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Pity the parent in today's world. The pendulum has swung in the other direction to such a degree that even the best parents are sincerely asking themselves whether their behavior is experienced by their children as abusive.

"Child abuse" is a phenomenon defined collectively, and the definition changes. Many disciplinary measures and other parental actions once considered normal and even proper are now considered inappropriate if not downright abusive. And the definition today is open-ended, leaving room for more and more behavior and omissions to be defined as abusive or malignantly neglectful.

Parents, gripped by a genuine desire to do what's best for the children they love, are privately grilling themselves with ceaseless questions that, frankly, have no hard-and-fast answers:

What constitutes child abuse? How subtle can it be? What constitutes physical abuse? What constitutes emotional abuse? What constitutes neglect? What constitutes deprivation? When is control inappropriate? When is parental absence malicious? What if a parent fosters gender confusion or immaturity by being too loving? What if a parent tolerates promiscuity? When is a parent being too relaxed about discipline? What if a parent displays sibling favoritism? When is discipline too severe? What's the dividing line between putting your foot down and building a wall of contempt? What makes a child feel owned or enslaved or tortured?

Parenting is a dangerous activity, and the lines dividing appropriate from inappropriate behaviors are not fixed or easily identified. Perfection is not a human quality - of parents or of anyone else among us. Parents bring their own imperfections and childhood traumas into the parenting relationship. And as if that were not enough, children have many influences that parents do not fully understand or control.

...and it always seems easier to analyze in retrospect what was done wrong than to say in advance how things should be done differently. But those too apt to judge are treading on dangerous ground.

Question for thought: Is the behaviour and mental state of the child the true measure of the success of the parenting? When a child goes "bad", is that a sure sign that the parenting was faulty? When a child has low self-esteem or is depressed or tends to act unruly, is that a sign that the parents have failed?

When children do wrong, accusing eyes turn toward the parents. Even parents who are models of altruism and love are turned inside-out by those eager to find an easy hidden answer. How easily we forget that anyone whose life is put in a bright-enough spotlight will show a few blemishes. How different we'd feel if the spotlight were directed at us.

Certainly the dividing line between good parents and abusive parents is, in some instances, very easy to draw. Parents who beat up their children or burn them or break their bones; parents who have incestuous relationships with their children; parents who constantly belittle their children or tell them they're not wanted or loved; parents who treat their children as animals and lock them up and feed them from doggy bowls and call them doggy names - all of these are clear instances of abuse of the most abhorent and intolerable kind (and sadly, all have been documented).

But what of the parents who refuse to let their boy go to a birthday party for a girl he's fond of in his class, and he carries that bitter memory and that pain with him for the rest of his life? Have they abused him? Or must there be a pattern and an underlying subtext of abuse for such an incident to qualify as abusive?

The pendulum has swung to a place where we now tend to be suspicious, even of the most circumspect families. We tell ourselves: Just because a family is firmly established in the community and the parents earn good incomes in respectable jobs and have friends who believe them to be exemplary and have children who are models of normal behaviour does not mean that there is no subtext of abuse running through the home.

We say to ourselves: Some of the most subtle forms of abuse are the easiest to hide - but that does not mean they are subtle in impact. A child may be constantly belittled in the home or subjected to implicit ridicule or constantly asked why he cannot match a peer's performance or regularly reprimanded unfairly or treated with bipolar inconsistency. Parents sometimes "discipline" children, not because the children's actions warrant discipline, but because the child's normal childhood behavior interferes with selfish adult pleasures, like watching the soaps on TV or reading a book or holding long telephone conversations.

We tell ourselves: Parental presence in the home does not necessarily mean they are spending high-quality time with their children. The child may be sent to his room, or left to stay alone in his room for lengthy periods, or subjected to such coldness or ridicule that his room is his only sanctuary. Parents can let their children watch TV or play video games for extremely long periods of time, cutting them off from normal social interaction - or they may unreasonably deprive their children of safe pastimes. They may spend time in the home arguing with one another, or gossiping maliciously about other families, or putting down young people and youthful activities, or talking incessantly about disciplining their children. They may be two-faced, cursing and swearing in the home while wearing halos on the outside.

We get the message from TV talk shows and other media: Parents - maliciously or unintentionally - may interfere with a child's social or sexual development. Children may be teased about things that are especially sensitive to them. Parents may rib a teen ceaselessly about points of vulnerability: size, appearance, speech, clothes, signs of puberty. Children may be given a message - subtly or overtly - that teens are not to be trusted. A boy may be told that all girls are promiscuous, and a girl may be told that all boys are lecherous. A teen may suffer through having the love of his life torn apart in words at the kitchen table. He may have his gentle thoughts of infatuation spoiled by too much talk about safe sex and virginity and pregnancy. He may have his most secret thoughts about masturbation drawn out for public discussion and reprimand.

We've heard parents described as brutal overseers: A teen may be kept from parties where peers are enjoying themselves - sometimes for no reason and sometimes for extreme reasons. The parent may send an overt or subtle message to a teen that he is not to be trusted, that he is inherently evil, that he has a rotten personality, that he uses people, that he is dirty, that he smells bad, that he is not good-looking, that he is bad at conversation, that he is immature, that he doesn't try hard enough, that he will never amount to anything, that he is selfish, that he is spoiled.

Over imagination has been teased with wild speculation about how parents can hurt their children: The parent may threaten future discipline to such an extent that the child is always in fear and intimidated. The parent may play games about discipline, sometimes threatening it as a joke while at other times following through on the threats, leaving the teen feeling he is impotent to protect himself by following rules of consistency. The parent may turn medical treatment and therapy into discipline, or threaten therapy as a way of subduing the child. The parent may impose on the child the conviction that he is sick or mentally ill or flawed or in need of serious intervention. The child may feel completely out of control of his life and maturation, and constantly fear having his most intimate secrets and his private world dragged out in front of his parents and other adults in the therapists' offices.

We hear that abuse can be something as insidious as over-control. This is our child and we own him. We will make him into a good specimen, a good reflection of us. As people see him, they see us - so we will insist that he not embarrass us or undermine our reputation in the community as sound child caregivers. And if he strays, we will pull him back in line using every technique available to us. We will do whatever it takes to be model parents. We insist that our child have the best and be the best. We will force every ounce of rebellion and pigheadedness out of him. As long as we are his parents, we have complete control over how he behaves.

We hear that parents can abuse their children with guilt trips and thinly-veiled threats. I wouldn't be sick like this if it weren't for the constant abuse you put me through. What kind of constitution do you think I have? You put me through agony. What did I ever do to deserve this? Why couldn't you be like your sibling? You drive me to tears. You'd drive a parent to drink. I don't know how a woman will ever put up with you. You're not ready for relationships. Why don't you act your age? How much more of this do you think I can take? Why can't you be like all the other children? Do they give their parents as much woe as you give yours? You can bet the other parents don't put up with the kind of agony you put us through. One of these days, I just might do something to make you think. One of these days, I may give you the shock of your life. So you'd better watch out, because you're "this far" from the edge of my patience.

We have been trained to be suspicious and to give parents the exact opposite of the benefit of the doubt. We have been programmed to assume the worst unless and until the parent is proven innocent. We've been programmed to believe we live in a truly evil society, where parents are desperately trying with all their might to get away with as much abuse of their children as possible without being caught.

We simply assume that a child's speech and threats and mannerisms paint a vivid picture of life in the home. We assume they betray how the child is treated, and tell ourselves the children are perfect mimics of the parents themselves. It is now a rule-of-thumb that abused children are prone to abuse others unless there is intervention. A very angry child may be acting out anger that is in the home, we say. A child making insidious threats may be a child who has suffered from insidious threats, we tell ourselves. Just because you don't want to believe it's true of a family doesn't mean it isn't.

What is most dangerous is that our suspiciousness can become self-fulfilling. It is not only parents who hear the endless speculation about how parents abuse their children. The children hear it as well, and it frames their view of the world. How could any child subjected to the daily feed of TV talk shows, walk away thinking we live in a good world where most parents genuinely care for their children? How many children will instead walk away glaring coldly at their parents from the corners of their eyes, suddenly awake to the ways in which they too are being "abused"?

Granted, there are bad parents out there who make life difficult for the rest. This essay is not meant to diminish the implications of genuine abuse. If the child has suffered from genuine abuse - even if there are no physical scars, even if there was no sexual trauma - there may be severe trauma nonetheless. A child driven to rage by a parent is a captive in the home and a captive to immaturity as well. The child may have been prevented, because of a parent's persistent abuse, from developing the defence mechanisms that would have let him put the experiences in a safe context and move beyond them. Without that protection, the child can hardly be expected to deal with the abuse in a responsible adult manner. Arguably, the child who blows under this kind of pressure is not responsible for his actions.

But one must also accept that the average child today, living in a culture where abuse is considered quietly prevalent, internalizes the scars of perceived abuse and implicitly assigns blame based on circumstances that are not in themselves abusive. Perhaps a child can be traumatized by perceived abuses that he projects on his own situation from those he's heard described in the lives of others. A child stricken by the fear of the boogeyman cannot say he has been deliberately traumatized by a boogeyman since boogeymen do not exist. But when a child believes the source of his pain is a person who actually exists and influences his life, the child may indeed believe this person has deliberately hurt him and his trauma originates in the act of that individual.

The bottom line of this thought experiment is that the child can come to the mistaken belief that good parents have abused him. Believing the fiction that exists in his thoughts, he can experience genuine trauma and honestly believe his parents are the source of that pain. He behaves and feels as if he were an abused child, and yet the abuse he suffers was not actually perpetrated by the parents he blames. The "abuser" is a boogeyman who wears the face of his parents only in his thoughts.

In a culture where we're shown abusers around every corner and where children are warned to be suspicious of malicious adults, is it possible that some children experience abuse without an abuser?

Take again the case of the child who bears a permanent painful memory of having being denied permission to go to a certain birthday party on a given occasion. The parents have not "abused" the child, but the child feels nonetheless traumatized because of the personal pain of the consequences of their decision. Having heard that childhood pain and anger at parents may be symptoms of abuse, the child may use this experience to reinforce the thought that he is being abused.

What dangerous territory we are in here. When we undertake to judge actions and intent in family situations where there are minor immature subordinates and parenting caregivers living lives in private over a long period of time, we must recognize just how murky and complex our task really is. Not only are the experiences of the various parties subjective and open to reinterpretation over time, but we have to rely on the relaying of stories about these subjective responses. We have to deal with the fact that developing children have varying degrees of maturity over time. We have to understand our own role as interpreters. And we have to recognize that sometimes, our most reluctant suspicions are well-founded.

No parent or family or child memory or interpreter is perfect or above the potential for error. In the context of universal imperfection, even "error" cannot be satisfactorily defined. Sometimes, decisions are simply unwise and circumstances are simply unfortunate - but deliberately abusive? Where do we draw the line for making that conclusion? It's not even that there are no easy answers. The situation is even more difficult than that. The lines we draw and the judgments we make are forever open to redefinition and reinterpretation. When allegations and evidence of mistreatment are weak and foggy, we must sometimes resolve ourselves to never being able to say to our own satisfaction that abuse has indeed occurred.

Doesn't there come a point when it is unseemly to be suspicious? What right do we have, in the absence of clear evidence, to say that "bad" behavior in a given child is evidence of bad parenting or abuse? How long can we malign the good name of people who, all the evidence says, have been parents of impeccable integrity and of the highest quality? How long can we maintain suspicions simply because proving them would provide us with such an easy answer to such a difficult question?

Maybe it is easier for some to hold on to their suspicions than to let themselves accept that bad behavior can be committed by a child who has suffered no child abuse at all. And maybe some people blame other people's parents because they hold such a grudge against their own.

Author June Callwood says the most important choice we can make as adults is to forgive our parents. Forgive them, not for what they have done, but for what the childish mind holds against them in times of rebellion. Resentment against parents can underlie the whole gamut of rude and violent behaviors that people commit against others. The chip on the shoulder is childish egocentrism and self-pity taken to the extreme. Maybe it will take a whole lot of forgiving by adults in order to teach children how and why they should learn to forgive.