Everyone of course knows about Superman, the Man of Steel (though he is actually much stronger than steel or he would have long since been splattered over the landscape). The original Superman (not the comic hero) was actually a villain with aspirations of World Domination. He wasn’t near as powerful as the later comic version. And of course the DC version was a Boy Scout with the ability to fly, lift trains overhead, and bounce bullets from his chest. At some point he entered the absurd, gaining the ability to throw planets into each other and at one point blowing out a sun (like to see how many gas giant planets he had to suck in to pull that one off). It was always shown in the comics that Superman became such a straight arrow due to his rearing by Jonathan and Martha Kent in the very small town of, you guessed it, Smallville. With a kind voice and a firm hand they were able to rear the super-tyke to achieve manhood as a saint, willing to fling his invulnerable body into any situation that needed a helping hand. How realistic is this scenario? (Like being able to blow out a sun is realistic.)
Now I was trained as a child psychologist, and did all the coursework for the PhD, as well as twice the clinical work needed for pre-internship training. I left before getting the degree for reasons that had nothing to do with lack of competence in the field, and continued to work with children seven years after that, before getting into another area of social service. One of the things I remember from graduate school was you can not reason with small children. Talking to a two to five year old (and in most cases even with older children) is a waste of breath. Dr. Spock was wrong. That statement was drilled into me at the same time I was taught the use of Time Out and other disciplinary procedures that did work on the little creatures that someday would become reasoning beings. The fact is that children, while they do posses some reasoning abilities (as anyone who has seen a child figure out how to reach the cookie jar on top of the high cabinet can attest to), about as much as some apes and monkeys, they possess very little in the way of impulse control. They want what they want and they want it now. Only physical force, or the threat of it, can stop them. A firm no can work, if it is backed with a past experience of what it means to ignore the command, like some sessions in time out or a good spanking. Otherwise the word no will get a strange look and then be ignored as the child plunges on ahead with what its little mind is telling it to do.
So how does this concern little Superman, or Super Toddler? The question would be, how do you spank an invulnerable toddler? How do you force a tantruming child into time out? How do you keep a child who can punch out an Abrams tank from splattering you all over the living room if you attempt to discipline him? I guess you might be able to use Kryptonite, if some is handy. Otherwise there is no way to correct the behavior of this child, who, according to my experience, will grow up to be at least a brat, if not a complete Sociopath/Psychopath, and not the Boy Scout portrayed in the comics. This is a Superman who would be better called Disaster-in-the-Making-Man. I see two outcomes for this character. Either he will rule the world. Or mankind will find a way to destroy him. Given that in the comics we seemed to have attracted more than our fair universal share of Kryptonite, I would bank on the latter outcome. But wouldn’t he have made a great villain for someone like the Flash to fight?