Researcher James Garbarino refers to the neglectful family as the “family with the hole in the middle.” When a child doesn’t get his basic emotional and physical needs met early on in life, it impacts his every day functioning. Foster parents see this impact every day in the life of children. The child who hoards food in his bedroom. The grade school child who doesn’t have basic hygiene skills. A baby who is underweight and underfed, yet shows no interest in snuggling and sucking on a bottle.
Neglect is sometimes hard to define because our basic expectations, our cultural biases, and our opinions of what parents should do influence our definitions. Neglect is usually quite severe before the State of Alaska Office of Children’s Services gets involved or before children are taken into custody solely because of neglect. Yet neglect is the most commonly reported form of maltreatment. Most children who have been placed into foster care because of physical or sexual abuse have also been neglected in some way as well.
To determine what defines neglect, we need to determine what a child needs from his or her caregivers in order to survive and grow. This course will look at what children need to be healthy, how children are hurt when basic needs are not being met, and how resource families can help a child heal.
This course includes:
