Neglect is difficult to define since there are no clear, cross-cultural standards for desirable or minimally adequate child-rearing practices.
Once a child is born, neglect may involve a parent or carer failing to provide adequate food, clothing and shelter (including exclusion from home or abandonment); protect a child from physical and emotional harm or danger; ensure adequate supervision (including the use of inadequate care-givers), or ensure access to appropriate medical care or treatment.
These consequences also impact society, since it is more likely that children who suffered from child neglect will have substance use disorder problems and educational failure when they grow up.
Being left at home alone can leave young people feeling scared, vulnerable and not knowing when their parents are going to return.
At the intra-personal level, the discussion around neglectful parents' characteristics often focuses on mothers, reflecting traditional notions of women as primary caregivers for children.
[11][27] "Neglectful attributes" have included an inability to plan, lack of confidence about the future, difficulty with managing money, emotional immaturity, lack of knowledge of children's needs, a large number of children, being a teenage mother, high levels of stress and poor socioeconomic circumstances.
[38] A recent reform to the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act (2004) has introduced a new offence of causing or allowing the death of a child or vulnerable adult, thus reinforcing the notion of "failure to protect".
Research on domestic violence, however, has consistently shown that supporting the non-abusive parent is good for child protection.
However, when poverty coexists with other forms of adversity, it can negatively impact a parent's ability to cope with stressors and undermine their capacity to adequately respond to their child's needs.
The neglectful behaviour the child experiences will contribute to their attachment difficulties and formation of relationships in the future, or lack thereof.
Infants who have deficits in growth and abnormal behaviours such as withdrawal, apathy and excessive sleep are failing to thrive, rather than developing to become "healthy" individuals.
[52] A study by Robert Wilson, a professor at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, and his colleagues, showed for the first time that children under the age of 18 when were moderately neglected in some manner by their caregivers had a 3 times likely risk of stroke over those with moderately low levels, after controlling for some common risk factors (they interviewed 1,040 participants ages 55 or older; after 3+1⁄2 years, 257 of them died and 192 were autopsied, with 89 having stroke evidence upon autopsy and another 40 had a history of it).
The higher proportion of females reported for neglect may reflect the social attitude that mothers are responsible for meeting the needs of their children.
In recent years, latent issues for child development and for the culture and political economy that are associated with paternal neglect have received more attention, however.
The teaching assistant asked to remain anonymous, fearing that she would be sacked by her school if they were to find out that she'd made the disclosure.
Neglect is a process whereby a child experiences developmental delay owing to the fact of not having received sufficient levels of any combination of care, stimulation or nutrition, which collectively can be referred to as nurturance.
What this suggests is that social work staff could consult medical notes to establish if the baby or child is failing to thrive, as the first step in a pathway towards identifying neglect.
[59] However, quite how one ascertains what a particular child needs, without referring back to their level of development, is not something theory and policy on neglect is clear about.
[60][61][62] Professionals should focus on the levels of nurturance provided by the carers of the child, where neglect is understood as an issue of the parent's behaviour.
[63] Some authors feel that establishing the failure of parents and caregivers to provide care would be sufficient to conclude that neglect was occurring.
This raises the question about what level of nurturance, a carer or parent needs to fall under, to provoke developmental delay, and how one goes about measuring that accurately.
Neglect is a process whereby children experience developmental delay owing to experiencing insufficient levels of nurturance.
It has been argued that in principle, this means that when starting an assessment of neglect by identifying developmental delay one needs to then check the levels of nurturance received by the child.
Even when one has established developmental delay and exposure to low levels of nurturance, one needs to rule out the possibility that the link between the two is coincidental.
[69] The NSPCC makes use of the NCFAS in their Evidence Based Decision-making Practice Model, which involves a Society practitioner working alongside the local authorities assigned a social worker to review the functioning of the family in complex neglect cases.
One type is impact studies where the evaluation aims to demonstrate a statistically significant improvement in outcomes on a population, which can be attributed to the intervention.
[73] The SafeCare programme has been provided to families in the United Kingdom where a professional has judged there is a risk of experiencing significant harm through neglect.
Outcome data shows that on average families who participated in the evaluation of the programme improved parenting skills and reduced neglectful behaviours.
The findings from this service showed that on average the children who participated in the evaluation experienced improved emotional and behavioural outcomes.
[73] Some parents also started to do activities with their children, which involved a small element of risk, after having agreed to do them for the first time as part of Video Interaction Guidance.