ask Dadds whether he was an exemplary father to his own stepchildren. He laughs. He’s good now, “but it took me a long time”, he says. “I was pretty fiery, a little bit narcissistic. Selfish, maybe like a lot of young guys, despite everything I already knew. You can be super-smart. You can study psychology. You get in a situation where a kid’s throwing a tantrum, or your own parents are nagging you when you’ve got your own kids, and it’s very hard to not just become primitive in your responses.”

Dadds has spent decades helping parents to avoid such responses. His clinic specialises in Oppositional Defiance Disorder and its “more serious older brother”, conduct disorder. The behaviours are common to all kids, in varying degrees – lying, stealing, punching, hitting, irritability, blaming others – but for some, they escalate to a point that disrupts the child’s life.

“We get a 60 per cent success rate,” says Dadds, “which is pretty good. That’s all you get with antibiotics for an infection. Because life gets in the way. [Some] people don’t do it. They drop out.”

University of Sydney Professor Mark Dadds in Marrickville.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

Some of the children have underlying anxiety, or are intensely aware and emotional, and feel like everyone is against them. They’re “good to treat”, says Dadds. There’s the ADHD kids, who have higher rates of conduct disorders because they’re impulsive. “Their thing is ‘I didn’t mean it’,” says Dadds. And there’s the kids with autism, for whom the challenge is to separate the behavioural issues from the hard-wiring of their neurodiversity. “The parents will often say, ‘is that a tantrum, or is that autism?’ There’s no answer to that. I say to them, ‘the only way we can do this is to get to know your child really well’.”

As we tuck into our mushroom, halloumi and egg ciabattas, I ask how the program works. Dadds asks me to imagine two buckets. One is full of the bad stuff; the negativity, the yelling, the fighting. The other is the good stuff; when a child follows instructions, plays independently, or has a positive interaction with their sibling. Typically, parents – especially those arriving at Dadds’ door, whose lives are consumed by conflict with their conduct-disordered children – focus their energy and attention on the former, and let the latter slip past with quiet relief. Dadds teaches them to do the opposite.

“We train the parents to find their heart again,” he says. “And to say [to their child], ‘I love it so much when we work as a team. And when you followed that instruction, and gave me that pen, we’re in the zone together!’ And then the moment that child steps out of line, we have this predictable, boring, attachment-neutral discipline. We get over that as quickly as we can, and we try to get back to normal.”

That emotionless discipline usually involves time out, which, if done correctly, is the “quickest and most effective”.

Mark Dadds with the families followed in the documentary Kids on Speed.Credit: ABC-TV Publicity

The interaction between neurodiversity and behaviour is a hot issue. There are deep divisions around the question, for example, of whether ADHD is over-diagnosed, and challenging, fidgety kids are being pathologised (Dadds, who starred in the ABC documentary Kids on Speed, does not agree; he says diagnosis has become more rigorous, and if anything it’s now under-diagnosed in sections of the community with less access to pediatric support).

Nowhere is the debate more fraught than in schools, where the number of neurodiverse children is skyrocketing. A NSW Department of Education report in 2019 found the number of children with autism was increasing by 15 per cent a year, and one in five children now requires classroom modifications due to some kind of disability. Students with disabilities receive disproportionately high numbers of suspensions.

There is mounting tension between parents, who expect their child’s challenging behaviour to be met with understanding in the classroom, and teachers, who say they have neither the time nor resources to deal with this extra complexity.

“This is such a problem,” says Dadds, who uses the term Urie’s law to explain the damaging impact of this conflict. Urie Bronfenbrenner was a Russian-American psychologist who showed that “the distance [a child] will go successfully in life – to be a loving, successful, happy, generous person … is directly proportional to the extent to which the caregiving systems in that child’s life are seen by the child to be on the same team”.

When Dadds was a child, there was more uniformity; parents, school and church mostly shared the same views and values. That’s no longer the case. He is encouraging parents to ask themselves, “even though I’m angry with the teacher, what’s the best for my child?” A teacher with 30 students in their class “doesn’t need your crap”, he says, “they need your help”.

As our conversation turns to challenging eight-year-olds, your correspondent – a parent who could use a little advice herself – spots an opportunity. I ask how he would convince an, ahem, hypothetical eight-year-old girl, who is brilliant, brave, kind and spirited, and who is much smarter than her mother, to be less defiant when it comes to following instructions.

He suggests holding a family meeting, to explain how her life will evolve over the next eight years as she comes of age. “She’ll grow to be 16,” he says, with all the exciting things that come with that; independence, adventures, boyfriends. “And you want her to have such a wonderful time.”

During that period, there will be three buckets, representing three kinds of decisions; one for those decisions her parents make on her behalf, one for the things they negotiate with her, and one for those she makes herself.

As she grows, the things that were once in the first bucket will move to the second, and then the third, in a slow shift towards independence. “Everyone struggles with it,” says Dadds. “But you two are going to do it because you’re smart, and because you love each other.”

He flashes that kindly smile again, but this time with a hint of concern because his interviewer has dissolved into tears, imagining her fierce little girl as a young woman and overcome with the joy and sadness of it.

“Design as much as you can around that model over the next eight years,” he says, gently. “It will be beautiful.”

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