An Ecological-Transactional Perspective on Child Maltreatment: Failure of the Average Expectable Environment and Its Influence on Child Development

The notion of an average expectable environment for promoting normal development proposes that there are species-specific ranges of environmental conditions that elicit normative developmental processes. This chapter provides a review of child maltreatment. Of particular salience is the growing contribution of neurobiological and genetic research to the study of child maltreatment, such that ontogenic development can be considered from both psychological and neurobiological perspectives. The ecological-transactional model of child maltreatment explains how processes at each level of ecology exert reciprocal influences on each other and shape the course of child development. The extent of variation in personality characteristics and personality organization among maltreated children represents an area of investigation that has recently gained attention in the maltreatment literature. The maladaptive trajectories of maltreated children diverge from those of nonmaltreated children over time such that maltreated children's problems become more severe as children get older, especially in peer relationships.