A Child Called It By Dave Pelzer

Dave Pelzer was once a teen and he didn’t enjoy it because of his abusive alcoholic mother. His mother will beat him for no reason and his father does nothing because he is not their most of the day. He was saved by one of his teacher because the nurse saw that he got staved by his abusive mother. His mother is too harsh on him and his brothers get treated the right way and he doesn’t.

This paper evaluates how David Pelzer develops in his memoir, A Child Called “It”. Pelzer is evaluated using Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems model, Piaget’s theory of cognitive development and Kohlberg’s theory of moral reasoning. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems model demonstrates how Pelzer’s environment impacted his development greatly. Pelzer is greatly influenced through others by how they treat him. Throughout this memoir, Pelzer is in the concrete operations stage of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. The reader is also able to see Pelzer’s development from preconventional morality to conventional morality using Kohlberg’s theory of moral reasoning.

I am writing to you to protest the School Board’s proposed banning of the book A Child Called “It” by Dave Pelzer. The book spent six years on the New York Times best-seller list, was an international best seller, and received a Pulitzer Prize nomination. As an award-winning author, Mr. Pelzer has shared his true-life story based on a childhood where he received physical and mental abuse by his alcoholic mother.

Discuss how your investigation of the generic conventions of poetry has influenced your understanding of at least one poem that you have studied in this unit.

Abuse and neglect comes in all different forms and each one of them are as equally as damaging as the next. Others will agree that abuse and neglect are hard to define in some cases, but there are clues and signs that professionals and nonprofessionals can detect in a child if they just pay attention. Being observant isn’t the only key to saving these children, but also being willing to speak up and tell someone what you know and or saw. In “A Child Called It”, David Pelzer is a young boy who goes through horrendous abuse and neglect who might have been able to endure much less pain if one adult would have spoken up, despite the fear of any consequences. There is a disgusting number of examples of abuse and neglect in this book, but there will be three different experiences that will showcase neglect, psychological abuse, and physical abuse discussed in the rest of this text.

Dave is made aware of his father’s feelings several times throughout the movie. He realizes when his parents are discussing Dave’s future loudly and when Dave’s father does not acknowledge Dave when giving a customer a test-drive.

Child abuse, in any form, is cause for outrage. This makes the question of whether neglect, benign or otherwise, is better than violence hard to consider. According to Canada’s Public Health Agency, parental neglect, at 34% of cases, is the most commonly reported form of child maltreatment (31). In Roald Dahl’s Matilda and Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, parental neglect is contrasted against violence as both are shown to be psychologically detrimental to a child, while the impact of these imperfect parents is able to help a child redefine their sense of self.

Words and actions have a large impact on the way you work with the world around you, they have the ability to make you feel indescribable emotions in every way. The poem “Little Boy,” written by B.H. Fairchild begins as a young boy questions his father’s hurtful past, as the speaker demonstrates that he asked the questions as he would’ve asked if he ever saw “Dimaggio or Mantle,” and develops into an examination of a lifeless relationship between father and son. In the poem the little boy’s persistent focus on the father’s brutal past reveals a case of PTSD from his involvement in WWII, and how it affects the advancement of an already bad and unsteady and unchanging relationship of a father and son.

Jonathan Kozol, in the chapter entitled “Other People’s Children, discusses and justifies the kinds of limitations placed on children who must attend poorly funded, educationally inferior school. Kozol argues that children in the inner-city schools are not fit to go to college and that they should be trained in schools for the jobs they will eventually hold, even though these jobs are less prestigious, lowest-level jobs in society. Kozol’s argument is based on the fact that students from the inner-city or rather from the societies that do not have enough job opportunities are not supposed to learn much because their society cannot accommodate most of the courses that are often found in the urban settings. For example, there is a point where Kozol cites one of the businessman’s statement which says, ‘It doesn’t make sense to offer something that most of these urban kids will never use.’ The businessman continues to argue, ‘no one expects these ghetto kids to go to college. Most of them are lucky if they are literate. If we can teach some useful skills, get them to stay in school and graduate, and maybe into jobs, we’re giving them the most that they can hope for’ (Kozol 376). This statement clearly indicate that the society should accept the inequalities and exercise the same inequalities even in education.

Dave Pelzer is the survivor of the third worst case of child abuse in California 's history. Dave grew up with his two brothers and two parents. Catherine, Dave 's mother, loved to cook exotic meals for her family and decorate their home in creative and imaginative ways each holiday season. She was full of energy, often taking her kids on tours of downtown San Francisco while her husband was at work as a fire fighter, exposing them to Golden Gate Park and Chinatown. Once, while on a family camping trip, young Dave was watching the sunset when he felt his mother embrace him from behind and watch the sunset with him over his shoulder. "I never felt as safe and warm as at that moment in time," he recalls.

Dave also thrives on embodying the “underdog identity”. Being a twentysomething year old, one is still searching to discover who they are and what their identity is. Dave has had several identities pushed onto him because of his situation such as Toph’s parent, an orphan, and a steady provider all while still maintaining his role as an older brother, but one of the biggest identities is the underdog, the victim rising from the ashes. During his inner dialogue, Dave says: “you like that stance, that underdog stance, because it increases your leverage with other people” (Eggers 119). Him saying this directly acknowledges the fact that he is using his situation to gain moral authority over others, an authority which he believes he is entitled to because of his situation. Dave, no matter where he goes or what he does in life, will always be the victim of a sad event, his parent’s deaths will always be a part of him and his story, but he is using it to define his

     Most likely, the abuse stemmed from alcohol abuse of his mother and father. They just both handled their addiction in different ways. His father was passive, but still loved his son; his mother became violent and took her frustration and madness out on Dave. Not that alcohol is an excuse, but it was the key to the ignition of that family’s child abuse problem. Alcohol in this case

The beginning of the book talks about what it was like before things went horrifyingly wrong. The family took vacations together, his mother was a loving mother and wife, and Dave's father was his hero. This eventually changed, as did everything in Dave's life. His father never turned out to be his hero, but a drunken firefighter who left him, and at times he wished his mother dead. When the torture and abuse began it was minimal, Dave describes it in the book as punishment instead of discipline but as the book progressed so does the intensity. As the story progresses Dave's feelings are expresses, he speaks of his mother, as either "The Bitch" or just "Mother" there is absolutely no love in the way he speaks of her at all. His anger is also expressed and shown in way he talks about his, once beloved hero, his father and his brothers.

Problems that comes up in this case study appears to child; physical, emotional, mental, verbal and personal abuse, along with environmental factors that created the initial “family secret,” that Dave talks about throughout the book. His parents have their own personal conflicted problems, along with their abused in substances like alcohol. The family social economic status seems to range in the lower class, as Dave’ father occupation was a firefighter and his mother’s occupation is unknown. Physical abuse of children is a nonaccidental injury inflicted on a child (Crosson-Tower, p.180, 2013). Dave’s mother made him sit at the bottom of the stairs with his hands under his bottom, starved and slept with no blanket in the cold basement. His mother’s alcoholic problems made him, his mother’s sole target for frustration and anger, basically as his mother’s punching bag. Neglectful mother were more than likely to used words like shame and sad more than non-neglectful mother during the study (Camilo, Garrido & Calheiros, 2016). Dave’s mother called him “it,” while his

However, Lehane addresses this theme through actual events in Dave’s life. In the novel Mystic River Lehane includes several incident where Dave needed someone to rely on and felt like he had no one there for him. Dave felt like he had no one when it came to him and his mom’s relationship. On page one-hundred fifty-five Dave and his mom states “Ma,” he said “who were those guys? Why did they-?”