Hello, everyone. Dominic is a six-year-old child placed with Lucia and Frances as their adopted child. The dynamics that put this family at risk for abuse are their busy lives and Francis’s addiction to opioids; drug abuse is a risk factor. The casual factors are environmental. Their environment is not healthy. The risk factors for the father‘s background were that he got neglected by his father, which caused Francis to be abusive to his child. The current risk factors for abuse were that the parents were too occupied with their own lives to give the love and affection the child needed, and his needs were ignored. I think the child got targeted because “abusive parents have carried into their adulthood the unmet needs of their own childhoods; they exhibit low self-esteem, excessive dependency, a failure to meet the challenges of parenting, unrealistic expectations of their children, role reversal with their children, and impulsivity moreover parents abusing, children are frequently working out their own developmental conflicts” (Crosson-Tower, C. (2021). The family’s strength is Lucia, who rushed the six-year-old to the hospital to seek help, which may have saved the child’s life and helped with future abuse. If these parents were friends of mine, I would feel concerned about the child, and if I suspected child abuse, I would contact Child Protective Services. I would hate to have to call them because they were friends of mine. However, the child is more important.
I would try to be there for the family to offer advice like substance abuse counseling or family counseling. This is a concerning case of a child who has been abused and has been taken to the hospital numerous times, and finally, an investigation follows. Socioeconomic factors are that they are not living in poverty, so poverty is not the cause of abuse in this situation; substance abuse, neglect, and physical abuse are all issues. In this case, the father is abusive to Dominic. Abuse is non-accidental. “Particular children may be at higher risk for abuse than others, while parental traits and life circumstances as well as family systems may also present risk as well as protective factors” (Crosson-Tower, C. (2021). Even though Lucia‘s business was flourishing, there were issues in the house that caused problems for the child.
Why did Francis put up with this and buy her husband‘s opioids, and why did it take her so long to help her child, and what factors play a role in this situation?
