According to 2014 [National Children Abuse Status Report, the probability of children abuse and neglect to be happened in their homes and by their parents occupies over 80% of total cases. From the data, it can be guessed that the abuse and the neglec...
According to 2014 [National Children Abuse Status Report, the probability of children abuse and neglect to be happened in their homes and by their parents occupies over 80% of total cases. From the data, it can be guessed that the abuse and the neglect against children are hard to be discovered and are very possible to be continued for a long time. adolescent suffering from the abuse and the neglect are apt to be negatively influenced inside and outside their homes, and the abuse and the neglect against adolescent especially influence on their relationships. Meanwhile, the adolescent period is very important in positively forming the self-esteem. Besides, adolescent spend much more time with their peers in this period than in the childhood, and the self-esteem takes a great role for a adolescent to make a relationship with his/her peers. Therefore this study aimed to recognize the influence of parental abuse and neglect against their children on the adolescent’s peer attachment, and to verify the effect of self-esteem as a parameter during the process. For this purpose, this study utilized and analyzed total 2090 cases from 4th-year data for elementary schooler panels in their 4-th grade in the ‘Korean Children & Juvenile Panels Survey.
As the research method, this study used the AMOS 21.0, and verified the self-esteem’s mediating effect on the adolescent’s peer attachment through the AMOS 21.0 Bootstrapping and the Sobel test. The results of this study gotten from such measurement process were as follows.
First, it was found that the parental abuse and neglect affected significantly negative influence on the adolescent’s peer attachment, respectively. And it could know that the parental neglect affected more negative influence on the adolescent’s peer attachment than the parental abuse’s influence.
Second, the parental abuse and neglect affected significantly negative influence on the adolescent’s self-esteem, respectively. Similarly to the above results, it was found that the parental neglect affected more negative influence on the adolescent’s peer attachment than the parental abuse’s influence.
Third, it was found that the adolescent’s self-esteem positively influenced on his/her peer attachment.
Fourth, it was found that the parental abuse affected statistically significant, indirect influence on the adolescent’s peer attachment through the mediating process of adolescent’s self-esteem, and the parental abuse had the full mediating effect. Similarly to that, the parental neglect affected statistically, significant, indirect influence on the adolescent’s peer attachment through the mediating effect of adolescent’s self-esteem, and the parental neglect had partly mediating effect.
Based on the above results, the implications and suggestions of this study can be summarized as follows.
First, as parents may unintentionally or unconsciously commit abuse and neglect behaviors against their children, so it needs to set the operational definitions of abuse and neglect more specifically and clearly appropriate for Korean situations. And as the parental neglect affects more negative influence on the adolescent’s peer attachment than the parental abuse’s influence, so it needs to develop the sensitivity on the neglect with separating it from the abuse, and to seek for interventions to help neglected adolescents.
Second, when a person faces a difficult time or is given a chance to solve a problem by himself/herself in his/her whole life, the self-esteem is especially important. It needs to set some programs to recover and enhance the self-esteem for the adolescents whose self-esteem is lowered due to parental abuse and neglect. Besides, similarly to that, as the neglect affects more negative influence on the self-esteem than the abuse’s influence, so it needs to give progressive support to neglected adolescents through some actions like a teacher’s counseling or the reference to other institute when a neglected adolescent is discovered.
Third, as a adolescent’s self-esteem is higher, it more positively influences on his/her peer attachment. So a program to enhance the adolescent’s self-esteem is extremely important because the self-esteem can positively influence on other mechanisms beyond itself.
Finally, the interventions should be involved in the neglect prevention and the self-esteem enhancement in order to enhance the juvenile’s peer attachment, and for an abused child, his/her self-esteem should be especially managed for enhancing his/her peer attachment.