Child Abuse and Parent Support

Learning from the Arguments and the Practices in the United States

Abstract

Every child protection system has two primary goals: to ensure the safety of children and to preserve the parent-child relationship. However, in the United States especially, the juxtapositioning of these two goals are thought to bring about a serious dilemma. According to the liberal thought, which places much value on the autonomy and self-reliance, state intervention to the family must be kept at a minimum. It therefore follows that parents do not get any support unless they are found to be abusive to their children. Under this ideology, parents are blamed in cases of child abuse because it is thought that the parents hold full responsibility for raising their own children. Parental rights are terminated to keep the child safe if the parent (s) cannot improve their parental abilities after a temporary period of assistance. Some possibilities for overcoming the problems of these contrasting alternatives can be found in the arguments of E. F. Kittay and M. Minow. They reconstruct liberal theory using the concepts of "dependency" and "relationship" and argue that society should acknowledge the social value of the parent-child relationship and support parents. If generous support for parents can reduce the parental stress, it will help prevent abuse from the outset, or at least prevent its recurrence. The latest practices on this theory can be appreciated to have broadened the possibility of concurrently realizing the two original goals: the safety of children and the preservation of the parent-child relationship.