As I was walking to the office today, I witnessed a very sad event: a mother was abusing her infant child both physically and verbally, apparently on their way to the kindergarten. She was pulling the child’s arm and shouting out at him, calling him an idiot. She was accusing the small kid that they missed the bus due to his slow and relaxed walking.

It’s unfortunate that there was no way for me to intervene. If I had done something, probably I would have angered the mother even more, and her poor child would have suffered her rage later that day. The child would’ve paid for me trying to help him.

I’m certain that most people have witnessed similar scenes at public places. This is only the tip of the iceberg though, and its scale is often underestimated by the public. I grew up in a family in which child abuse was something regular, and now I will try to “dissect” this whole issue.

My parents had no ambitions, and they had settled for an easy and low-paying job. My father was making $120 a month, and my mother was getting only $60. In comparison, at the age of eleven I was making $340 a month working cherry picking and lawn mowing jobs with my grandfather. My parents didn’t have their own house, and we were living at their place of work - a holiday cottage in the mountains. At some point, their employer offered them to live in a small company apartment in the city, after much soaping and humiliation on their side. My parents were living off their own parents, and they were quite OK with it.

I started suffering abuse when I was five. My mother would lash out and beat me for no reason. She kept telling me that she gave me life, so she can take it away at any time. There was no one to tell me that this was not right. I was living with the understanding that I’m someone’s property, and my life depended exclusively on my mother. I strove to be good and avoid giving my parents a reason to abuse me. They were using me to feed their own egos by treating me badly, though. The daily threats of sending me to school for children with special needs began when I started school. The threats were unconditional - me going to special needs school did not depend on doing good or bad at school. I can write a whole book on my parents, but I’ll stop here and continue unraveling the common problem.

Humans are by nature social beings, and in evolutionary sense each person’s awareness of their place in the social ladder has been very important for their survival. At times when resources were scarce, the last in the social ladder would perish, mostly of hunger. Obviously, we are descendants of people that were higher up that ladder, and we have their genes. Nowadays the people at the lower end of the social ladder are not threatened by dying of hunger, but they still feel anxiety and dissatisfaction at a subconscious level. The purpose of this mechanism is to push them into forcing their way up the social ladder, and thus guarantee their survival.

There are two ways to go up the social ladder - by will and determination, or by making someone fall down the ladder and taking their place. When a newcomer enters an established society (a rookie, a new employee, a new inmate, etc.), the lower-standing members are relieved, not even realizing that the reason hides inside their prefrontal cortex, and that it was put there some 300,000 years ago. For the same reason, people who stand in the middle of the ladder in a small society are afraid of newcomers. Until recent times, the social hierarchy was a means to survival, and this somewhat irrelevant “code” is still valid nowadays.

Unfortunately, the newcomer in a family is usually a newborn baby. At some point, parents unconsciously see in the child an “opportunity” to satisfy their inborn social ladder instinct. When this will happen depends on many factors, but it could be quite early as well.

Here is a classification, depending on when this problem emerges:
0-2 years: Pathology, I will spare you the details
3-18 years: Verbal and physical aggression. Constant attempts to convince the child that it cannot do anything as good as the “super-parent”.
19:50+ years: Bad advice about professional realization. Attempting to prevent the grown up child from having an independent life and starting a family. This is all masked under the false pretense of good intentions. For these people, their child is the last straw in a lifelong chain of events revealing that their life is a failure.

We are not perfect yet, because evolutionary speaking, several thousand years is a very short time. Our technological advance has surpassed our mental and spiritual development, and that is our main problem. We have coined the phrase “monkeys with guns”, but we are actually the monkeys with guns, money, nuclear briefcases and more. We need to introduce Psychology lessons not only in schools, but in kindergartens. We need to know ourselves and our weaknesses before robots come in, because to them and their artificial intelligence we’ll just be an open book with numerous typos and a lousy plot.

We need to realize that primitive tricks are not relevant since long ago, and that they are a part of a completely wrong and destructive strategy. We need to show compassion, good will, mercy, and humanity instead. Please remind your kids how talented they are, and how they posses everything they need to be better and more successful than you.