The preliminary finding that genetically-mediated child effects on maltreatment appear to be small relative to other parenting and home environment variables suggests that maltreatment may be less a response to children’s behaviors and more associated with characteristics and experiences of caregivers. That is, although much of caregivers’ more normative parenting and disciplining behavior may be a response to children’s behavior, parents’ violating social norms and failing to meet children’s basic needs may be more associated with their own limitations. A small to moderate portion of the variance in maltreatment variables is due to the shared and twin environments, which may reflect environmental processes and/or passive gene-environment correlation. Most of the variance in maltreatment is due to nonshared environmental influences, which may include either idiosyncratic child effects (e.g., an illness that affects only one of the siblings) or parent effects (e.g., a stressor experienced by the parent when only one of the siblings is present).
