Child abuse and neglect is seen as an abnormal parenting behavior which has resulted from neglect or abuse of the abusive parents during their early lives. Included are brief sections on the following topics: the development of the abusive child-rearing pattern (lack of sufficient love and care, extremely high premature demand for performance, and excessive criticism and physical punishment for failure); psychological characteristics and problems (such as immaturity, dependency, lack of appropriate sympathetic responses, and inability to have pleasure) of abusive parents as encountered during the therapeutic relationship; parental misperceptions of the child; the constellation of psychological characteristics of abusive parents; the inability to cope with crises; goals of treatment; general problems of working with abusive parents which include parental reluctance to become involved, avoidance of criticism, lack of adequate and accurate information, and distrust by parents of a social caseworker from a different race, culture, or economic background; and treatment modalities including public and private social agency casework, psychotherapy, group thereapy, behavior modification, and role modeling. (SB)