The Battering Parent

Not many youngsters get through their early years without a spanking. But what monstrous parents would burn an infant's flesh with cigarettes? Immerse a baby in a sink of scalding water? Break its bones--in one instance, 17 times? These all too familiar examples appear in the growing body of literature concerned with what is known as the "Battered Child Syndrome." The phrase was coined eight years ago by Dr. C. Henry Kempe, chairman of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, during a pioneer investigation of child beating and its causes. Kempe and other investigators have since gained a better understanding of battering parents, and have developed a form of therapy that is now proving successful in curbing their excesses.

Pervasive Demand. In a study of 60 families with battered children, University of Colorado Psychiatrists Brandt F. Steele and Carl B. Pollock discovered one characteristic all these parents had in common. As children, they had been battered themselves, either physically or emotionally: "All had experienced a sense of intense, pervasive, continuous demand from their parents, a sense of constant parental criticism. No matter what the patient as a child tried to do, it was not enough, it was not right, it was at the wrong time, it bothered the parents, it would disgrace the parents in the eyes of the world."

The pattern repeats itself when such children grow up and have children of their own. Overdisciplined and deprived of parental love in their infancy, they look to their own children for what they missed. "Axiomatic to the child beater," say Pollock and Steele, "are that infants and children exist primarily to satisfy parental needs, that children's and infants' needs are unimportant and should be disregarded, and that children who do not fulfill these requirements deserve punishment."

Such parents feel in effect that a baby who wets his diapers or hurls his Pablum at the ceiling is demonstrating that they are failures as parents. One young mother went into an all-day fit of hysterics because her young son refused to keep his coat on outdoors. Another told Colorado's investigators: "I have never felt really loved all my life. When the baby was born, I thought he would love me. When he cried, it meant he didn't love me. So I hit him."

All 50 states now have child-abuse statutes on their books. But legal action against a parent is seldom effective; pressure from the law, Pollock and Steele have found, simply reinforces his conviction that he is always "being disregarded, attacked, and commanded to do better--the very things which led him to be an abuser in the first place." Nor is it always wise for a therapist to intervene when he sees a child being badly treated, believes Psychiatric Social Worker Elizabeth Davoren, who took part in the Colorado study. "Protecting a child when you cannot continue such protection beyond the moment may be the cruelest thing you can do for him."

Kempe's experience has taught him that the battering parent is basically not a monster. Cruelty seldom inspires the savage beatings he inflicts on his children. In his mind, he is punishing them, a right long granted by society to parents. The trouble is that he carries that right to extremes. Some specialists, among them Dr. David Gil, professor of social welfare at Brandeis University, take the arguable position that the extremist parent is essentially a product of his culture. "Millions of children are subjected to physical punishment every day," says Gil. "As long as society tolerates such assaults against children, you will have cases of abuse."

By focusing on the parent, however, Kempe's group has been remarkably successful in reducing those cases. The Kempe therapy supplies a surrogate parent--for the battering parent himself rather than his victim. This person's role is to overcome the parental feelings of rejection that lead to child beating. Sometimes he literally moves into the household, offering the much needed gift of uncritical attention. "It must be a very patient, listening type of care," says Kempe. Therapy is stopped only at the parent's request. As the need for it dwindles, the surrogate parents may find their role reduced to that of occasional confidante. The Kempe system has worked so well that among the 400 cases of battering parents treated, there have been no repeaters.

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