Assignment Essay
Children are the future contributors towards building a strong nation, it is the responsibilities of family members to ensure their protection and provide support best condition to develop meaningful life. In today’s culture, the families with small children faced several problems and stresses. One of the common problems is of spending less time with children and hearing their concerns. Thus, this essay focuses on the family issue related to child neglect and abuse.
The family issue of child neglect and abuse
The families with small children are often faced with the challenge to taking time to talk to the children and discuss the feelings, working together to handle their complaints and needs.
This has led to the issue of child neglect and sometimes the parents are unaware about the abuses faced by their children. According to Van der Kolk (2017), child neglect is an act of absence of desired action by a family member in the care of a child.
The neglect can be in form such as not providing enough food, not attending to child in home, not keeping child clean or maintain hygiene, not helping with school activities or homework, not comforting the upset child, no care for child health issues or problem faced at school or dealing with verbal or physical abuse.
In 2015-16, the issue of child neglect and abuse was found to be the second most common type of child maltreatment in Australia (Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2017).The statistics show that in 2015there was a high percent of children died due to child maltreatment due to neglect and physical abuse.
Figure 1: Maltreatment types and fatalities in 2015 (Child Welfare Information Gateway, 2017).
Child neglect and abuse affects on family, child and the child care centre
Child neglect and abuse has a serious impact on family due to affected children depressing state, growing anxiousness and weakening physical and emotional mental state. The family have a challenging phase in understanding and discovering the ways to support the neglected and/or abused child.
The family struggles in dealing with children changed attitude and behaviour and face difficulty in coping with the children situation.
The effect of child neglect and abuse on a child can be disturbing as it has a psychological impact on the young children mental, emotional and even physical development in case of emotional neglect.
It affects the children responses due to psychological effects such as low self esteem, depression, anxiety, fear and lead to withdrawal from siblings and friends. The physical effects can be poor physical health, poor hygiene, pain in body parts, bruises and other physical scars.
The neglect and abuse of child also affects their language comprehension, intelligence quotient and self expression (Cecil et al., 2017). It can lead to behavioural effects such as self-harm, absence from school, lack of concentration, fear of physical touch, trouble sleeping, etc.
Thus, this issue deteriorated the life of the young children and worsen the child growth due to failure to provide conditions necessary for physical health and emotional development of the child.
Child care centre is also affected by the issue of child neglect and abuse. The child care centres need to provide provision and facilities to provide care to the neglected/abused child.
The care centres need to provide a safe, healthy and simulating environment that can counsel child in emotional and mental perspectives and help in child development. The care givers need to provide emotional support and continuous attention to the behaviour and attitude of the child. It needs to promote an open communication to discuss the parents and children issues and help the family to cope with the stressing situation.
Early Childhood Educators response to family issue
The early child educator can reduce the issues related to child abusing and neglecting through identify the unique qualities in each child and according guides them so that the children’s make such habits as their future skills. Other than that, there are number of steps that childhood educator can perform.
Step one is to become a nurturing parent of the child through allowing them to develop creative skills and learn that activity in which they have particular interest area. Likewise, if a child likes to painting and artistic activities but he/she does not good in writing and reading then in that case childhood educator should allow the child to pursue as per their interest area (Finkelhor & Lannen, 2015).
Step Second: respect kids through treat the same way which a senior or elder expects a kid. If educator uses abuse action then children won’t learn the mannerism. In that case, the childhood educator should applies things first in themselves then make child learn.
Step Third: The childhood educator should use the resources or tools as per the current technology. This could assist the educator to address the issue of child abuse and neglecting. However, the child abuse occurs with lose of temper when child is not in particular behaviour or fails to learn something.
These create the condition of child abuse. In such condition, the advancement of resources could support. The resources could be the films, books and games activity which tends to helps the child to gain the knowledge. These activities attract highly the child and kids.
Step fourth: The childhood educator can also promote the programs at school places in which parents would be invited. This practice could help to keep child happy and motivate.
Apart from these steps, the childhood educator can also use certain ways to reduce such problems: The primary educational institution needs to conduct the training session for the teachers or staff so that they can learn how to deal with different behaviour child (Widom et al., 2015).
Similarly, they also get to learn regarding how to control anger and anxiety. In a similar manner, educational system needs to incorporate the child abuse and neglect policy in such a way that negative health and economic consequences of child abuse and neglect can be solved.
To sum it up, the child neglect and abuse is a common family issue which affect the overall child development and has long term consequences in terms of behavioural, physical and psychological effects.
By learning about this issue and its impact on child, family and care centres the early childhood educators can respond towards protection of children and provide resources to assist the families to cope with child neglect and abuse.
Australian Institute of Family Studies. (2017). Child abuse and neglect statistics. Retrieved from: https://aifs.gov.au/cfca/publications/child-abuse-and-neglect-statistics
Cecil, C. A., Viding, E., Fearon, P., Glaser, D., & McCrory, E. J. (2017). Disentangling the mental health impact of childhood abuse and neglect. Child abuse & neglect, 63, 106-119.
Child Welfare Information Gateway. (2017). Child abuse and neglect fatalities 2015: Statistics and interventions. Retrieved from: https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/factsheets/fatality/
Finkelhor, D., & Lannen, P. (2015). Dilemmas for international mobilization around child abuse and neglect. Child abuse & neglect, 50, 1-8.
Van der Kolk, B. A. (2017). Developmental Trauma Disorder: Toward a rational diagnosis for children with complex trauma histories. Psychiatric annals, 35(5), 401-408.
Widom, C. S., Czaja, S. J., & DuMont, K. A. (2015). Intergenerational transmission of child abuse and neglect: Real or detection bias?. Science, 347(6229), 1480-1485.
