Is your teenager abused? Don't be too sure he doesn't think he is. Adolescence and immaturity provide the wherewithal to do the strangest things while maintaining the appearance and actions of an emotionally healthy teen. Science explores ways to reach the hearts of younger patients, but even state of the art techniques leave us relying on imperfect assessment skills. All this while our increased sensitivity to child abuse promotes protection at all costs.
The necessary alarm that accompanies allegations of child abuse is not unnoticed by the children of today's immediate gratification nation. And thus all too many victims have turned out to be the entire family. We have, on numerous occasions, been confronted by cases in which children recant testimony to protect the cohesion of the family. But we also encounter boys and girls who, without regard for the truth, go over the head of a punitive parent to show who's boss. They have made child welfare workers and counselors foot soldiers to clever retaliation for discipline.
The professional community has fueled public perceptions about the evils of striking children, Talking and building communication are preferred, and with good reason. Yelling at a child, or whacking him with a belt, is physically and emotionally hurtful. How harmful, though, is hurtful?
Once upon a time, before television, double income homes, and chat groups on the internet children were more reliant upon the example of mother and father, or the immediate neighborhood. And those parents, reflecting the example of their parents, raised a generation that pulled an entire nation through World War II and the economic boom of the 1950s before adolescent psychiatric hospitals were even born. They grew up with varying degrees of punishment, and didn't see themselves as abused. They were, however, disciplined, and didn't call child welfare when they got grounded to say that daddy touched me.
This is the repeatedly played scene on adolescent treatment units. Children hospitalized after reports of abuse playfully engaging the other "patients" or cheerily chatting on the phone with a boyfriend or girlfriend as if away at camp. Meanwhile, a besieged, beleaguered parent struggles to clear his or her name, now neutered and unable to control his child. And this all started, for example, because the parent took away phone privileges. The last call that kid made was to child welfare. In the future, the newly labeled offending parent will come about as close to disciplining his teenager as UN inspectors will to curtailing Saddam Hussein, And the child further drifts to outside influences—but for the grace of God.
This is how the smug precocity and redefined morality of generation next is a product of capitulating and allowing children to run their upbringing. Were independence alone to cultivate maturity, we would be better for it. But that is just not the case.
Shouldn't psychology and psychiatry be providing a more textured understanding of parenting, discipline, and what constitutes abuse? As it is now, almost all physical discipline is regarded as abuse, and claims of abuse invariably are presumed accurate. Such is the zeal for protecting the endangered species. In a treatment setting, this has spawned prospecting for abuse. A few therapists have created a cottage industry of implanting memories of abuse to vulnerable, all-too-unquestioning patients. And by assigning liability for not reporting abuse, states unwittingly encourage this practice.
Someday, we will truly understand the dimensions of how enforced laxity has undermined our societal order. Perhaps some rational evidence will emerge that love sometimes goes hand in hand with a good smack. For now, however, we are left with the ugliness of family disintegration that follows prospecting for fool's gold. Too many families are forced into passivity in the name of proper parenting, much as schools must yield to the disruptive conduct of the undisciplined.
Incest nightmares and truly abusive environments can still be investigated with protection of the child in mind. But we need remember how one Jerry Springer-influenced child may experience abuse and his parents quite differently from how compassionate, law-abiding adults do. This is how overly aligning child advocacy with the immediate desires of the child ignores the trauma to the child of the displaced family. Until child protection becomes redefined as family protection, more parents will continue to wrongly enter the criminal justice system as inquiry begets overkill. Years later, will we be able to say the child has truly benefited?
