Do you think ‘near’ abusive parents watch the news, and think of changing their behaviour?

[EddyF]

I couldn’t think of a title of what I am trying to really ask. I guess I would be interested to know/discuss if parents who are on the slippery slope of parenting (I.e, not downright evil) but not practicing good enough parenting; do you think they get touched by stories they see on the news regarding children being abused/murdered? I guess neglectful parents.

I can’t think of anyone not affected by these stories, and I wonder if these stories can be the catalyst for change in some people’s parenting.

I also think that those who are in the frontline of protecting children, they’re also expected to manage the chaotic nature of the caregivers, thus making it difficult to solely concentrate on the child’s needs. I know someone who states they often have to deal with crying/or angry parents, and the needs of the child has to be explicitly brought back to the forefront, but this takes skills and awareness in that moment.

I guess my question is: do you think parents who are not nurturing their children in a correct way, can they have a lightbulb moment when such tragedies occur and want to do better?

Sorry to read that Namechangetimes100 - your experience sounds truly awful. I think you've highlighted the fact that within a family all sorts of terrible behaviour can become 'normalised' and it can take an outsider to identify what's going on - or in your case you getting out of the family home.

@DeadbeatGasbag

I think they probably are much more likely to think "see I am not that bad, I'm nothing like those really horrific cases you see on the tv".

I'd say this is probably very likely

Some of the posts here are really sad. Especially the grandparents seeing their own children be abusive mothers 😢

No I don't. I think they don't care and they carry on until they are caught or the DC grow up and leave home. Or they are stopped if the DC are removed by SS.

[quote Unreasonabubble]@WingingItSince1973 - Have you reported your DD to social services or the Police?[/quote]
Yes twice since September and the school have also phoned them. Had 3 phone calls and one face to face. He doesn't meet safeguarding threshold but they will back us up if we apply for SGO.

I can only go by those I have known, of which there have been a few over the years.

Without exception they have all given a tiny part of a much bigger picture like "I didn't do the washing" or "my child had headlice".

I'm.not saying some aren't truly honest, but ime they are not.

Most parents who have had children actually removed do struggle to accept responsibility at least initially, if they’d been able to reflect and see the problems they probably wouldn’t have lost their children. Some do reflect later when they’re in a different emotional space themselves.

However I’ve already seen an otherwise sensible contributor on another thread tonight comment that social workers are more concerned about a messy house or piles of laundry than about reports of bruises, which shows how common a belief that is.

Fir the record, no social worker cares about a pile of laundry. Christ, you should see my house sometimes.

No, I don’t think they see themselves as the same.

I took my kids to soft play after school yesterday and they have a gate that staff have to press a button to unlock so kids don’t escape. I was leaving and this little boy - maybe 5 - tried to get through behind us. His mum was shouting “DS NO do NOT leave this place!”. He tried to squeeze though but noticing I said “Sorry sweetheart I’m just going to close this gate can you step back please so I don’t catch your toes”. And he did. His mum came over and said “You’re very patient, I’d have just kicked him in the chest, he’s a little shit”. Then laughed. I was and just left. I’ve thought about her a lot and wonder if she knows that’s an awful thing to say and if she is abusive and thinks other people treat their kids that way too. I wish I’d said something, i chickened out.

My son has called the police twice now due to the family where his bedroom backs onto, arguing loudly and the bf hitting the woman and shouting at the little girl

The mum has a boyfriend who isn't kids dad. Hoping it makes her think about her situation and get rid of him and his weed smoking

Pretty sure my mother thought she was justified in what she did -

• slaps round the face/ear for 'back chat' (as a toddler... incapable of fully understanding 'tone of voice' or when to answer a question vs when to shut up)...

• shoving my head under the cold bath tap (v high pressure water) when I cried so hard i got the gulping gasping 'hysterics'... after being slapped/smacked etc because I was hysterical and that was necessary to stop me being hysterical (i stopped, because gasping and gulping under cold water makes you inhale water).

• Standing me out in the porch on the quarry tiles, barefoot in the cold, not allowed to sit down, I don't recall what that was for but everything was FOR something or other.

I won't bore you all with the rest, i suspect even today SS wouldn't actually have been interested, it would have been not quite enough to take any sort of real action.

So no, it wouldn't have stopped her, everything she did was for a reason and was justified in her mind and it only stopped when I was big enough to physically slap her or push her away. Of course the fact I did that (once!) justified her further as i was clearly a violent and abusive child and she was the victim...

I don't know if she enjoyed torturing me, I don't think so.. I genuinely think she had no capacity to cope with small children and very little empathy, maternal instinct etc etc and lashed out when she couldn't handle things any other way, plus was triggered by things I had no ability to percieve or control.

For those who actively are enjoying torturing a kid... no it wouldn't stop them either, they'd tell themselves they have to and justify it away.

Some people are capable of that kind of introspection but, generally speaking, I think a lot of people perpetrating this behaviour, themselves, would not see the parallel with the high profile cases. My DM, for example, was apoplectic about Arthur Labinjo-Hughes: emoting and ranting for ages. Ironically, she failed to make the connection between her behaviour as a parent and that case. DM would allow partners to physically abuse me. I was even threatened with a knife to my throat and my DM ignored it. Fortunately for me it didn’t escalate beyond that as my DM largely ignored me. I think abusive parents actively delude themselves that they are somehow different.

I recently saw something shared on social media about a child who fell asleep while being made to face a wall for the purposes of a time out. It was unclear how long the child had been there. The comments were depressing as it was very much “don’t criticise, stay in your lane” or “tut, snowflakes moaning about legit parenting choices”. And yet, I imagine these people would be raging about Tustin and Hughes.

Cognitive dissonance.

@NeverDropYourMooncup

From experience, they're often the first to witter on about the poor dear, sweet little thing and how terrible it is that there are people in the world that would do something so awful.

And then once they're home and away from their audience, they give their child a good punch in the side of the head for looking at them funny during the competitive emoting over somebody else's child and 'showing them up'.

Genuine question, what experience?

Personally I think that abusive parents are in denial and do not recognise their behaviour in news reports. So often they have had no gap between an abusive childhood and becoming an abuser, they are literally re-enacting their childhoods.

I interviewed a bunch of both abused people and abusers. Most were both. One woman in particular sticks in my mind, so friendly and kind and just full of love.
Recently released from prison for beating a 13yo grandson. I am not condoning that but hear me out.

She was horrifically abused in every way as a child. Gave birth at 12. Married young to an outrageously violent man who was in and out of prison. Said the day he died (at 58) was the best day of her life.
As a grandparent she was landed with 7 grandchildren to raise because their parents weren't coping. That's a big responsibility not least when you are dependent on a paltry income from the state and have only ever known abuse.

Prison was the making of her. She described it as "lovely".
For the first time in her life she had a room of her own and was able to eat regularly. She had access to psycho education and learnt how to garden.

Upon release she received continued support and reestablished relationships with her grandchildren. She was like a mother to younger women who had been abused.

She was born a beautiful and innocent baby, same as we all were. Unfortunately she was born into poverty and violence, and did not know that loving relationships existed until she was quite old.

I wish there was more support for young and new parents to help them break patterns of negative behaviour.

I don't think so. I've reported my neighbour many times to social services. I hear him shouting at his very young child most nights. I know he isn't going to school because they'd have to walk past our door to get there and there's the fact he's always In the shared courtyard putting the empty beer cans in the recycling and he shouts 'stay inside no one is meant to see you'

I've told the school, they obviously know he's not in, I've told the police and they came round once and told him to pack it in, I've told social services and got told I was being too nosy. I'll still report but I've not got a diary and I'm writing down every time I can hear the 5 year old screaming through the wall and the dad screaming back.

@dontletthemugglesgetyoudownn

I don't think so. I've reported my neighbour many times to social services. I hear him shouting at his very young child most nights. I know he isn't going to school because they'd have to walk past our door to get there and there's the fact he's always In the shared courtyard putting the empty beer cans in the recycling and he shouts 'stay inside no one is meant to see you'

I've told the school, they obviously know he's not in, I've told the police and they came round once and told him to pack it in, I've told social services and got told I was being too nosy. I'll still report but I've not got a diary and I'm writing down every time I can hear the 5 year old screaming through the wall and the dad screaming back.

This is so upsetting and worrying.

Please do keep reporting. Ring 999 every single time you hear shouting. Report to the NSPCC.

Just awful.

@NeverDropYourMooncup

From experience, they're often the first to witter on about the poor dear, sweet little thing and how terrible it is that there are people in the world that would do something so awful.

And then once they're home and away from their audience, they give their child a good punch in the side of the head for looking at them funny during the competitive emoting over somebody else's child and 'showing them up'.

This

Sadly, I don't think so. My neighbour thinks all she does is shout at her children sometimes. She is completely delusional about her own behaviour. Social services don't care.

I’m glad that any type of corporal punishment is getting deemed as unacceptable.

As a child it was seen as normal for parents to hit their kids when they misbehave or said something they didn’t like, so it was hard to recognise that when my dad hit us that it was wrong and “overboard”.

There as so many different non abusive techniques to encourage good behaviour and put in boundaries. There is no need to hit a child in any capacity.

Nope - for example currently have a couple of parents whose children have been removed and we're in proceedings tell me we shouldn't be trying to safeguard their kids & instead getting the kids like little Arthur!! Oh the irony. A parent able to those inflict those kind of levels of pain and harm to their child either directly or indirectly (via DA, drugs etc) sadly very rarely have insight into the harm they are causing. Many have suffered their own traumas that can limit their empathy and ability to mentalise the experience of their child's lived experience. Sitting with the guilt and shame of having caused hurt to your child is often so hard they will project blame anywhere but on themselves.

@50shadesofcatholic from being one of the children of the woman who did this over every news report of an abused child. She didn't come from an abusive home, by the way, so that can't be blamed for it.

Whatever she did was perfectly OK. It wasn't done by a boyfriend or stepfather, so it couldn't be abusive. It wasn't done with sticks except when it was so it couldn't be abusive. It didn't leave visible marks because she'd learned from the older ones that got social workers interested, so that was OK. And threatening to melt one's face off with a hot iron held millimetres from you wasn't abusive because it didn't actually touch you. And we were clumsy. Stupid. Horrible. Completely different to those scummy young girls with low IQ and dodgy boyfriends. Completely different.

Reading these is really saddening, but I agree - nobody believes they are abusive. Arthur's father apparently said "it went a bit far". He called it discipline. Star's murderer Googled how to bring a baby out of "shock". To imagine a toddler you just punched is suffering from shock suggests very limited understanding. I also think that in the case of abused children who are murdered, the abuse escalates from casual cruelty through non physical "discipline" to physical violence.
I think we need a more Swedish approach - very pro active state care for children, (which would have to include active parenting classes), and outlawing abuse: not just hitting (which is still legal in the UK) but also cruelty like not feeding/treating one child the same as the others or shouting at them or making them sit or stand in one particular place. Unless it's black and white some people will not understand.

I think it was in the abuse memoir 'A Child Called It' that the author described his mother taking inspiration for his abuse from news stories she'd read about other abused children - getting ideas for methods of torture.

No

@Heruka is right I think.

There are the genuine sadistic bastards who enjoy hurting children.

But the majority of these people are subconsciously following a template set by their own parents or carers. They find it genuinely difficult to see their own behaviour objectively and understand how others see it.

This is why parenting classes are so important. If you leave this to individual families you are not allowing people to break the cycle.

@HollowTalk

Do you really think people like that watch the news? Generally I think they have no interest in anything but themselves.

You're very much underestimating how many different types of people are capable of abuse. My mum was emotionally abusive at times throughout my childhood. She was in every other way an ordinary person- even a good person. She considered herself a good parent and often could have been described as one. Abusers don't fit into a neat box.

It seems unlikely to me that anyone who is abusive would read the news and think, I’d better stop abusing my child

They’re probably on social media mashing the keyboard writing sad messages about the little angels or princesses

I’ve said for years it’s extraordinary that you could need a license to own a dog for any idiot can have a child it comes down to funding yet again who is going to pay for the parenting classes certainly isn’t going to be a Conservative government is it they couldn’t give a shit