Understanding the dynamics of child maltreatment: child harm, family healing, and public policy (discussant's commentary).

For almost a half-century, the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation has profiled many of the evolving themes and issues at the heart of psychology. It has also documented, less directly, changes in society. When the symposium was inaugurated in 1951, child maltreatment was a sad reality of life for many children, but it was not a topic of considerable professional attention. With the identification of the "bat-tered child syndrome" Silver, 1962) in the early 1960s, however, professional concern with the plight of abused and neglected children quickly grew. National attention to child maltreatment also increased as public concern about family poverty escalated in the late 1960s, the incidence of reported sexual abuse grew in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and anguish over drug-exposed babies and the effects of homelessness on children emerged during the past decade. During the same period, media reports of abuse-related fatalities in families who were well-known to social service personnel and of children who became "lost" in the foster care system focused critical scrutiny on the inadequacies of the child protection system. These reports also revealed how the growing national problem of child maltreatment had become linked to other social ills, such as urban and rural poverty, the drug culture, neighborhood dysfunction, and the changing patterns of family life 246 MOTIVATION AND CHILD MALTREATMENT and child care (Thompson & Wyatt, 1999). A symposium devoted to child maltreatment would have been almost unimaginable when the symposium began in 1951, but the chapters of this 46th Annual Nebraska Symposium on Motivation reveal how much we have learned about this extraordinarily complex and challenging problem of human motivation. As psychologists have studied child maltreatment, three questions have been at the heart of their inquiry. First, what are the effects of abuse or neglect on its child victims? Psychological research has revealed that the sequelae of maltreatment extend significantly beyond bruises and broken bones to include damaged self-esteem, distrust in close relationships, conduct problems, and other harms. Often the psychological effects of maltreatment are the most significant sequelae, but understanding why abuse leaves enduring scars for some children but has transient consequences for others is a significant research challenge. Second, how can families be healed? Psychological research has highlighted the multifaceted contributors to family risk for child maltreatment, such as adult psychopathology, the child-related belief systems of parents, economic stress, family disorganization, domestic violence, and deteriorating neighborhoods. These and other …