III. More About the Children Available for Adoption, Page 11
What is Neglect?
Our son spent the first years of his life in almost total isolation. When he was taken into care he had no idea of play (his mother didn’t believe in toys) or social behaviour. He had never seen food cooked, never been grocery shopping, and at seven he had no conception of time or money or of cause and effect. His main language and behaviour role model had been his mentally disturbed mother and his speech was often bizarre and sometimes incomprehensible. He had a logically consistent way of looking at the world around him, but it was one which bore little relation to the one the rest of us use.
Child neglect can be deliberate (such as leaving young children at home while the parents go on holiday). But it is more likely to be ignorance or emotional immaturity which is at fault. Some parents simply don’t know that babies need to be cuddled and talked to, or that fish and chips are not appropriate food for a six-week-old baby. Others are unable to put their children’s needs before their own, and will persistently leave babies or little children home alone to go out for a night on the town. Neglect can also be caused by gambling or drug or alcohol abuse: the parents spend all their money on feeding their habit and are either too spaced out to look after the children or there is no money left over for food and electricity. Grinding, honest poverty can produce neglect, too (or at least, squalor), with too many children to feed and parents having to work out of the home to find the money.
Neglect can include filthy living conditions, inadequate food or clothing, emotional neglect (leaving a baby to cry for hours, not cuddling), not changing nappies for days at a time, not providing toys or friends to play with, not providing a safe environment or intellectual stimulation, not properly supervising children or letting them play outside till all hours with others who are bad influences. It can also include failing to protect a child from abuse. Neglected children may be undernourished, infested with parasites, may have open sores from unchanged nappies, be far behind in their intellectual development, and unable to interact normally with other people.
Neglect doesn’t necessarily mean lack of love, and where there is love and willing in the home it is worth the effort of social services to try to help such families stay together. But often the children eventually have to be taken into care anyway and new families found for them because the parents are simply not up to the job. Unlike abuse, where some children may be singled out for mistreatment, neglecting families generally neglect all their children equally, although some families do further abuse a scapegoated child by intentionally neglecting her.
Our daughter had been neglected by her birth mother for her first nine months. Even after a further nine months in an excellent pre-adoption placement she had urine scars from unchanged nappies and was very emotionally insecure. As she grew older she became too eager to please, too anxious to be part of the “in-crowd” at school. Only as a teenager has she begun to gain the self-confidence that her beauty and considerable talents warrant.
When they come into care some neglected children can behave almost like animals. By the time a child like this is placed with an adoptive family the medical problems will have been addressed and the foster family will have worked intensively on redressing the developmental and social backwardness, but there can still be a legacy for the adoptive family. One child, usually the oldest, in a sibling group which has been neglected, will often have taken over the role of parent for the younger ones. She will have grown old before her time with care and concern and will need to learn to be a child again, to shed her responsibilities. But she may find it hard to give up her parental role and trust other adults to do it, even as the younger ones may find it hard to accept new parents instead of their sister- or brother-mother.
Neglected children tend to be the easiest to turn around once they have functional, loving families, absorbing love and stimulation like sponges and visibly strengthening and blooming with nourishing food.
© Roger Ridley Fenton
