Psychological child maltreatment: a developmental view

Abstract

This article explores the concept of psychological child maltreatment. It begins with a developmental view of the needs of children and proceeds to define psychological maltreatment in terms of care-giver behavior that thwarts the meeting of those needs. It focuses on five forms of psychological maltreatment that are of concern to the practitioner: rejecting (sending messages of rejection to the child); ignoring (being psychologically unavailable to the child); terrorizing (using intense fear as a weapon against the child); isolating (cutting the child off from normal social relationships), and corrupting (mis-socializing the child into self-destructive and anti-social patterns of behavior).