Last update - 00:00 10/05/2007
Parental abuse at the hands of children a growing Israeli trend
By Ruth Sinai, Haaretz Correspondent
Violence in Israel has manifested itself into a disturbing and growing new trend, children who strike their parents.
When Y.G. was 10 years old, his father was jailed for beating his wife. When Y.G. was 11 he hit his mother so hard she had to be hospitalized. He was removed from his home in the north and taken to an emergency center run by the Social Welfare Ministry, from which he was transferred to another institution for treatment.
Until a few years ago, social workers were unfamiliar with children like Y.G., but the phenomenon of children being violent toward their parents is now growing. In 2005, 26 such children were removed from their homes, according to said Social Welfare Ministry official Hanna Slotzky. In 2006, the number jumped to 47, with some of the children as young as nine or ten.
But violence toward parents actually starts at a much younger age, according to data publicized yesterday, at the third Eilat conference on violence in Israeli society.
Excessive violence is found in some 18 percent of children aged one to two who are treated at the infant unit at Geha Psychiatric Hospital in Petah Tikva, said Dr. Miri Keren, a child psychiatrist and expert on infant psychiatric problems. The proportion rises to 24 percent for children between the ages of two and three, she said, adding that the number of infants treated there for excessive violence comes to more than 200 per year.
Keren said parents often don't know how to react appropriately to a young child who hits them.
"Many parents don't understand that they need to stop this, but not by hitting," she said. "They think it's not terrible, they say the child doesn't understand what he's doing, doesn't understand that he's hurting [someone]. There are some who say that he's simply mischievous.
Many times the children first hit the parents and then start to hit other children; they push, bite, and grab the parent's hair."
Over the last few years, Keren has helped establish seven psychiatric units for young children across the country, where thousands of kids are brought every year. Sometimes the children come after day-care centers refuse to care for them because they hit other children or the teachers.
Keren rejects the argument of some child development experts that aggression at such a young age is a natural stage of development.
"If we let these children continue their behavior without treatment, there's at least a 50 percent chance they will grow up to be violent as children and adults," she said. The violence is deemed to be a problem, she added, when it is repeated and keeps the child and the family from functioning normally.
The older children who are removed from their homes are brought to emergency centers that were established to protect children from parental abuse and neglect. Many of the violent children suffer from emotional problems, learning difficulties or both, said Slotzky. And many parents lack the ability to set boundaries; quite a few of the children come from broken homes.
Reports of violent children generally come from the schools, not the parents, as parents fear their children will be taken from them if they complain to social services. Slotzky recalls a mother who came to the ministry because she couldn't cope with her violent 6-year-old son
and found herself being questioned by the police.
But Slotzky thinks social services have changed their approach over the past year and are not merely more aware of the existence of violent children, but are also prepared to provide parents with tools to help them set limits and cope with the violence. One technique is to teach children and parents new coping skills.
"I would want every parent who feels that he's losing control, that he's losing authority to feel that he can ask us for help," said Slotzky.