Domestic Violence Effect On Children and Parent-child Aggression, and Treatments (Part II)

Domestic Violence Effect On Children and Parent-child Aggression, and Treatments

Eurus Thach

March 18th, 2019

Literature Review

Millions of children out there are suffering domestic violence every day. Domestic violence, when it comes to children, gives them no choice of either staying or running away. It is a cruel challenge that children have to learn how to adapt. To be adaptive to such an environment, they have to trade their physical and mental health. Besides that, it costs children the ideal relationship between them and their caregivers, which results in parent-child aggression. The reason is the emotional expressions between to subjects in that relationship relate to each other. The pressure, the parent-child aggression,  makes children keep their mental and physical problems to themselves and becomes susceptible adults.

       

Summary

A child learns emotional expressions from the caregiver.  McCoy and Raver (2011) state, “greater frequency of positive caregiver emotional expressiveness has been linked with greater emotion regulation, more adaptive behavioral competence, and fewer behavioral problems in children” (p. 743). A child learns and modifies the emotional expressions from the caregiver. On the other hand, a poor emotional performance from the caregiver evokes negative thinking and the negative reaction of the child. What makes a poor emotional performance? It is when a child witnesses his or her caregiver’s gloomy expression such as sorrow or aggression toward a problem. McCoy and Raver (2011) reveal that the performances of frustration, fear, or anxiety shape "children’s responses to emotionally arousing stimuli in ways that may be proximally adaptive but that may also compromise children’s longer-term functioning” (p. 744). One wrong step can push the process of shaping a child’s thinking further to undesirable development. In the end, it produces heavy, child mental problems. That is how parent-child aggression is built up. 

In all dimensions, domestic violence causes the heaviest damage and consequences to children. What is worse than a child suffering unsteady feelings among abusive events? Jaffe, Baker and Cunningham (2004) state the following:

52% of 144 mothers reported that their children yelled from another room during abusive events at least occasionally, and 24% reported their children frequently yelled from another room. Twenty-one percent of the mother reported their children called someone else for help during the abuse at least occasionally, and 6% reported they did so frequently. (p. 14) 

When domestic violence occurs, children bottle up their feelings toward their caregivers, suffer the pain on their own. They keep doing so until they reach the threshold of their tolerance. Hence, they yell, which is the easiest way to relieve their feelings. To them, sharing feelings with their caregivers is not the best option. It is not because they do not want to, they just do not know how to let them out gently.   

Besides the difficulty handling the damaged emotions, in the article of Jouriles, Barling, and O'Leary (1987), children also have a high chance of developing psychological problems: “Parent-child aggression in families of antisocial children compared to families of control groups (Patterson, 1982), and children exposed to parental aggression have consistently been found to show more behavior problems” (p. 166). Parent-child aggression involves not only in the present mental health but also the long-term impact. Hamby (2015) shares, “a child who grows up in a violent home might be a violent adult” (para. 5). How does domestic violence relate to parent-child aggression? Jouriles, Barling, and O'Leary (1987) explain that interspousal aggression strongly connects with parent-child aggression (p. 166). Domestic family stresses out the parent-child aggression, which affects the child, and the affected child grows up and steps in the community with violence and unhealthy mental life.

Studying about community responses means studying the community’s recent reactions and attention to this crisis. Since then, there should be more improvements to domestic violence. Besides the people, the government has taken this seriously. There have been several changes in U.S. law. However, they occur slowly. While the domestic violence researches appeared in the 1980s, it took the U.S. a decade to improve and proceed with the law.  According to Jaffe, Baker, and Cunningham (2004), in 1997, a Utah law was passed and treated an adult who exhibited more than once domestically violent behavior like an offender. After the law, Jaffe, Baker, and Cunningham (2004) reports, the desired effect has been achieved through the decrease in the amounts of domestic violence (p. 17). The twenty-first century is nominated as a safer time for children in the world. Despite that, the lack of responses in the community is still undeniable. In her TED Talk speech, Abi Cole (2015) asserts, there are 38% domestic violence cases that the police leave the perpetrators with just warnings. “Only a quarter of reported incidents”, Cole (2015) continues, “results in the rest; and a mere 4%... results in conviction”. That is clear proof that this crisis needs more attention from the government.    

What about the view of the community on the cause of domestic violence? Surrounding that main factor is others like interspousal conflicts and learning adults’ violent behaviors. Into details, Greydanus, Palusci, and Merrick (2017) assume factors that draw the crisis are “limited education in parenting skills as well as an underlying milieu in human history of extreme violence and aggression” (p. 108). More speech appears to encourage and help the children overcome this hard time. It is good news that nowadays civilization allows people to have caring attitudes toward this crisis. In spite of that, Abi Cole (2015) reveals that there are a lot of cases the witnesses choose not to involve in the situation. Sadly, the ignorance of the community accidentally strengthens the perpetrators’ power, which makes it hard to put a complete stop on domestic violence.     

Discussion and Evaluation

Most of the research agrees that children might copy behaviors and learn emotional responses from caregivers. In the domestic violence angle, Hamby (2015) interprets, “they see adults use violence to get their way and social learning theory would suggest that kids will copy that behavior” (para. 5). She uses the social learning theory to support her claim. In lieu of using the same method, Jouriles, Barling, and O'Leary (1987) accomplish their study about parent-child aggression based on many others’ researches and experiments. So do Greydanus, Palusci, and Merrick (2017). This work relates the process to “limited education on parenting skills” and “underlying milieu in human history” (p. 108). Although they do agree that the expressiveness from the caregivers non-linearly connects to this learning process (pp. 743-744). No child wants to replicate domestically violent behaviors from the adults. However, how do they resist the process while the abusive events keep being on loop? It is an unconscious process that is hard to fight against. 

This is also the why reason appropriate community responses are essential. Jaffe, Bake, and Cunningham (2004) tend to focus more on the improvement of community responses. They provide organizations and the laws fighting against this crisis. The work by Greydanus, Palusci, and Merrick (2017) also chose community attention as their aim. However, instead of naming supportive foundations, it mostly reviews the timeline of domestic violence. Jaffe, Bake, and Cunningham ’s work (2004) lacks information about the process of modifying caregivers’ emotional expressions. On the other hand, they show their interest in the psychological effect of domestic violence on child development. Like other research in this essay, they assume that this has a long-term impact on mental life (p. 11). Community responses reveal the way people connect with each other. It is hard to get in one’s shoes, but never too hard to respect and protect them.

Proposed Research Question

The further question this research brings forth is what kind of understanding and awareness of a child’s perspective of domestic violence is needed to help improve the treatments for them. This piece of information might be missing due to the psychological complexity of an individual. Besides the improvements in children’s treatment, intervention programs for abusers are also helping children heal parent-child aggression. Studying this specific problem asks for deep and highly-educated work. Since then, the research can end up collecting various aspects of a child. The reason this question is significant is that it strongly relates to parent-child aggression and child cognitive development. Understanding this problem means understanding the whole picture of domestic violence, which helps improve community responses.

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References: (the whole research)

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