Kids Raising Kids

There are varying views of what child abuse consists of. Some would say that merely yelling at a child is abusive, while others believe it is acceptable to spank their children as punishment. What gives individuals these different opinions of what child abuse is comes from a plethora of factors.   Such as one’s own childhood, career, stress, mental/physical condition of the abused child, personal relationships and poverty all contribute to abusive tendencies toward children. One of the main sources of child abuse are in teenaged mothers. Unprepared for the extremely demanding task of caring for and raising a child, many teenaged mothers are at a loss of how to correctly discipline their child and often times end up forming abusive patterns, trying to deal with the frustrations of raising a child.
Child abuse is broken down into four areas: physical, sexual, emotional and neglect. Physical abuse is delivered to the victim with the intent of inflicting injury. Just as with smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol, physical abuse can be a habit that is executed when tackling stress (Dutton 45). Acting in a belligerent manor may relieve stress and after all, infants and children are easy targets as they most likely cannot fight back. Aggression is most often learned through observation and more directly, self experience. Dutton’s studies found that aggressive adolescent boys will likely have had an aggressively driven father punishing them as a young child. The reward of executing physical abuse, the pain and agony felt by the victim, leads the abuser to repeat his or her actions in order to gain that award an additional time. Another reward the abuser may feel is control. This control may lead to more abuse especially if they have little control over other areas of their life.
Sexual abuse in young children according to Prevent Child Abuse America is inappropriately exposing or subjecting the child to sexual contact, activity or behavior.   Surveys from this source... [continues]

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