If you have bad kids, it may not be your fault.

Well, it could still be your fault, because it's biology and genetics is part of biology, but you can't control genetics. At least you then you wouldn't have to feel guilty about being a lousy parent.

Either way there's a real effort on to blame everything except the actual delinquent kids and a new study in Psychological Science advances that cause. Rutgers University psychologist Daniel Hart and colleagues write that they can use a a Skin Conductance Response (SCR) test, along with some family history, to predict delinquency.

The family history point might be important, especially if you and your husband go at each other like an episode of Spy Vs. Spy.

But first I wanted to know more about this SCR test.  If it can absolve me for bad parenting, maybe it can also help me feel better if I burn the paninis or shrink clothes in the dryer.  

Hart, Eisenberg and Valiente measured the sweat in the palms of these children.  They do this because the eccrine sweat glands on the palms of the hands are responsive to emotional stimuli but don't have much to do with the body's heat regulation.  Sweaty palms are more conductive than dry ones so it's a safe guess that more sweat means a stronger emotional response.

The researchers picked something the children in their tests would not have seen a lot; a swimming dolphin and a house fire. The video of a dolphin swimming in the ocean gave them their baseline reponse, though I think elementary school children with electrodes hooked up to their bodies would set that baseline rather high. Then they watched a film where a lamp caused a fire in a child’s bedroom to measure their stress.

They did these tests four times over the course of six years. They then found out which children were delinquent and matched up their results and determined that the children with the greatest biological reactions and a troubled family history were most likely to be the delinquents.

I am not a neuroscientist, I am an engineer. And in engineering most things make sense, except dogs named "Checkers" and Esther Williams swimming pools, so engineers don't understand how family history and sweat mean a child will be a criminal, unless your father is Jesse James and takes you out robbing banks.

I consulted this MIT article,The Skin Conductivity Response, and found there are some real flaws with the technique, namely when a danger threshold is reached or a child is exposed to stress often.

Figure (a) shows a subject with no habituation during the experiment, all the three stimuli elicit a response. Figure (b) shows, a subject with rapid habituation, only the first stimulus elicits a response. MIT

So a person living in an Iraqi war zone might not have much stress at all to the sound of a bullet whizzing by whereas one of Donald Trump's children might go into sheer panic if he thinks there's a problem with his American Express Centurion card. Those kinds of variable were not factored in, negating most of the biological response.

Until they get more reliable testing for physical responses to family stress and can then make a stronger correlation between biology and delinquency, it's still safe to assume that if our kids are screwed up it's because we made them so the old-fashioned way; by letting them hang out with shifty types that pick up trash along the highways and volunteer at animal shelters on the weekends. I always knew those animal shelter people were trouble.