Psychological child maltreatment. A developmental view

This article explores the concept of psychological child maltreatment. It begins with a definition of psychological maltreatment in terms of care-giver behavior that thwarts the meeting of the needs of children. It focuses on five forms of psychological maltreatment that are of concern to the practitioner: rejecting (sending messages of rejection to the child), ignoring (being psychologically unavailable to the child), terrorizing (using intense fear as a weapon against the child), isolating (cutting the child off from normal social relationships), and corrupting (missocializing the child into self-destructive and antisocial patterns of behavior).