Parental maltreatment of children takes many different forms and has a variety of origins (Mrazek and Mrazek, 1985). Thus, it may involve a pattern of parenting that leads to a nonorganic growth failure or “failure to thrive” disorder in infants and young children; to inadequate or negligent parenting amounting to child neglect; to physical abuse; to sexual abuse; and to deliberately created iatrogenic illness (so-called Munchausen syndrome by proxy). Each of these varieties of maltreatment involves its own specificities but, equally, there is substantial overlap between them with each representing a serious maladaptive distortion of parenting functions and of the parent-child relationship. Accordingly, one way of tackling questions on the antecedents of child abuse is to examine factors associated with serious parenting difficulties more generally. The assumption here is that the occurrence of physical abuse should be seen as just one of several manifestations of aberrant parenting. That is the approach followed in this chapter in the consideration of intergenerational continuities and discontinuities in serious parenting difficulties.

Alternatively, the physical maltreatment of children may be viewed as an example of personal violence that may be linked with violence between husband and wife or violence exhibited outside the home. This approach, too, has validity as shown by the associations between family violence and crime in the community, both violent and nonviolent (White and Strauss, 1981). However, it should be noted that the predictors of violent crime do not differ markedly from the predictors of nonviolent serious crime (Farrington, 1978; Rutter and Giller, 1983). Moreover, the antecedents of adult criminality overlap substantially with the antecedents of nondelinquent social failure and non-antisocial personality disorders (Rutter, 1984a; West, 1982).