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Child Maltreatment: Consequences, Mechanisms, and Implications for Parenting

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Parental Stress and Early Child Development

Abstract

Childhood represents a period of extreme vulnerability. Children’s brains and bodies are developing at a rapid pace to navigate an increasingly complex environment and, as with other primates, are heavily dependent upon caregivers. There is a great deal of variation in the quality of parenting children receive, and children’s development is flexible enough to adapt to tremendous variation in the type of input they receive. Child maltreatment represents a threshold where parental behavior disrupts the biological systems that underlie children’s social and emotional development. In this chapter, we describe the consequences of child maltreatment and consider several target mechanisms through which child maltreatment impacts children’s development including behavioral, physiological, learning, attentional, neurobiological, and epigenetic pathways. We also discuss clinical implications of this body of research including the potential for designing effective interventions aimed at both preventing the occurrence of maltreatment and targeting specific deficits associated with the experience of maltreatment.

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  1. University of Wisconsin—Madison, Madison, USA

    Brian T. Leitzke & Seth D. Pollak

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    Kirby Deater-Deckard

  2. Department of Psychology, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA

    Robin Panneton

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Leitzke, B.T., Pollak, S.D. (2017). Child Maltreatment: Consequences, Mechanisms, and Implications for Parenting. In: Deater-Deckard, K., Panneton, R. (eds) Parental Stress and Early Child Development. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55376-4_9

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