Although parental deficit models dominated thought about child maltreatment throughout
the 1960s, critics have questioned the appropriateness of this model, stating, for example, that “it is
theoretically naïve to assume that the individual abuser, who is the focus of the psychiatric model,
exists independently of the society in which he is imbedded” (Belsky, 1978, p. 38). In part, this
criticism resulted from the failure of the model to adequately predict which parents would maltreat
their children. One of the main tenets of the psychiatric model is that parental psychopathology,
caused by parents’ own histories of inadequate parenting, is the main contributing cause of
maltreatment and leads to the intergenerational transmission of abusive or neglectful parenting
practices. However, many studies exploring this issue have concluded that the vast majority of