Burned Child, Seared Parent

Accidental burns among small children are common enough that some hospitals staff special wards to treat them. But are the burns really accidental? Helen L. Martin, a medical researcher at the Burns Unit of London's Hospital for Sick Children, says no. After studying 50 cases over a period of seven months, Mrs. Martin has concluded that most burns are actually the outcome of emotional problems in which the children are innocent pawns.

Mrs. Martin matched the patient traffic in the hospital's Burns Unit, which ranged in age from seven months to 14 years, against a control group of children of the same age, background and residence who had never been burned. Over the seven months, she repeatedly interviewed the parents of both the burned children and the control group children. Except in five instances, she found that the burns had occurred during conflict situations --emotional tension within the mother, between the child and some other member of the family, or between hostile adults. In only two cases was the child alone when injured.

Guardian Role. A factor in many of the "accidents" was a maternal ambivalence toward the burned child. Of the 46 mothers involved in the study, 44 were preoccupied at the time with some "unresolved problem" that tended to distract them from their guardian role. Nineteen, for instance, confessed that they had not wanted to bear the child who had been burned. Twenty-one classified their attitude toward their husbands as "distant, indifferent or hostile." Only three in the control group felt that way.

Mrs. Martin draws an analogy between the burned child and the "battered child," that far more common victim of parents' emotional stress (TIME, Nov. 7). But there are significant differences. For one thing, burned children are not victims of deliberate, conscious assault. Their injuries seem accidental, but actually result from the adult's unconscious wishes: the mother who "accidentally" leaves the boiling soup where the child can reach it, for example. Battering parents inflict terrible, sometimes mortal injury without expressing guilt, and they often voice open hostility to the child. In contrast, the mother of a burned child, in Mrs. Martin's words, typically shows "marked guilt, which helps preserve a virtuous front (necessary because the child is not felt to be all bad) and wards off conscious recognition of destructive impulses, protests the strength of her positive feelings for the child, and at the same time punishes the mother for her destructive impulses." In short, the mother of the burned child is herself deeply seared.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.