Answer to Question 1
Physical neglect includes refusal or delay in seeking health care, expulsion from the home or refusal to allow a runaway to return home, abandonment, and inadequate supervision. Educational neglect involves actions such as allowing chronic truancy, failing to enroll in school a child who is of mandatory school age, and failing to attend to a child's special educational needs. Emotional neglect, one of the most difficult categories to define, includes actions such as marked inattention to the child's needs for affection, refusal or failure to provide needed psychological care, spousal abuse in the child's presence, and permission for drug or alcohol use by the child.
Answer to Question 2
At the positive end of this continuum, we see appropriate and healthy forms of child-rearing actions that promote child development. Competent parents encourage their child's development in a variety of ways and match their demands and expectations to the child's needs and abilities. Of course, parents are human, and many on occasion will scold, criticize, or even show insensitivity to the child's state of need; in fact, discipline often requires such firm control, with accompanying verbal statements and affect. Poor/dysfunctional actions, shown in the middle of the diagram, represent greater degrees of irresponsible and harmful child care. Parents who show any discernible degree of these actions toward their child often need instruction and assistance in effective child-care methods. Finally, the far right of the diagram depicts parents who violate their child's basic needs and dependency status in a physically, sexually, or emotionally intrusive or abusive manner. Similarly, their failure to respond to a child's needs is the cornerstone of neglect.