Today there is a lot of controversy over children who have emotional problems. Are these problems genetic or are they caused by something else the child is exposed to? Major problematic outcomes, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, cause the child a lot of problems throughout their life. A vague medical model has been developed to attempt to explain these problematic outcomes.
This medical model is a single factor main effect model. This means there is one cause that leads to an outcome. The unit for the model is the mother. The cause is psychiatric problems in an abusive mother and emotional trauma in the abused child. The measures used are psychiatric evaluations of the individual done by professionals. The outcome of the model is lasting and permanent emotional injury. The mechanism seen is an intergenerational transmission of the emotional wound brought upon one as a child and passed onto the next generation of children. Additionally a sufficiency mechanism can be seen in that it is sufficient to say that an abusive mother is sufficient enough to cause lasting and permanent emotional injury. The only intervention possible is to prevent the abuse as primary intervention or stop the abuse before it is too late as a secondary intervention. There are numerous criticisms seen with this model as expressed through many individuals" research.
One such criticism is the fact that individual characteristics play a role in abuse and problematic outcomes (Emery & Laumann-Billings 1998). These individual characteristics are related to the likelihood of family violence. Such characteristics include low self-esteem, poor impulse control, negative affectivity, and heightened response to stress. Seeing all of these ideas as possible causes of family violence makes a single factor main effect model seem unreasonable. One should not say that emotional trauma causes emotional injury when there are so many factors that may lead to the emotional trauma.