The definition of child abuse is simple: whenever the spirit of the child is disrespected the child is abused. Abuse of the spirit of the child can take many forms, from the overt forms of child abuse that conventional society is able to accept – such as overt sexual abuse, physical violence and the extremes of neglect – to whole realms of abuse that fall below society’s radar and are considered normal and healthy forms of parenting. Children have massive needs, and where parents fail to meet these needs – whether society notices or cares or even bats an eye – the child ends up abused. Children are born into the world with a total right to have all their needs met. This is the responsibility of parents, and although parents have a whole palette of ways and techniques to deny their responsibility and pathologize defenders of the child, this does not change the basic facts. Children experience torture when their needs go unmet, and while I might sound like a fanatic writing this, it is only because I am taking the deep emotional side of the most disenfranchised minority in our society: the child. This is something that so few – and so few parents, those largely false advocates of society’s most innocent and squelched – do, or have any deep capacity to do.

When a mother has a child because she feels her life emotionally incomplete and wants someone to make it more whole, her child is BOUND to be abused. He will pick up her deepest unconscious needs from the time he is in her womb and start growing toward them to insure that he gets loved, and his abuse will only increase from that point onward.

When a mother takes psychiatric medication or drinks alcohol or smokes for whatever reason she becomes less emotionally available to her child, and this is abuse. Anything that takes a mother away from her deepest connection with herself, and her deepest healing process, is a cruelty to her child. This starts in the womb as well – but continues throughout his childhood.

When a mother and father fight in front of their child, and worse yet use their child as a pawn in the marriage, even in the mildest and subtlest of ways – which is so utterly common in our world that it goes essentially unnoticed – the child suffers abuse. Children need two parents who live in radical emotional harmony with each other. Any family dynamic that fails to meet this basic criteria is a setup for toxicity for the child.

When parents have not healed from any of their own traumas of their own childhood – however mild those traumas might be – they have no choice but to act out these traumas unconsciously on their child. This often takes place in subtle and symbolic form – such as the use of doubletalk, ultimatums, or conditional love – but it is abuse nonetheless. Parents cannot help but act out their unresolved childhood traumas on their children. Because children are so needy for parental love and have so few resources for defending themselves they make the most highly charged magnets for parental acting out.

When parents do not devote 100% of the best of their life’s energies toward guiding and nurturing their children, their children suffer abuse. And how many parents can realistically say that they devote even 20% of the best of their energies to their child? Some parents might argue that they do, but that does not mean their arguments hold any water. Most parents have so much to deny and defend against that they can rationalize almost anything. We live in a world where most people live almost entirely unconscious of who they are – and what their deepest motives are. It is no surprise that the most unconscious people often think themselves enlightened. This is comforting. Dissociation mimics enlightenment.

My writings might sound like I am setting the bar impossibly high for parents. Good! I am. For most parents I set the bar impossibly high because most parents have absolutely no business having children. On their deep emotional levels they can barely take care of themselves, and still ARE emotional children themselves. The horror taking place in our world is enough proof of this!

From the child’s perspective the bar I speak of is not set high at all, and the torture the child feels when the parents fail to meet his full needs – much less actively thwart them – tells where the child stands on this question.

If children could feel safe enough to speak about their deepest feelings, and have neither need nor motivation to protect the denial of their parents, they themselves would be the loudest advocates against all forms of child abuse. And often they are, much as our sick adult society misreads the child’s advocacy. Every crying and screaming child strapped into his stroller is railing against abuse, and yet so few notice – and even if they did, it would be totally taboo for anyone to step into the sacred world of his family and say anything. Protecting the denial of abusive parents is sacred in our sick world. And selling out children is the norm.

But there is a reason little children stand transfixed watching other children scream and cry: they know what the screaming and crying child is experiencing. They know torture. They still remember. They are watching a mirror of themselves go down the same emotional toilet down which their own parents have flushed them.