and their scarf and belt accessories before choosing one for her appearance at the breakfast table.
Five-year-old Grace was a suspicious and dictatorial presence in the Center’s kindergarten class. Articulate and righteous, she confronted children and staff alike with evidence for the unfairness she found everywhere. In legalistic defense of her rights and sometimes those of her peers, she used her strong wide face, penetrating look and quick and observant mind aggressively. Her somewhat intimidated childcare worker maintained Grace's cornrowed hair with care. Sensitive to criticism and quick to anger, she competed with her teacher for control of the class. Her drug abusing young mother had escaped from her own mother’s authoritarian house, leaving six-month-old Grace in the care of her commanding grandmother, a matronly church elder. Recent studies by David Reiss and associates at George Washington University assessed psychosocial dynamics in genetically varied families. They found that genetic similarities amplified the expression of individual characteristics of interpersonal relating through what might be called personality resonance. Relatives often commented that Grace and her grandmother, being alike, deserved one another. Shortly after her fourth birthday Grace was removed from her grandmother's home while the circumstances surrounding the accidental scalding of the bottom half of her body in an overheated bath were being investigated. She began her first conversation with me, “Hey doctor baldy, why are your bottom teeth so crooked?”
Damon was darkly handsome, with teasing eyes and a gleaming smile. Talking to his legal guardian on the pay phone in the afternoon of his second day at KIDS, he was heard to be making charges of mistreatment by the staff. He asked his guardian, loud enough to be heard throughout the day room, “What does it take to get someone fired around here?” Six years old and abandoned by his mother at the age of three, Damon came to KIDS with a history of provoking administrative conflicts at several children’s shelters. His record showed that once he successfully used accusations of beatings to get a staff member fired employing charges that were later shown to have been fabricated. He argued persuasively, manufacturing
events and quoting imaginary conversations with smooth confidence. He could
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