Each year in the U.S., more than 600,000 children suffer abuse or neglect that warrants the intervention of Child Protective Services. Often times, these children need support for emotional and behavioral difficulties. It’s a heart-breaking problem, but there is evidence that some treatments can help.
A new systematic review highlights one effective solution: animal therapy. The review included four separate studies where pets – such as dogs and cats – were present during therapy sessions with abused or neglected children.
The review found that having an animal present during therapy helped children cope with anxiety, depression and anger. It also found some evidence that integrating the animal into the therapy session in a purposeful way led to more pronounced improvements for children.
The researchers did caution that more evidence is needed to fully understand how animals can help abused and neglected children. But that further investigation “could prove helpful to the many children facing struggles associated with maltreatment.”
“Companion animals give children chances to feel empathy and to practice being responsible for another’s well-being. Perhaps using animals in therapy can help break the cycles of abuse and neglect that afflict some families,” said Elliott Smith, a developmental psychologist at Cornell’s Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research.
Smith is the associate director of the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect, a project that provides child maltreatment data to qualified researchers to help us understand costs, consequences, and prevention of child maltreatment.
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