Child Abuse and Neglect Is an Ongoing Problem

Non-Traditional Parenting The main point of the article, "Moms at Work and Dads at Home: Children's Evaluations of Parental Roles," is that when children are given a chance to express their opinions on traditional vs. non-traditional roles, they speak up. In this case, the children used in the survey (67 second-graders and 54 fifth-graders) saw it as "acceptable for both mothers and fathers to work full-time" (Sinno, et al., 2009). However, children found it not as acceptable for fathers to be stay-at-home parents as it is for mothers to be stay-at-home parents.

Clearly, 2nd graders were "more likely to rely on .. stereotype knowledge of appropriate roles" (mom home, dad at work), and when dad was the key child-rearing parent it became a non-traditional family. http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=130760&page=1. (This is an ABC News report on the growing trend of fathers raising children.) Another non-traditional family is the Foster Care family. According to the Journal of Child and Family Studies, more than 500,000 U.S. children are in foster homes " .. due to child abuse and neglect" (Tyler, et al., 2010).

The sad part for these children is that once removed from the original home where they were abused " .. many continue to experience child maltreatment while in foster care" (Tyler, 787). And sadder still is the fact that once many of foster care children leave their foster parenting situation, they encounter difficulties such as " .. drug use, homelessness, victimization, and/or arrests" (Tyler, 787). Homeless adults are five-to-seven times more apt to have been in a foster family, and youths that had lived in a foster family " ..

find themselves ill-equipped for their emergence into society," and their chances of becoming homeless within the first year after "being discharged" from a foster family are quite high (Tyler, 788). The Website www.endhomelessness.org points out that those parents with a foster care background are more likely than the average parents to have their own children in foster care.

Child Maltreatment: The key point of the article in BMC Psychiatry (on child maltreatment) is that for male juvenile offenders, when they have suffered from neglect at a young age, they tend to continue the same criminal path (recidivism). And if the male juvenile offender was physically abused in a home as a young child, his situation is " .. uniquely related to violent recidivism, over and above dynamic risk factors for recidivism" (van der Put, et al., 2016).

For female juvenile offenders that had been neglected and physically abused, their past is "weakly associated with general recidivism" but not with violent recidivism (van der Put, p. 1). The point here is that since recidivism has been documented vis-a-vis juvenile offenders that were abused / neglected as children, risk management interventions need to be addressed. http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/childmaltreatment/index.html. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a helpful section on the abuse of children.

History of Child Maltreatment: The abuse of children likely goes back to the history of humans, according to findlaw.com. Until the late 1800s, women were considered the property of their husbands, and children were considered the property of their fathers. And they could be beaten and subjected to horrific abuse. But in the 1870s, news broke out that an 8-year-old orphan whose name was Mary Ellen Wilson was being beaten and whipped every day at her foster home in New York City.

The only legal group to step up and stop this carnage was the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; the judge in this case sent the foster mother to prison, and citizens formed the New York Society for the Prevention.