In Honor of Child Abuse Remembrance
Help prevent shaken baby syndrome
- Never shake a baby. Also, do not slap or hit a child of any age on the face or head. A child’s brain is very delicate. Shaking, slapping, or hitting a child can cause serious harm, even though it may not leave any obvious sign of injury. –Healthwise staff, Shaken Baby Syndrome: Home Treatment
I’m seeing all these people changing their profile pics because of child abuse, which is fine. But what I want to see is lives changed. My parents did not abuse me, but child abuse makes me very angry just the same. I get furious whenever I think of how somebody I used to know would treat her husband and children, things she would do right in front of me as if daring me to object.
She smacked a three-year-old in the back of the head so hard her tongue flew out. One moment I see two children dancing, the next moment I see her going ballistic on them for no reason I can tell, screaming and slapping and spanking.
I heard her belittle her oldest child more than once.
Once she came and picked up the children after I babysat, and even though she hadn’t seen them for hours and it was just a few minutes later, I could hear her screaming at them in the car while I went back to the house. Not yelling, screaming. How could she have gotten so angry so fast?
Then there were the stories I heard of what she did in the privacy of their home: screaming, cussing, spanking too hard, hitting her husband. And when she discovered my reaction was not to bow to her superior parenting skills, I became her next target.
She is gone out of my life.
It makes me so mad to think of these things. I want these things to STOP.
I want to see parents treating their children with compassion and gentleness because they are, after all, just children.
I want to see spouses treating each other with love and respect, not like possessions or slaves.
So in remembrance of child abuse, I’m writing this note rather than changing my profile pic.
–reposted from Facebook, December 6, 2010