Effects of child abuse on language development of a child - Essay Example

Introduction: The paper focuses on the effects of child abuse on language development of a child. Abuse leads to a lot of emotional, psychological and behavioral disorders in children, which include certain speech impairments. It is only logical that child abuse affects the language development of children. A child’s ability to speak reflects its level of physical maturation, mental activity, emotional make-up and social relations. Language development depends on accurate understanding from healthy social interaction.

Proper experience is needed for the acquisition and comprehension of language. Parents play a very important role in helping the child acquire proper language skills by becoming good models for children to imitate and by providing adequate facilities that can boost language acquisition. Proper guidance from parents is a must for language learning. However, children who are abused or neglected do not have the opportunity to obtain proper facilities which result in the speech impairment or disorders like lisping, stuttering and stammering.

This paper intends to study what could be done for the improvement of the condition of such children who have to face the maltreatment. Affection, security, approval and freedom are the basic psychological needs of a child. Parents must satisfy these needs with the aim to develop the complete personality of a child. The child should sense the union with other people and should feel secure. This research centers on the case study of Genie, a 13 year old girl, who is neglected by her parents, which results in language deficiency of the child.

The connection of the developmental ecological models with the parents and the surrounding environments play a major role in the child’s development. “Applied to child’s maltreatment, the developmental ecological model suggests that neglect is the result of multiple interacting factors, including child, family, community, and cultural characteristics, at differing levels of proximity” (Reece 2005, P.160). For the complete development of a child’s language skills, security and affection from the parents is highly significant.

From Genie’ case one can understand that the child who is neglected at home will be mute to certain stages of life. Children should not be deprived of their connection with the outer world as they will loose the capability to explore more, especially their interest in learning new words. Isolation from healthy social life will prevent them from acquiring the language styles and patterns unique to that community. Thus research will attempt to find out the negative impacts of child abuse on the language development of a child.

When a child gets abused, he/she may not be able to find an affection between the parents and this will result in the lack of interaction experience with the parents which is more important for the development of language Works Cited Reece, Robert M. Treatment of Child Abuse: Common Ground for Mental Health, Medical, and Legal Practitioners. JHU Press. 2005. Web. 23 May. 2011. Print