Abstract
The main aim of this paper is to examine the connection between parental stress and child maltreatment, with a particular focus on children aged 5 to 12. Does the caregivers’ stress really impact how they treat their children? The researchers assume that children and adolescents brought up by parents and caregivers who are stressed are more likely to be mistreated than others.
Maltreatment of children by their caregivers is a common issue, with studies showing that about 16% of girls and 7% of boys are mistreated by their parents (Berger & Slack, 2020). The paper will aim to provide more insights into the issue of child maltreatment by conducting a literature review of 10 scholarly sources. The findings of the study demonstrate a link between parental stress and child maltreatment.
Introduction
The primary purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between parental stress and child maltreatment, especially among adolescents and children. Child maltreatment, including neglect and emotional, sexual, and physical abuse, is a significant public health problem affecting millions of children across the globe. Therefore, the issue must be studied, and solutions must be implemented. For instance, Pei et al. (2019) argue that child maltreatment could result in adverse outcomes, affecting their physical, cognitive, and emotional development. Understanding the correlation between parental stress and children’s mistreatment would be vital as it can help implement policies and intervention measures for the overall well-being of the children.
Research Question
The main research question guiding this paper will be: Is there an association, correlation, or relationship between parental stress and child maltreatment? To answer this question, the study will conduct a literature review of five previous articles on a related topic.
The research will examine how these parents influence their children by subjecting them to maltreatment. Moreover, a focus will be given to the impacts of maltreatment on the affected children physically, emotionally, or psychologically. The research question in this study will promote an understanding of the interplay between stress in parents and maltreatment in children for the formulation of evidence-based solutions.
Background of the Problem
As previously mentioned, child maltreatment is a substantial public health concern affecting millions of children across the globe and has been around for many years. This issue has made many scholars and policymakers curious about the degree to which parent stress influences child maltreatment. It has been proven that his maltreatment could be attributed to various factors, with parental stress often associated with the problem (Brown et al., 2020).
For instance, parents who live in chaotic neighborhoods are more likely to be stressed, which results in them displaying dysfunctional parenting behaviors (Pei et al., 2019). Conversely, Chung et al. (2020) concluded that increased parental stress during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in increased harsh parenting behaviors and negatively impacted parent-child closeness. These observations prove a critical issue in child parenting that needs to be addressed as soon as possible.
The degree to which parental stress influences child maltreatment is challenging to assess, as an accumulation of contributing factors often causes mistreatment. According to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (2020), as cited in Brown et al. (2020), child mistreatment could occur from other stressors such as economic strains, educational hardships, and single parenthood. Studies show that common negative behavior, such as harsh treatments, low levels of support, and inconsistent discipline, is contributed to by a combination of the mentioned stressors, i.e., Brown et al. (2020). However, parental stress occurs regularly among parents and, for that reason, could be a great contributor to the problem (Yoo, 2017). This observation makes the problem critical and necessitates further study, as it could provide great insights.
Statistics and Facts about the Research
Previous research and statistics show that parental stress and maltreatment of adolescents have a significant influence on the parents’ behavior toward the child, thus affecting their well-being. In the US, 25% of all parents are said to be experiencing stress, which could result in them portraying aggressive or indifferent behavior toward their children (Pei et al., 2019). The behaviors include yelling, ignoring, screaming, or physically punishing the child, which could harm the child’s physical and mental health.
However, these observations are not due to the US culture, as reports from Canada show that 24% of parents scream at their children, and 12% physically abuse them (McConnell et al., 2020). The research is also not limited to North American countries, as a survey in Australia proved that 91% of parents’ stress is attributed to their child’s maltreatment (Mathews et al., 2023). This final statistic proves that both parents’ stress and child maltreatment could influence each other. Nonetheless, further studies need to demonstrate how each factor contributes to a caregiver’s stress and the degree of their contribution.
Several facts and findings are relevant to the topic of parental stress and its correlation with child maltreatment. According to the WHO (2022), about 1 in 4 adults have reported experiencing violence as an adult, while 1 in 5 women and 1 in 13 men have experienced sexual violence as men. This significant number could result in behavioral and long-term mental problems for the person as an adult. Child maltreatment has also been identified as a cycle passed from generation to generation, making it essential for policymakers and other stakeholders to address the problem from a societal perspective (Yoo, 2017). These statistics and facts show that parental stress is a massive contributor to child maltreatment and could help solve the problem of the increasing number of child abuse cases.
Theoretical Framework
The theoretical framework of the relationship between parental stress and child maltreatment could be well explained using Bronfenbrenner’s Bio-Ecological Theory. According to this theory, human growth and development occur through a combination of environmental systems, including microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem. At the microscopic level, parental stress is a major contributor to child maltreatment, as parents who are stressed are more likely to abuse or neglect their children. Individual-level factors such as mental problems, financial challenges, and personal conflicts are argued to be the main contributors to stress in this stage.
During the mesosystemic level, the causes of stress in parents are influenced by structural factors, including the nature of the family and the society in which the parent operates. Negative structures that make a parent lack social support contribute to them becoming stressed and consequently ending up mistreating their children. Conversely, parents with favorable mesosystemic structures are more likely to offer better care to their children, reducing child malpractice cases.
At the exosystemic level, communal factors such as the accepted social norms, the society’s levels of poverty, and the access to resources in the community have impacted the caregiver’s stress levels. Children born to parents who live in poverty-stricken regions are more likely to encounter child abuse since these parents could be stressed.
At the macrosystem level, factors such as laws formulated by regulatory bodies are said to be the primary influencers of parental stress, which causes child abuse and neglect. Since these policies are mainly concerned with social equality, economic equity, and justice, they influence the level of support that families and communities in poverty receive, influencing the parents’ stress levels.Some policies are also designed in a manner that will influence the way parents react toward their children, even when under stress. Many scholars and policymakers have used Bronfenbrenner’s Bio-Ecological Theory to understand the relationship between parents’ stress and their children’s maltreatment.
The decision-makers need to understand critical terms to understand the issues in child maltreatment. Generally, the term represents all behaviors that could cause the child to be injured, hurt, or harmed. According to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (2020), child maltreatment is said to encompass all behaviors that would result in abuse or neglect by a parent, caregiver, or any other person with whom the child is given custody.
The WHO (2022) states that maltreatment encompasses all forms of exploitation of a child that result in actual or potential harm to the child’s health and dignity (As cited in Vilariño et al., 2022). Most caregivers maltreat their children through aggression, which can be either relational, verbal, or physical. Physical aggression comes in the form of pushing and hitting, relational aggression comes in the form of damaging relationships, and verbal aggression is expressed through words (Hue San Kuay and Towl, 2021). Understanding the causes and effects of child maltreatment, such as aggression in complex social environments, would help researchers, parents, and other stakeholders make more informed decisions.
Literature Review
According to the literature, this research paper aims to examine the relationship between parental stress and child maltreatment for adolescents and children. This literature review will discuss the following articles (Anthony et al., 2005; Chung et al., 2020; Rodriguez & Richardson, 2007; Pei et al., 2019; Yoo, 2017). All these research papers will help provide more light on the correlation between parental stress and child maltreatment.
The paper by Antony et al. (2005) examines the relationship between parenting stress and behavior and preschoolers’ social competence and behaviors in classroom settings.There were 307 participants, of which 229 were attendants of two Baltimore City Head Start programs, while the other 78 were attendants of private daycare centers in the same region.The average age for the participants was four years, while their ages ranged from 26 months to 59 months.
The parents who participated in this study filled out a parenting behavior checklist that describes a range of parenting behaviors and the parenting stress index short form, which measures the stress levels in the relationship between the parent and the child.The teachers who volunteered for the study were asked to fill out the Social Competency Behavioural Emotional (SCBE) form, which examines the preschoolers’ competencies in the mentioned aspects. The researchers found that children’s classroom adjustments and behaviors were related to parenting stress. The research also showed that parents’ behaviors are related to parenting stress.
Chung et al.’s (2020) paper sought various ways in which the effects of parenting stress on harsh parenting and the parent-child relationship can be mediated during the COVID-19 pandemic in Singapore. The study had 318 respondents, of whom 275 responded, and 268 were found to be eligible to participate in the survey. Chung et al. (2020) excluded caretakers who were not the students’ biological parents, leaving 258 responses to be analyzed for the study.The survey comprised 50 questions that sought to determine the impacts of COVID-19 on stress and how it related to parenting.
The study outcomes assessed were the harsh parenting behaviors portrayed by the parents and parent-child relationship and closeness (Chung et al., 2020). The study hypothesized that parents significantly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic would report higher stress levels (Chung et al., 2020). The results from the analysis showed that the COVID-19 pandemic had an impact on both harsh parenting and parent-child relationships due to parenting stress. The researchers concluded that the circuit-breakers implemented by Singapore’s government contributed to the adverse outcomes.
The purpose of Pei et al.’s (2019) research paper was to examine the external and internal influences of neighborhood disorders on parental stress and a child’s physical maltreatment. The data used in this analysis were drawn from fragile families and the child well-being study (Pei et al., 2019). A total of 3288 caregivers completed the survey, and after missing data issues were sorted, the final sample for analysis had data for 3036 children.
The results of this study showed that parents who bring up their children in disordered neighborhoods are more likely to report high issues of children’s externalizing issues. Moreover, the study aligned with Chung et al.’s (2020) conclusions. It argued that parental stress and physical child maltreatment mediated the relationship between neighborhoods with disorders and externalizing problems of children aged three years old (Pei et al., 2019). The researchers concluded that it is essential for interventions to be taken in early childhood to prevent externalizing issues both at the micro and macro levels.
The purpose of Rodriguez and Richardson (2007) is to examine the relationship between aspects of social information processing theory, such as stress and anger, in predicting parental child maltreatment. The participants for this study were 115 parents who filled out self-reports on cognitive factors such as loss of control, perceived attachments, and lack of empathy towards the child as predictors of maltreatment risk from the parents. Of the participants, 86 were mothers, while 29 were fathers of children aged 4 to 12. The parents had to answer questionnaires of 160 forced-choice statements they either had to agree with or disagree with.
The study analysis used SPSS for Windows, where descriptive statistics were provided. The results showed that many social factors predict increased child maltreatment risks. The study’s findings partially supported the hypothesis that the pre-existing schemas argument risks beyond contextual variables (Rodriguez & Richardson, 2007). The researchers recommended that policies that encourage emphatic parental behaviors and encourage more internal attributions be formulated.
Yoo’s (2017) study aimed to find out if stress among caretakers contributed more to stress than other previously identified causes. The participants for the study were 366 immigrants from Korea who had at least one child born in the US or had immigrated with their child into the country.The parents who completed the survey ranged from 29 to 64 years, while their children’s ages ranged from 0 to 30.
The respondents filled out Conflict Tactic Scales, which were then analyzed using hierarchical multiple regressions to determine if there was any relationship between the risk causes and child maltreatment. The study results showed that parental stress was the most significant contributor to stress among children. The authors recommended implementing community programs to help mitigate parental stress challenges.
Conclusion
Grasping the link between parental stress and child maltreatment is crucial, as it can guide the development of policies and interventions aimed at promoting children’s well-being. This paper reviews five research studies that explore the connection between parental stress and the mistreatment of children. Antony et al. (2005) found that parenting stress harmed the children’s classroom competencies. Chung et al. (2020) found that the government’s COVID-19 restrictions negatively impacted parental stress and suggested online interventive measures to prevent the problem.
Pie et al. (2019) also contributed to answering the research question, where they found that chaotic neighborhoods resulted in externalizing issues for the children. Rodriguez and Richardson (2007) found that many risks predicted child maltreatment, but parental stress was the most significant contributor. Yoo (2017) examined the effects of parental stress among parents who migrated to the US and found that it significantly contributed to child maltreatment.
Based on the five studies analyzed and other materials cited in the introduction section, it can be concluded that the literature proves a correlation between parental stress and child maltreatment. In addition, based on the discussion recommendations of the authors, it can be concluded that parental stress is not just a personal issue.Instead, policymakers should try to reduce factors that contribute to parental stress, which will reduce malpractice of children.Moreover, parental education needs to be provided on managing stress and ensuring their issues do not impact their children.
References
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