Abusive Parents​—The Ultimate Stressors

“Because [children] have little frame of reference outside the family, the things they learn at home about themselves and others become universal truths engraved deeply in their minds.” ​—Dr. Susan Forward.

A POTTER can take a formless mass of clay, add water in the proper amounts, and shape it into a beautiful vessel. Similarly, parents shape a child’s view both of himself and of the world. With love, guidance, and discipline, the child develops into a stable adult.

All too often, however, the impressions on a child’s mind and heart are formed by abusive parents. Emotional, physical, and sexual abuse create distorted thinking patterns that become firmly set and difficult to reshape.

Emotional Abuse

Words can hit harder than fists. “I don’t remember a day when [my mother] didn’t tell me she wished I’d never been born,” says Jason. Karen reflects: “I was always given the message that I was bad or not good enough.”

Children will usually believe what is said against them. If a boy is constantly called stupid, then he may eventually feel stupid. Call a girl worthless, and she may believe just that. Children have a limited perspective and often cannot discern that which is accurate from that which is abusively exaggerated or false.

Physical Abuse

Joe recalls his physically abusive father: “He’d start punching me until he’d have me up against the wall. He’d keep pounding me so hard that I’d be dazed . . . The scariest part of it was not ever knowing what would provoke his outbursts!”

Jake was routinely beaten by his father. In one such beating, when Jake was just six years of age, his arm was broken. “I wouldn’t let him or my sisters or Mom see me cry,” Jake remembers. “It was the only pride I had left.”

The book Strong at the Broken Places notes that childhood physical abuse is comparable to “being in a car accident every day, every week or every month.” Such abuse teaches a child that the world is unsafe and that no one can be trusted. Additionally, violence often begets violence. “If children are not protected from their abusers,” warns Time magazine, “then the public will one day have to be protected from the children.”

Sexual Abuse

According to one estimate, 1 in 3 girls and 1 in 7 boys have been forced into a sexual experience by the time they are 18 years old. Most of these children suffer in silence. “Like soldiers missing in action,” notes the book The Child in Crisis, “they remain lost for years in a private jungle of fear and guilt.”

“How I hated my father for abusing me and how guilty I felt for hating him,” says Louise. “I felt such shame because a child is supposed to love her parents and I didn’t all the time.” Such perplexing feelings are understandable when a child’s primary protector turns into a perpetrator. Beverly Engel asks in The Right to Innocence: “How can we acknowledge that our own parent, someone who was supposed to love and care for us, could care so little about us?”

Sexual abuse can warp a child’s entire view of life. “Every adult who was molested as a child brings from his or her childhood pervasive feelings of being hopelessly inadequate, worthless, and genuinely bad,” writes Dr. Susan Forward.

It Doesn’t Go Away

“It is not just the child’s body that is abused or neglected,” writes researcher Linda T. Sanford. “Troubled families mess with a child’s mind.” When a child is abused, either emotionally, physically, or sexually, he or she may grow up feeling unlovable and worthless.

Jason, mentioned earlier, had such low self-esteem as an adult that he was declared a suicide risk. Needlessly putting himself in life-threatening situations, he assessed his life as his mother had taught him: ‘You should never have been born.’

Reflecting on the effects of being physically abused as a child, Joe says: “It just doesn’t go away because you move out or get married. I’m always afraid of something, and I hate myself for it.” The tension of the physically abusive household causes many children to grow up with negative expectations and rigid defenses that imprison rather than protect.

For Connie, incest created a distorted self-image that solidified in her adulthood: “I still think a lot of the time that people can look right inside me and see how disgusting I am.”

All forms of abuse teach poisonous lessons that may become deeply entrenched by the time of adulthood. True, what is learned can be unlearned. Countless survivors who have recovered from childhood abuse testify to that fact. But how much better if parents realize that from the time of their child’s birth, they are shaping much of his concept of himself and the world. A child’s physical and emotional welfare is largely in his parents’ hands.

[Picture on page 7]

Words can hit harder than fists