Exploring the subjective experiences of Japanese mothers who abuse their infants and young children: A qualitative study

Abstract

Objective: This study examined the subjective experiences of mothers who abused their infants and young children. This qualitative inductive study comprised semi-structured interviews with six mothers who received public support to prevent the abuse of their infants and young children.
Methods: We analyzed the results qualitatively and inductively. We summarized mothers’ experiences into four core categories: justifying husbands with no intention of protecting their families, internalizing both the crying self and the self who strives to raise the child perfectly, falling into a vicious loop of abuse and having suicidal thoughts, and controlling the vicious abuse loop with the emergence of faint hope.
Results: Our findings indicate that the causes of maternal abuse included the crying self-seeking love, an imbalance from wanting perfection in child-rearing, negative factors regarding the husband, a lack of opportunities to nurture maternal instincts, and the child’s behavior serving as the trigger. Mothers in situations of abuse experienced uncontrollable anger, vicious loops of abuse, and suicidal thoughts. Abuse was prevented by the emergence of a glimmer of hope through budding feelings of attachment and various forms of support aiming to control the vicious loop.
Conclusions: Experts’ support encouraged mothers to regain control and experience hope.

Keywords

Infants / Young child / Abuse / Mother / Psychology / Qualitative research

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank the mothers who participated in the survey and the child guidance center who cooperated with the survey.

AUTHORS CONTRIBUTIONS

The first author carried out the entire process, the third author assisted with data collection, and the second author super- vised the analysis and writing of the paper.

FUNDING

Graduate students received funding from Kagawa Prefectural University of Health Sciences.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST DISCLOSURE

The authors declare they have no conflicts of interest.

INFORMED CONSENT

Obtained.

ETHICS APPROVAL

The Publication Ethics Committee of the Sciedu Press. The journal’s policies adhere to the Core Practices established by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

PROVENANCE AND PEER REVIEW

Not commissioned; externally double-blind peer reviewed.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The data are not publicly available due to ethical and privacy restrictions.

DATA SHARING STATEMENT

Data cannot be shared due to ethical constraints.

OPEN ACCESS

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

COPYRIGHTS

Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s), with first publication rights granted to the journal.

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