Speaking about such sphere as psychology, it is necessary to say that a wide range of factors connected with personality, personal problems, and life circumstances of future specialists influence their decisions when choosing their preferred fields.
During our previous classes, we were provided with an opportunity to get acquainted with such a field as child maltreatment. Considering the importance of the given area for a level of mental health of children and, therefore, for the future of our society, it is necessary to discuss whether I will contribute to this field in my future practice. First, I suppose that child maltreatment can be regarded as my potential field because of specific features that I possess and my interest area.
As for the particular reasons I could work in this field, I would like to state that I am highly involved in this topic because it means a lot for me. For instance, during my lifetime, I have witnessed many cases of child maltreatment (both physical and psychological) because I had acquaintances belonging to different social groups. Therefore, I have seen the consequences of such behavior for these children, and it is evident that traumatic experiences made it more difficult for them to cope with specific problems (Dion et al., 2016). As I have seen the consequences of cases involving even unobvious child maltreatment, I would like to do everything I can to improve the situation and help those who have experienced maltreatment and do not know how to accept such experience and keep wending their way through life.
Another reason why the area can become essential for me to in the future is related to some unique features I possess that can be important during the work with children. Thus, I suppose that I am quite patient, and this feature is hugely significant for those specialists working with children due to the fact that the latter usually need more attention than adults. Besides, it often happens that those specialists helping children are supposed to repeat the same idea many times in order to make their patients understand it, and it takes a lot of time. Apart from that, I suppose that I am quite sociable, and this is why it is easy for me to communicate with children and understand their problems; in general, emotional empathy remains an essential feature of a specialist in the discussed field.
Nevertheless, even if I suppose that my personality traits can help me to work in the discussed area in the future, it is necessary to assume that there are also specific adaptations that I will have to make in order to be more successful in the field. In the first place, I will have to expand my knowledge on different types of child maltreatment in order to be able to analyze the cases of my patients more thoroughly and make informed decisions on measures that have to be taken to help them to resume an everyday existence as soon as possible. Furthermore, I will have to improve my knowledge related to reasons that encourage adult people to be aggressive towards their children to provide them with valuable advice in case if the situation does not involve the termination of their parental rights.
Reference
Dion, J., Matte-Gagné, C., Daigneault, I., Blackburn, M. E., Hébert, M., McDuff, P.,… & Perron, M. (2016). A prospective study of the impact of child maltreatment and friend support on psychological distress trajectory: From adolescence to emerging adulthood. Journal of Affective Disorders, 189(1), 336-343.