A landmark study conducted over 30-years found that parents who suffered physical abuse as children were not more likely to be violent with their own kids. The results undermine the prevailing consensus that patterns of physical abuse are passed from one generation to the next.
“All of the literature had led us to believe that physical abuse would be passed on from one generation to the next. That is not what we found,” said Cathy Widom, a psychologist at CUNY, on a Science Magazine podcast.
The study recruited 908 people who had been abused and neglect—as documented by court filings—between the ages of 0 to 11 and followed them as they aged and started their own families. A control group of 667 people who were not evidently abused as children were recruited to serve as a comparison. The rate at which parents abused their own children was examined using information provided by child protection agencies, as well as self-reports from the parents and their children.
“Parents who had histories of abuse and neglect did not report more child abuse than the comparison group subjects,” Widom said.
