This is why they are like this...

Disclaimer: I've known rich people, average people, and poor people. I've known them because I've lived among them. I've been poor, rich, and just decidedly average, run-of-the-mill middle class in America. I've lived in the mid-west and the east-coast metropolitan hubs. So let this all serve as a disclaimer that I speak here from deep-seated and intimate personal experience, not from some lofty, remote perspective of elitist judgement.

To get to the point, these boys (since that is still what they are) are in their particular condition due to how their innate psyche responds to the environment they grew up into. I've seen this first hand, lots of times, across the socio-economic spectrum in America, but it's particularly poignant here. They grow up in an environment where people are being "legally" fed psychopharmaceuticals that turn them into, pardon the phrasing, zombified half-wits. They also drink very sweet, highly caffeinated beverages with great regularity (I can count at least 6 cans of Monster "drink" in the movie, though I am sure there were plenty more).

So they are on one side surrounded by people who are almost chemically lobotomized and sleepwalk through life responding to barely any stimulus, while others (and perhaps they too) take copious amounts of stimulants (nicotine is a stimulant, as are sugar and caffeine). And of course the parents/guardians see nothing wrong with this, as they too probably live like that. And then of course there are other legal as well as illegal drugs that affect their mind and emotional make-up. I'm sure there is more than a bit of crystal meth and weed (which does *beep* up your mind, especially if you're young) around these households.

So then they naturally end up living in utter chaos, living in trash even, not caring about it, and not aspiring to having any semblance of an orderly life. No wonder they act out and then have time for lots of abusive/self-abusive behaviour.

If Americans weren't being prescribed all that crap, and buying the rest by some means, and drinking all that stimulant *beep* and smoking their welfare away, they might have some time to take care of their children and get them to learn, expand their minds, become useful around the home, and hold down a job, any job, as there is nothing less than a person with too much time and idle hands.