Child maltreatment, an umbrella term for various types of abuse and neglect, is a major public health concern. Examples of different types of abuse include physical, emotional, sexual abuse, and neglect of any kind. Although experiencing abuse at any age can be detrimental, this is especially harmful during early childhood. Child abuse has serious and many times nonreversible long-term effects that can last a lifetime. In this section, we will focus on the effects of child abuse on cognitive, language, and physical development. However, as you will learn in other chapters these long-lasting effects influence every domain of development.

An abundance of research shows that child abuse impacts the developing brain, body, and mind. Regarding cognitive development, it is well known that experiencing abuse in infancy has significant cognitive delays and lower educational attainment. For example, abuse and neglect are associated with lower cognitive abilities in infancy and negative long-term educational and employment outcomes in young adulthood regardless of race, sex, birthweight, family income, maternal education and many other important factors (Strathearn et al., 2020).

As you can imagine, child abuse and neglect also has an impact on language development. For example, young adults who experienced prolonged child abuse had lower scores on a vocabulary test at age 21 (Strathearn et al., 2020). Finally, physical development and physical health are hindered by child abuse too. Overall, the quality of life of those who experience child abuse is lower. For example, a longitudinal cohort study found that children who experienced child abuse had a reduced adult height at age 21 even when adjusting for parental height. Additionally, child abuse was associated with high fat intake, a risk factor for obesity, poor sleep quality in men, and asthma at age 21.