by Byron Egeland

About the author: Byron Egeland is the Irving B. Harris professor of child development at the University of Minnesota. He is a fellow in the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society and has served on a number of national committees in the area of child abuse.

Over the more than 30 years since C. Henry Kempe, Frederic N. Silverman, Brandt F. Steele, William Droegemueller, and Henry K. Silver’s description of the “battered child syndrome,” a tremendous amount has been written about the causes of child maltreatment. Much of the early writing reported that abusing parents were themselves abused, which led to the belief in the transmission of abuse or a cycle of abuse across generations. This notion of the intergenerational transmission of abuse was...