A Child Called It - Personal Biography by Dave Pelzer

"A Child Called It"

Dave Pelzer

A Child Called "It" is a personal biography by Dave Pelzer. He talks about his struggle to survive physical and emotional abuse by his mother. The story beings with the school where Dave attends finally reporting what has been happening to Dave to the proper authorities. Dave is finally a "free" child, no longer to be abused by his mother. The story also talks about how is life was before his mother began abusing him, he talks about all the happy memories that he went through. Dave then begins to tell about how his mother's discipline that eventually got out of control; extremely out of control. Dave's mother is also an alcoholic and this contributes to his abuse. Also his father works as a firefighter and is gone a lot, and even when he is around, he really doesn't do a lot to help Dave; he ignores it as though maybe if he does this then it's not really happening.

This book was a real eye opener. I think that its defiantely a must read for everyone. We all know that this stuff goes on in people's lives everyday, but I think that we forget about it a lot of times just because we don't see it and/or it isn't really affecting our life; which is really sad. After reading this book though I do think about abuse more often and keep my eyes open for signs of abuse. I know at home when I worked in the elementary school's after school program, there were a lot of children whom I would say showed some signs of abuse. One child I did talk to a teacher about it and they said that they had been monitoring her for awhile, and that they had to be careful with the girl because they last time she was in a school and they reported he as an abuse case, the mother and father had moved away so that nothing could be done. This was frustrating to me because I wanted to do something right away, but couldn't for the child's sake. After reading this book, I wondering if that's why the teacher's at Dave's school took so long to report what was happening with him. I think that as teachers, you do need to be careful in reporting because you could be putting the child's live in more danger by reporting it too soon.

This book was a hard read, only because it was so sad! I think that it was good to be able to really see into someone's