David Pelzner: An Analysis

Life is not what everybody expects as days pass life changes and gets harder every day. In Hope’s boy, Andrew Bridge was a 5 year old boy who had the love from her mother and share a deep connection with, who thought that nothing else mattered. However, ended up getting separated from her mother at only 7 years of age because of her mother’s mental illness. Nevertheless, Andrew suffered from her mother’s separation having to be placed in a foster care and deal with loveless foster parents. Andrew was placed with the family Leonard’s who refuse to identify him as one of their children. Andrew experience emotional and physical abuse in the Leonard’s household. Mrs. Leonard was such a heartless person to Andrew. There was a time when little things will make Mrs. Leonard mad such as maybe Andrew leaving socks in the floor, not picking up after himself or maybe nothing at all and take it out on him. Andrew Bridge stated “Digging into my arms or grabbing at my face, she screamed that the foster child in front of her was ungrateful, lazy, obnoxious, confrontational, stupid, and undeserving. With her hand at my ear or at the base of my neck, she pulled me to the floor and through rooms” (181-182). This shows how the Leonard’s treated Andrew using physical abuse. Mrs. Leonard wanted to make Andrew feel what she felt when she was a young girl. As if Andrew didn’t had enough with Mrs. Leonard’s rejection he had to suffer being emotional abuse, bulled by Christopher Mrs. Leonard’s son.

As a young child, David had a loving family, his Mommy, his father and his two brothers. By the time he was seven, he was being starved and abused by his mother. In his life, David had to face many challenges. One of which is having to play his mother’s “games” that left him half dead. He would also get punished for being a “bad boy” when he never did anything. Later, he had enough courage to tell someone, his 4th grade teachers at Thomas Edison Elementary School.

As a child Dave Pelzer was brutally beaten and starved by his emotionally unstable, alcoholic mother; a mother who played tortuous, unpredictable games that left one of her sons nearly dead. She no longer considered him a son, but a slave; no longer a boy, but an 'it'. His bed was an old army cot in the basement, his clothes were torn and smelly, and when he was allowed the luxury of food it was scraps from the dogs' bowl. The outside world knew nothing of the nightmare played out behind closed doors. Dave dreamed of finding a family to love him and call him their son. It took years of struggle, deprivation and despair to find his dreams and make something of himself. A Child Called 'It' covers the early years of

A Child Called “It” by author David Pelzer is an incredibly emotional and vivid story of the experiences of a young boy. About his own life, Pelzer describes how he endured unthinkable abuse at the hand of his own mother. He provides detailed accounts of the abuse and neglect as well as the emotions and pain he endured, his struggle to cope and survive, and how he eventually was freed from her and the hell he was living. A Child Called “It” is a disturbingly real example of how children are victimized through various forms of maltreatment.

First, David’s mother gave him enough courage to keep hope his father would be all right after the Nazis arrested him. Because their own house was no longer safe from Nazi invasion, David’s family was staying with friends. However,

In 1995, David Pelzer wrote a book describing his childhood, a book that is highly recommend as a must read. The book starts off with a happy home and quickly turns into his very own nightmare. Pelzer is a survivor of child abuse. This story is so nauseating that while reading it you find found yourself praying that his parents would rot in hell for all eternity.

Through his experiences, Dave Pelzer struggle to find his self-existences and self-worth as a human being. The struggle for self-existence and self-worth is depicted in his novels A Child Called “It” and The Lost Boy. The two novels discuss about the autobiography of Dave Pelzer. The autobiography of Dave Pelzer‘s life highlights issues concerning the youth. His novels, A Child Called “It” and The Lost Boy demonstrated the awareness of abuse and mistreatment in the homes of family members and sometimes non-family related members. Pelzer‘s story is not the first of many stories to depict a child trying to survive in a home where there is many afflicted injuries. In other words, the afflicted injuries represented abuse. The work of Pelzer suggests

David Pelzer was finally freed from his abusive home after years of neglect from his family, doctors and educators. Through his book, A Child Called “it,” he recounts the different types of abuse he faced and the effects the abuse had on his ability to communicate with others and in his overall life. Throughout David’s abuse, his mother took the primary role of abuser by developing different reward and punishment techniques to discipline her child. As it is mentioned, her first disciplinary techniques and forms of abuse where to dehumanize and humiliate David by asking for others to ignore him, require the family to treat him as if he was not a member of the family, and wear the same clothes to school for months. David’s mother would also mentally mistreat him by using the “corner treatment” and then the “mirror treatment,” both techniques meant to make David believe that he was a “Bad Boy” that deserved to be punished. As well, his mother’s abuse often employed physical punishments such as beatings consisting of punches, kicking, and slapping. David was also stabbed once in the stomach and made to drink ammonia, Clorox and liquid soap. All of the abuse David suffered, resulted from years of child abuse neglect and sexism.

     The conflict of the story was Dave’s mother. She was cruel and unloving. She would drink and abuse Dave. For some reasons she never beat any of her other kids. Every time he stood up to her she would tell him he was a nobody or an “it”. She did cruel things for no reason. For example one time she tried putting him on the stove to burn him. Other times she would make a gas out of ammonia and Clorox in the bathroom and lock him in there for hours. The climax of the story is when people at school start noticing cuts and bruises on David. When a social worker is sent to his house, his mother starts treating him with love and pretends she’s sorry. Dave believes it and doesn’t say anything when the social worker comes. Dave thinks his dreams have come true and is very happy not knowing when the social

At the age of 5 years old, not only did he began to take showers with his father, but when they went to the beach club, his mother bathed him in the shower in the presence of other naked women. By the age of 6 years old, David noticed the power men had over women, “when a male entered the women’s side of the bathhouse, all the women shrieked”. (Gale Biography). At the age of 7 and 8 years old, he experienced a series of head accidents. First, he was hit by a car and suffered head injuries. A few months later he ran into a wall and again suffered head injuries. Then he was hit in the head with a pipe and received a four inch gash in the forehead. Believing his natural mother died while giving birth to him was the source of intense guilt, and anger inside David. His size and appearance did not help matters. He was larger than most kids his age and not particularly attractive, which he was teased by his classmates. His parents were not social people, and David followed in that path, developing a reputation for being a loner. At the age of 14 years old David became very depressed after his adoptive mother Pearl, died from breast cancer. He viewed his mother’s death as a monster plot designed to destroy him. (Gale Biography). He began to fail in school and began an infatuation with petty larceny and pyromania. He sets fires,

Throughout the story, his parents and grandparents do numerous horrible things to him. His grandmother abused him, his mother lied to him and was constantly mean towards him, and his father gave him cancer. David’s childhood was incredibly rough, and in order to make it feel a bit less overwhelming he painted the city of Detroit as the ‘bad guy’. In this story there are numerous examples of this ‘neglect’ and other tragedies David is faced with. For example in chapter two David discusses this neglect, “Around that time Dad must have gotten a promotion or a raise.

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

“I am David” was a book written by Anne Holm who has gotten a lot of inspiration from World War 2 Survivors, and that were willing to tell and share their stories with her. This book is based on a Boy Called David who was put into a concentration and during his adventures he changes dramatically mentally by discovering more about the world around him that is beyond the Walls of the Camp. He discovers more about himself and the people around

Though David represents a seemingly common boy at the time, he has several qualities that make him stand out. However, these character traits are never simply told to us. Instead, the implied author uses David’s actions, decisions, and beliefs to