When a girl barely out of childhood has a child of her own, bad things can happen. Among the worst is: nothing at all.
Beyond poor parenting is no parenting. Beyond physical abuse is emotional abandonment.
"The most troubled mothers are adolescent mothers," says Pam Smelser, a supervisor in Anne Arundel County's Child Protective Services.
"They are so self-involved they don't have room in their heads for a child. They are too busy taking up where their adolescence left off. Drugs and alcohol, switching partners can make it much worse. They can demonstrate a lot of indifference to this needy little human being."
That disengagement, that lack of nurturing, can result in "mental injury" to a child, and it is now part of Maryland's child-abuse law. Little-noticed language in a domestic violence bill passed last spring by the legislature requires caseworkers to look for acts of omission as well as acts of commission by a parent.
Verbal abuse and threats, the terrorizing of a child -- these have been proscribed by language defining emotional abuse. If a child is sick, ill-fed or poorly clothed -- these can be signs of physical neglect. But this new fine print in child-abuse law opens uncertain territory for caseworkers and psychologists.
"This is the hardest area to get a handle on, but potentially the most damaging," says Smelser. "It is easier responding to a caring parent who loses control than to one who doesn't even connect with the child."
"I'm going to be interested in seeing how the courts handle this," said a psychologist who evaluates children for Child Protective Services. She asked that her name not be used to protect the children she sees. "Prior to this, the focus has always been on physical abuse or neglect."
If a parent feeds and supervises a child, where is the neglect? No bedtime snuggles? No reading stories? No tender conversations? Those sound like very middle-class values to impose on a single mother who comes home from work on "Empty."
But we are not talking about an overextended parent who occasionally tunes out the kids. These are parents, most often mothers, who might feed and clothe their kids but who don't connect on any level with their children. While emotional neglect may be hard to write a law around, it is not hard for professionals to spot.
First, it rarely exists in isolation. A child who is ignored will usually act up to get a mother's attention and immediately becomes a candidate for physical abuse. Second, emotional neglect leaves ghostly traces on a child. You can see what he has not had by what is missing in him -- to begin with, a childhood.
Often, the child who is not parented will take on the role of parent. Getting meals, tending to younger siblings. Simple questions from a social worker about the day's routine can reveal an unhealthy role reversal.
"These children are anxious and overwhelmed," says the psychologist. "They expect themselves to take care of everything, and they can't."
In school, these children quickly distinguish themselves as problems. There has been no structure, no limits in their lives and they drive their teachers crazy.
"I see more kids acting out at this point," says the psychologist. "That is the way they keep people involved with them. They don't learn that there are other ways to connect with people."
The long-term implications for these children are grim. A child develops a conscience from the positive and negative messages he gets from his parents. "What happens if there are no messages at all?" asks the psychologist. "No conscience?"
"The scariest part is, mental injury goes unnoticed until it gets really bad," says Smelser. "If a child can find a way to function in the outside world -- and kids have remarkable coping skills -- no one will know."
Should the government judge a parent on something as vague as their nurturing skills? Maryland legislators resisted this change in the law for years. But Smelser says her caseworkers can help parents learn how to be parents.
"A lot of this is drugs and alcohol," said Smelser. "But a lot is they don't know how to parent any other way."
These parents fear losing their children, a card social workers are not always forced to play.
"Those parents are glad to see us. We're not the enemy to them. We're somebody who can help them."