I put this in debates, because right now although it is too soon, it my either become established fact, or dropped by the wayside, so form your opinions carefully!
It’s long, so you can skip to the TL;DR: if you want.
Background follows-- if bored, skip to line below==> with **
I’m posting this because a long time ago, when Border’s (RIP) and Barnes & Noble were nascent, I was sitting in one or the other, sipping coffee, and hooked on a journal article by a practicing MSW therapist who had gone back to school for a PhD specifically to study the commonly believed, but never really demonstrated clinically, idea that child abuse is “passed on” from parent to child.
He had worked with lots of people who came to him saying they had been abused, and now wanted to have children, were with a partner, but they wanted not to abuse their own children. He usually saw them twice a week for a few weeks, one time with the partner, if the partner was willing, then saw them once a week until a baby was on the way, at which point if the client requested more frequent meetings, they had them. He tapered them off after the birth if they felt no impulse to hit the baby, or continued if they wanted to, and maybe were referred to a psychiatrist for a drug trial.
**[so yadda-yadda, got grant, matched experimental & control groups, designed experiments|
He found that some people who had been abused themselves needed help to resist an “abusive impulse,” which some who had been abused themselves did not have in the first place, and there seemed to her little way to predict who was which. But she ran batteries of common tests-- they had the normal spread of IQs, and soforth.
She did find one thing-- the experimental group (impulse to abuse) had difficulty copying other people’s hand and body shapes; They would hold an arm up, but orient the hand all wrong, and mix their feet up, getting left and right confused.
Cut to the chase, she got permission to do research in prison with violent offenders. She discovered that nearly to a person, violent offenders had experienced a head injury as a child. a few of them had been in car accidents, or fallen off playground equipment, but the vast majority had been abused by a parent of parental figure.
So, it appears that in that sense, yes, abuse does get passed down-- get beaten with a head injury, and grow up to give your own kid a head injury, so he’ll beat his kid.
That article was a print article, and a summation, or adaptation, of a journal done for the popular press.
I have looked and looked for the original print article I read, but it was before everything was online.
Today, though, I found this. It’s an article about head injury and criminality that uses other-body traumas as controls.
Significantly, it studies adults who have head trauma as ADULTS, and finds that many of them begin criminal behavior, when they had not before that head trauma,
TL;DR: Recent research suggests that head injuries may be at the root of criminal behavior. The idea that child abuse in “passed on” in families may just be parents with head injuries from prior abuse, causing head injuries in their own children.