Child Neglect Psychology

In the United States, there is a call made every ten seconds to report an instance of child abuse or neglect. Meaning, on average, over 3.15 million calls are made every year about some form of child mistreatment. Additionally, almost as often as every three hours, a child dies to abuse or neglect (Child Abuse Statistics…). In many instances, it is only when a beautiful child dies with an even more tragic horrendous story that people begin to care. Stories on the front cover of newspapers are those where “If the police were just a little quicker,” or “If the ambulance drove just a little faster.” While survivors of a life of terror are given under six hundred words in a corner of the back page to tell of the horrors that they lived through.

While one person can jump back and can let the horrors go, another person who has gone through the same abuse will become controlled by their memories and experiences (New York Adoption…). This behavior, yet again, leads psychologists to ponder the age old question of nature vs. nurture, and in the case of child abuse and neglect, the constant varying variables are ever-present. There is a remarkable difference in the psychological resilience of a child who has undergone extreme trauma and a child who has not. When discussing resilience, it is important to know what exactly the word means. Resilience, in respect to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “the ability to become strong, healthy, or successful again after something bad happens (Resilience).” Meaning that, despite its diluted use in the media, the word resilience refers to something more than a fun and new way to describe a new cloth, or just another label to put on a piece of plastic. Resilience is more than a noun or an adjective, it is a verb; t is an action that determines the life and sanity of millions of children across

Each form of abuse and neglect have intertwining and mutually exclusive types of symptoms. But first, to understand the symptoms, it is crucial to understand where the symptoms come from. Physical abuse is the act of repeated physical pain, injury, or striking that is not excluded to slapping, shaking, slapping, kicking, punching, burning, and pinching. Emotional/psychological abuse is when a parental figure constantly puts down, demeans, undermines, and rejects a child in forms that are not limited to locking a child in a closet for many hours, locking the child in a cage, terrorizing the child, isolating the child, and exploiting the child (Emotional Abuse). Sexual abuse is any sexual contact or exposure of a child and an adult that can include exposure to adult sexually, molestation, commercial exploitation, violations of body privacy, and mutual masturbation (Types of Child Abuse…). Neglect is the emotional or mental harm caused by the lack of care for a child’s basic needs by a guardian figure that is often demonstrated by the parent figure’s complete absence in the child’s life. Each of these broad types of mistreatment of a child each cause their own psychological damages to a