Antidepressants Blog

The ideal parent should love, nurture and wisely discipline his children so they may develop as ideal children and into ideal adults. But the real world is rarely like that.

Even with the best will in the world and no matter how much we love our children, they sometimes do get us down. Perhaps we sometimes smack them as a result of our own anger or frustration rather than in a genuine desire to teach them not to do the wrong thing.

Recognise yourself in this description? Perhaps if you answer yes, you have some objection to seeing it included under a discusion on child abuse. It really is all a matter of degree.

Children of all ages are frequently abused in our community. This may be physical or mental abuse, they may be deprived of proper nutrition or they may be sexually abused. While we may rightly be offended by this behavior we will not solve the problem nor help the victims by seeking only to punish those parents who abuse their children.

There are many reasons why these parents may fall below what we regard as proper behavior to their children.

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Each organ consists of a number of different types of cells arranged in a characteristic pattern. For example, the stomach has an inner lining, a muscle layer and an outer protective coat. The lining contains acid-producing and mucus-producing cells. The middle layer contains muscle cells, blood vessels with the different types of blood cells within them, lymph vessels, lymph cells, and supporting cells which hold all the others together. The outer layer contains supporting cells and nerve cells.

Some cells, such as the acid-producing cells, occur only in the stomach. Some, such as the muscle cells, are also found in the intestines, bladder and other organs. Others, such as blood and lymph vessels, are found throughout the body. Each type of cell has a unique job and a unique appearance. A muscle cell cannot do the job of a nerve cell. An acid-producing cell cannot do the job of a blood cell, and so on.

The process of developing special functions is called differentiation or maturation. A cell with few or no special functions is called undifferentiated, immature or primitive. The only function of undifferentiated cells is to multiply when necessary to produce cells which are capable of developing into specialised cells. Once cells specialise they often lose the ability to multiply. For example, mature red blood cells are so specialised for carrying oxygen around the body that they cannot reproduce themselves. As old cells wear out or are lost by bleeding, new red blood cells come from undifferentiated cells in the bone marrow, not from the mature red cells in the blood.

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