Vicious Cycle of Child Abuse, Neglect

Alvin Poussaint, an African American authority on child psychiatry, says blacks and other Americans need to pay more attention to a festering problem in child-rearing among poorer, often single, black parents. In "Spare the rod, save the child," columnist Clarence Page, who is himself black, gives the sorry details. The column appeared recently in The Chicago Tribune and other newspapers.

The immediate problem, per Page, is that "African-American kids are being expelled from preschool at a much higher rate than other racial or ethnic groups ... African-American children are twice as likely to be expelled from preschool programs as white or Latino children, and five times as likely to be expelled as Asian-American children." Why? Poussaint says it's not racial profiling by school officials that's mostly to blame. Instead, "early anger" among three- and four-year-old black children leads to their misbehavior and expulsion.

That anger in turn often results, quite predictably, from parental abuse and neglect.

We're talking here in part about the 80 percent of black parents who believe that when their kids act up, they ought to "beat the devil out of them," Poussaint says. The psychiatrist goes on: "And research shows the more you beat them, the angrier they get. It is not good discipline."

Just as wrongheaded as outright corporal punishment is "black parents cursing, shaking or slapping their prekindergarten kids or demeaning them with statements like, 'You're no good, just like your father'." Or, the parent will simply neglect to discipline the child in a more appropriate way. Page then adds:

Single parents, usually moms, can easily be overwhelmed by the challenges involved in raising children, especially boys. In the worst cases they pass the consequences of their anger down from one generation to another.

Those consequences can later include social isolation, unruly school behavior and violence. Lacking appreciation at home, kids will often shop for it out on the street.

So childhood abuse/neglect not only breeds — via internalized anger that is always going to find some outlet — street crime, gang violence, drug use, educational failure, entrenched poverty, and other social pathologies. It also produces, eventually, parents who have their own bottled-up anger and who take it out on a new generation of kids: theirs. And the vicious cycle begins again.


This is an insight which oldstyleliberal finds most compelling. Anger breeds anger, via childhood abuse and neglect, with social ills in this country as its unfortunate side effect. We all need to pay attention to this syndrome; race is, after all, the third rail of American politics.

oldstyleliberal is accordingly mindful of the side effect of the side effect, as one might call it: non-black Americans develop a negative impression of black Americans, which turns into a stereotype, which turns into racial profiling and worse.

Thus we all need to be open to possible solutions to this problem. "What," asks Page, "can be done?" He answers that a Yale study "found that preschools that had psychologists and other support for their teachers had a lower expulsion rate. Back at home, communities may need to provide more resources, whether voluntary or through local social service agencies, to help parents cope. We need to help more parents learn about what works best in raising children — before the problems with their families become our problems."