NCJ Number
202546
Journal
Child Abuse & Neglect Volume: 25 Issue: 11 Dated: November 2001 Pages: 1439-1461
Date Published
November 2001
Length
23 pages
Annotation
This study tested the hypothesis that a parent's history of abuse as a child and the parent's own abusive behavior toward his/her children is mediated by parental psychopathology, early childbearing, and consistency of discipline; the effect of severity of abuse as a child on the likelihood of becoming abusive was examined.
Abstract
The sample included participants in the Oregon Youth Study of 206 boys (G2) and their parents (G1) recruited as a representative sample from the highest crime-rate areas of a medium-sized city. Although the boys were at risk for delinquency, they did not necessarily manifest behavioral problems. The subsample selected for the study consisted of 109 families in which either both biological parents or only a single biological parent was present in the home through the youths' 18th year. This ensured that the G2 youths' reports of their parents' abusive practices referred to the same parents who had 10 years before completed a questionnaire about their experience of abuse during their own childhoods. The youth and their parents participated in full-scale assessments every 2 years. Also measured were parental socioeconomic status, antisocial behavior, depression and posttraumatic stress disorder, consistency of discipline, and the perceived early difficulty of the G2 children. As reported by their children, parents who indicated having been abused in their own childhoods were significantly more likely to engage in abusive behaviors toward their children. Consistency of discipline, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder were also predictive of parental abuse of their children. Contrary to hypotheses, however, the effects were not fully mediated. Parents who had experienced multiple acts of abuse and at least one physical act of abuse were more likely to become abusive than were the other parents. This report concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for preventive interventions. 3 figures, 3 tables, 61 references, and appended list of items used for the abuse scales