Only about one-third of maltreated children grow up to maltreat their own children

Evidence

Joan Kaufman and Edward Zigler at Yale addressed this directly in a 1987 paper in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry — one of the most important methodological corrections in the history of developmental psychology. They reviewed every study that had empirically measured intergenerational transmission of child maltreatment and found that the transmission rate across those studies ranged from 7% to 70% — with a best estimate of approximately 30%. About one in three parents who had been maltreated as children went on to maltreat their own children. — , The Rod and the Child, 8563

Categorization

• XREF: Directly reverses the deceptively simple ‘cycle of violence’ narrative; connects to the inversion defense ‘I was hit and turned out fine’ tackled in this same episode. — connects to: Most maltreated mothers break the cycle rather than repeat it — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 6869; Most maltreated children do not go on to maltreat their own children — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 6942; Intergenerational maltreatment transmission operates as a risk elevation, not inevitability — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 11013

Related

• Most maltreated children do not go on to maltreat their own children (similarity 0.93)
• Intergenerational maltreatment transmission operates as a risk elevation, not inevitability (similarity 0.89)
• Most maltreated mothers break the cycle rather than repeat it (similarity 0.88)
• Narrative coherence about one’s own childhood predicts whether maltreatment is transmitted (similarity 0.81)
• Treating abuse transmission as inevitable was empirically wrong and actively harmful (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Intergenerational maltreatment transmission operates as a risk elevation, not inevitability #corroborates (0.85) — , The Rod and the Child, 11013