Predicting rejection of her infant from mother's representation of her own experience: implications for the...

Child-battering parents are described in the literature as having three primary behavioral characteristics: a general difficulty with the control of aggression; an aversive, unsympathetic response to distress in others; and self-isolating tendencies. Here we review recent studies of young abused children which show the development of similar behavioral characteristics as early as 1-3 years of age. Surprisingly, these same three behavioral characteristics also develop in relatively maternally rejected children in normal samples. Taken together, these findings seem to suggest a continuum of psychological process from the experience of "normal" rejection to the experience of actual abuse by the parent. Studies of normal samples can then enrich our understanding of the psychological processes involved in child abuse. The second half of this article presents preliminary findings taken from our own ongoing study of social development in normal (nonabusive) families. Our study of the transcripts of 30 Berkeley Adult Attachment Interviews shows that a mother's apparent experience of her own mother as rejecting is systematically related to her rejection of her own infant (as observed in our laboratories) and at the same time to systematic distortions in her own cognitive processes (as taken from our study of adult attachment interviews). These distortions (idealization of the rejecting parent, difficulty in remembering childhood, incoherency in discussing attachment) are each significantly related to the mother's rejection of her own infant. Distortions in representation of an abusing parent may play a positive role in the perpetuation of child abuse.