Ivonne Perez

 Lifespan Development, PSYCH 9

Professor Tifany Moreira

April, 28 2021

 A Child Called It analysis

David, a character in the novel “A Child Called It” by David Pelzer, was a teenage boy who had

to deal with that situation. When you read this book, you will see how the main character David

changed as he overcame the challenges of being abused as he realized that he could survive his

mother’s punishments, that he could find ways to lessen the pain of her punishments, and that he

could trust others with what was happening between him and his mother. Those were the ways

he handled being abused by his parent. 

   

 David’s mental state changed as he learned how to deal with his mother’s punishments.

This first started during an experience when his mother forced him on top of the stove at about

the same time his family was about to return home. He knew his mother wouldn’t do anything

with his family home, so he tried to wait out the punishment and delay the worst part. After he

was successful in installing his mother, he realized that he had more control than he thought over

surviving the battles between him and his mother when he thought to himself, “I used my head to

survive” (Pelzer 42) so coming up with a plan to stall his mother worked. After this, he had

angry thoughts and his feelings of rage toward his family made him seem more confident. He

started to think thoughts like “That day I vowed to myself that I would never, ever again give

that bitch the satisfaction of hearing me beg for her to stop beating me” (Pelzer 43) and do things
like “refusing to cry because I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of my defeat” (Pelzer 132).

The anger and rage he was feeling led to a more negative outlook on everything, which is not a

good mental state to be in, but for David, it made it so he had more confidence in dealing with

his mother because what he was doing was working. When he was thinking this way, it made it

so he would think about how to survive his mothers’ punishments rather than just winning them. 

  

  David was always trying to come up with ways to lessen the pain from his mother’s

punishments. At one time his mother had begun to starve him as a punishment. That seemed like

it ended up lasting forever, so he began to steal food so he wouldn’t go hungry. As he started to

come up with plans for stealing food, he thought, “The more I craved food, the more I tried to

come up with a better plan to steal it” (Pelzer 62). Every time he tried a new way to steal food, it

would “work for a while”(Pelzer 63), but then he would get caught. His mother would find out

and beat him even more and give him even less food his cycle of stealing food would start again.

Another way she tried to hurt David was to force him to swallow a spoonful of ammonia. After

the first time, she made him swallow a full spoonful of ammonia he tried as hard as he could to

never have to do that again. The next time his mother came towards him with a spoonful of

ammonia, he tried to “make her spill most of the cleaner onto the floor” (Pelzer 76). He was

never able to push the spoon around enough to spill the whole thing, but he always got rid of

enough to lessen the pain from it burning his mouth and throat as it went down. This was just

another example of how he was always trying to think of ways and ideas to lessen the pain of her

punishments. 

    
 After a while, David had begun to trust some other people with what his mother was doing

to him. At the beginning of one of his school years, he had a substitute teacher who knew he had

issues at home, but she did not know what they were, so she was a little nicer. The substitute

teacher eventually had to leave, but David did not want her to go because “She treated me like a

real person, not like some piece of filth in the gutter” (Pelzer 116). Nobody ever really treated

him like this before, so he clung to the happiness and warmth she gave him. When he started to

try and be a little more trusting of others because he wanted to feel that again, for example, after

she left, he was still being sent to the office for being late or stealing food, and the school nurse

would examine him and ask questions. Usually, he would lie to cover up for his mother as she

demanded, but sometimes he would slip up. The nurse started to catch onto what was happening

and pry even more, but he would “always break down in the end and confess” (Pelzer 6). At first,

he was apprehensive about it, but he got used to it and confessed a lot more and a lot more

willingly as he started to trust her. As the nurse grew more concerned, she brought the principal,

David’s teacher, and then finally a police officer together to ask David about what was

happening. At first, he refused to talk to them out of fear, but after they gained his trust, he

decided he would “take a deep breath, wring my hands reluctantly tell them about mother and

me” (Pelzer 10). After David told them about his mother, they took him out of the city to help

save him to live a happy life. His ability to end up trusting them helped him in the end. David

was a character in a novel which went through changes as he learned how to deal with the abuses

his mother inflicted on him. His mental state changed as he grew more confident in dealing with

everything his mother did. He had to learn ways to lessen the pain of his mother’s punishments.

He also had to learn how to trust others to get free from his mother’s abuse. By the end of the

novel, he was a different person, and the experiences he had to struggle through changed him.
   

 Dave does not begin to acknowledge God in his memoir until he reaches the tail end of his

abuse when he convinces himself that God did not exist because, if he did, he would not allow

Dave to keep living this way. Dave slowly loses faith throughout his maltreatment, believing at

first that there is some hope that he will escape his mother, but eventually growing desperate and

hopeless. The final line of Chapter 7 makes it clear that Dave did not ever entirely lose faith.

However: his willingness to keep praying shows that a part of him still believed that there was a

way out, and this knowledge kept him surviving until someone finally intervened.
 Works cited page

Pelzer, Dave. A Child Called It: One Child’s Courage to Survive. Reissue, Health

Communications Inc, 1995.