Emotional Neglect, The Emotional Abandonment Of Children
Emotional neglect is the impossibility of noticing, meeting, or effectively responding to children’s emotional needs. This situation is usually not visible or noticeable to parents.
Affective abandonment is characterized by neglecting many things that would be important to the child. This silently causes emotional damage to be done to her. Children who are not emotionally cared for grow up with difficulties in understanding their feelings and trusting their own emotions.
This type of child maltreatment damages the child’s social relationship and makes them dissatisfied and empty. Many children think or feel that they are different from others as if something is wrong with them. In general, it is because parents lacked affection in their upbringing.
How to identify emotional neglect?
Parents who do not take responsibility for meeting their children’s basic needs are considered emotionally negligent. Just as affection is lacking, they also fail to guarantee children elements such as food, hygiene or clothing. In large part, it can be said that they do not fulfill their role.
In this sense, parents, without realizing it, neglect their children emotionally, that is, they fail to provide their children with sufficient structure and rules to live. For example, there is a lack of discipline, something that everyone should have. This is crucial in learning the consequences of their mistakes, because it makes them aware of each of the acts committed by them.
As a result, children who experience emotional neglect may struggle with self-discipline as if they were truly adults. They don’t have enough knowledge to reason out their own difficulties. For this reason, there are some children blaming themselves and with a lack of high self-esteem.
Unfortunately, the emotional neglect went unnoticed, especially as other problems drowned it out. If child abuse of the physical type or visible trauma is not observed , it may not be possible to understand that there is a lack of affection.
Why does emotional neglect happen?
The main causes that can be found in emotional neglect in the emotional aspect of children can be recognized.
- Lack of affection. Parents who do not show their feelings for their children, a hug, a kiss, or simply do not pay them enough attention.
- Lack of discipline and rules . They can get to be too permissive, tolerate things that, in fact, should not be allowed. Rare are the times when they establish control rules, thus evidencing the lack of discipline that makes children rebellious. This causes them to fail to respect adults because of the lack of an authority figure who can correct them.
Getting to intervene in these cases is difficult, since, in general, the parents refuse to admit the problem. They fail to take responsibility for being negligent and look to blame. They have a concept in their head, which leads them to believe they are good parents, since they think they fulfill their role normally. However, their behavior or practice is very different from what they think.
Probably, it may be a problem inherited from the parents’ own childhood. Perhaps in childhood, they were not able to develop affection in the best way. This is evidenced in the difficulty of developing it in adult life, especially in relation to children.
For this reason, it is necessary to review the situation and create intervention strategies in the relationship between children and parents. It should be taken into account that these processes can be repeated generation after generation. That’s why it’s important to try to do your best to be good parents.
