Parent Talk / October 2007
Identifying Emotional
Abuse In Children
“Emotional abuse is more than just verbal abuse. It is an attack on a child's emotional and social development, and is a basic threat to healthy human development. Emotional abuse can take many forms, comments Dorothy M. Neddermeyer, PhD, author of "If I'd Only Known...Sexual Abuse in or Out of the Family: A Guide to Prevention. Dr. Neddermeyer has provided the following as an outline of different types of emotional abuse in children.
• Belittling
Belittling a child causes the child to see him or herself in the way consistent with the caregivers words. This limits the child's potential by limiting the child's own sense of his or her potential.
• Coldness
Children learn to interact with the world through their early interactions with their parents. If parents are warm and loving, children grow to see the world as a secure place for exploration and learning. When parents are cold to their children, they deprive the child of necessary ingredients for intellectual and social development. Children who are subjected to consistent coldness grow to see the world as a cold, uninviting place, and will likely have seriously impaired relationships in the future. They may also never feel confident to explore and learn.
• Corrupting
When parents teach children to engage in antisocial behavior, the children grow up unfit for normal social experience.
• Cruelty
Cruelty is more severe than coldness, but the results can be the same. Children need to feel safe and loved in order to explore the world around them and in order to learn to form healthy relationships. When children experience cruelty from their caretakers, the world ceases to "make sense" for them, and all areas of learning are affected - social, emotional, and intellectual development are hindered.
• Extreme Inconsistency
The foundations of learning are laid in the first interactions between child and caretaker. Through consistent interactions, the child and parent shape each other and the child learns that his or her actions have consistent consequences - this is the foundation for learning. The child also learns to trust that his or her needs will be met from others. When the caretaker is inconsistent in his or her response to the child, the child cannot learn what is expected from the start, and all areas of learning can be effected throughout the child's lifespan.
• Harassment
Harassment has similar effects to those of belittling, but also involves a stress response. Harassment scares the child, and repeated exposure to fear can alter the child physically, lowering their ability to deal with other stressful situations.
• Ignoring
Ignoring a child deprives the child of all the essential stimulation and interaction necessary for emotional, intellectual and social development.
• Inappropriate Control
Inappropriate control takes three forms - lack of control, over control, and inconsistent control. Lack of control puts children at risk for danger or harm to themselves and robs children of the knowledge handed down through human history. Over control robs children of opportunities for self-assertion and self-development by preventing them from exploring the world around them. Inconsistent control can cause anxiety and confusion in children and can lead to a variety of problematic behaviors as well as impair intellectual development.
• Isolating
Isolating a child, or cutting them off from normal social experiences, prevents the child from forming friendships and can lead to depression. Isolating a child seriously impairs their intellectual, emotional and social development. Isolating is often accompanied by other forms of emotional abuse and often physical abuse.
• Rejecting
When a caretaker rejects a child, the caretaker is negating the child's self-image, showing the child that he or she has no value. Children who are rejected from the start by their caretakers develop a range of disturbed self-soothing behaviors. An infant who is rejected has almost no chance of developing into a healthy adult.
• Terrorizing
Terrorizing, like harassment, evokes a stress response in children. Repeated evocation of the stress response alters the child physically, lowering their ability to fight off disease, increasing their risk for many stress-related ailments. Aside from the physical affects, a child living in terror has no opportunities to develop anything other than unhealthy and anti-social survival skills.
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