Childism, Chapter 3 - Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's final work, Childism, was published soon after her untimely passing in December of 2011. In the book, Young-Bruehl, a long time psychoanalyst and child advocate, focuses on the pervasive prejudice she feels overshadows many children in our society. Be it abuse, or the modern day phenomenon of helicopter-parenting, she felt these injustices served to demarcate children, marking them as less worthy than adults. The resulting consequences result in unhealthy and damaging parent-children relationships.

Arendt Center intern, Anastasia Blank, is reading Childism and providing us with a chapter by chapter review, highlighting some of the most interesting and compelling insights and arguments. Her previous posts about the book can be read here. Today, she shares her thoughts and impressions of Chapter 3. We hope you are inspired to read along. You can purchase the book here. 

Chapter 3 of Elizabeth Young-Bruehl's Childism argues that something went terribly wrong in the early 1960’s, the initial period when forms of child abuse and neglect were being identified. Young-Bruehl explains that the emergent field of Child Abuse and Neglect [CAN] “did not understand adult motivation and childism, [so that] childism was built into the field and its legal policy and advocacy.”

So why does Young-Bruehl take issue with the advocates and academics hoping to protect children? She explains that one of the pioneers of the field, Dr Henry C. Kempe, “Construed the children’s injuries… as a disease of the child. Not a disease of the abuser that is manifested on the child.” This turns the issue of abuse into something that can be solved by removing the child from the harmful environment, implying that there is a single cure for the child’s problem.

What Young-Bruehl wants us to see is that abuse and neglect are not issues with children, they are problems that stem from the abuser.

So how could a person, a family, a government, go about dealing with this problem?  Young-Bruehl describes a mother who had four children, but beat only one. Through therapy the mother determined that she identified her son with her own brother. Her brother had been favored by their parents, while they had neglected her throughout her childhood. Her relationship with this specific son was directly affected by the resentment she harbored from her own childhood. In a way she was afraid of her son, because  she associated him with negative experiences of her youth. This in turn caused her to use abuse as a means to keep him down and demonstrate her power and importance. Here we can see how abuse manifests itself explicitly within a relationship between child and parent. There is no single cure for abuse, because each case is different. What should be clear is that the solution lies in a multi-faceted approach. Human relationships are notoriously complicated, and one so vital as that between a child and their parent need not be doomed just because there is a problem (albeit it a very grave one).

What happened in the field of child abuse and neglect was that a problem was identified without ever being fully understood. Young-Bruehl traces years of legislation beginning in the early 1960’s to show that abuse is not the only concern we need to be addressing, but also how we as a country have responded to instances of abuse. In her discussion of the 1974 Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act she notes that it implied that,

All physically abusing parents are impulsive, hysterical, aggressive, and untreatable, so that removing children from their homes into foster homes is necessary. In effect, it looked like an argument for increasing reliance on foster care, not for establishing treatment programs for children or parents.

Research on reported instances of child abuse has shown that only about ten percent of abusers are psychotic and untreatable. So why should the other ninety percent be marginalized as being doomed to failed parenthood? Young-Bruehl wants us to look beyond the instances of abuse and to try to recognize the underlying motivations. Once abuse is reported, the next step is to ask why it happened? And then how can it be prevented? When we fail to ask why, we fail to give families a chance. She believes that solutions can be found to help the abusers, and subsequently help the abused. While protective service agencies remove children from harm, this process is a scary and disruptive event that leaves children without their parents. If we can identify resolutions that treat the issues apparent in the abusers we may be able to leave the family intact.

-Anastasia Blank