Abandoned by Family – Causes and Consequences
An abandoned child is not always one whose parents have been deprived of parental rights. It’s about the latter ignoring their responsibilities or being negligent to the child since birth, which often results in poor or no emotional support, care, and security.
What Is Family Abandonment?
Abandonment by parents, guardians, or close relatives is a conscious unwillingness to provide physical, psychological, emotional, financial, and other types of support to a minor child. Such rejection can take different forms, including:
- An unborn child is perceived by parents as unwanted. There’s no desire to care for the child’s health and emotional development;
- Parents provide all of the necessary care for the child in a rude and careless way or emphasize withdrawal from early childhood. That is, there’s no psychological support, emotional intimacy, and trust;
- After the parents’ divorce, one of them partially or completely evades fulfillment of their duties;
- As a result of the death or serious illness of one of the parents, the other parent has no desire or ability to care for the child;
- Young parents give their child up for adoption since there’s no financial or other ability to provide proper care;
- Parents have jobs that involve frequent and extended business trips.
This situation results in a variety of psychological problems in adulthood, and the child has an increased risk of psychiatric illness. The consequences of sustained psychological trauma in childhood are that the adult is not aware of the real causes of the problem, and therefore cannot cope with the ensuing consequences.
Causes of Child Abandonment
Child abandonment often arises in dysfunctional families. Various social, financial, psychological, and other types of problems can also become the reason:
- The family’s low financial situation. In this case, parents and other adult family members lack material, physical, and psychological resources to effectively meet their obligations toward the child;
- Severe illness or death of a parent. In this case, one of the consequences is that the other parent is in such a depressed physical and psychological state that he or she is temporarily or permanently unable to care for the child;
- A dysfunctional family where adults have an alcohol or drug addiction.
In all of these cases, children are often left to themselves and constantly haunted by feelings of fear and uncertainty about their personal safety.
Consequences of Child Abandonment
In adulthood, an abandoned child often has many psychological problems, which often leads to an increased risk of psychiatric disorders. Possible short- and long-term consequences for children who grow up in a dysfunctional family are:
- Insecurity. The person constantly feels wrong, not attractive enough, or unworthy of other people’s care and attention;
- Feelings of guilt and shame. The child feels that he or she is the cause of problems in the family. The same goes for the negative attitude of adult family members;
- Heightened anxiety. A person who experienced severe psychological trauma as a child often experiences unreasonable fear, which often leads to social isolation or compulsive behavior;
- A tendency toward possessiveness, pathological jealousy toward a partner, emotional dependence on other people, or codependency. Due to the fear of being left alone, such people will often demonstrate obsequious behavior to the detriment of their own interests;
- A constant fear of being left alone. If in the past, parents often made unrealistic promises to their child, it may be difficult for him or her to trust other people in the future;
- Confusion of consciousness and a tendency to self-loathing. Such people endlessly ponder their traumatic childhood experiences but cannot find answers to questions that torment them.
An additional problem can be that adults with troubled childhood may feel ashamed and reluctant to talk about their past and, therefore, refuse to seek professional help.
How to Find a Solution
Most often, in order to overcome psychological problems, such a person in adulthood cannot do without the assistance of a psychotherapist or other specialist. Depending on the situation in a particular family, there are the following ways of solving the problem:
- Making sense of and accepting the loss. If the connection with the family or with one of the parents is permanently lost, you will need to recognize the reasons for what happened and accept it;
- Reconnecting with family. If it’s possible to restore or create a trusting relationship with parents as an adult, mutual forgiveness will often be the key to the problem.
Only then is it possible to build healthy family relationships.
Conclusions
In a family where parents do not fulfill their direct responsibilities, there’s a constant feeling of fear, uncertainty, and uselessness. Such a child gets a steady psychological trauma, which can lead to depression and, in severe cases, various mental disorders.
This can be one of the types of a dysfunctional family or an incomplete family in which one of the parents has refused to fulfill their duties towards the child.