Parents who shout at their children or call them “stupid” are leaving their offspring at greater risk of self-harm, drug use and ending up in jail, new research claims.
Talking harshly to children should be recognised as a form of abuse because of the huge damage it does, experts say.
The authors of a new study into such behaviour say “adult-to-child perpetration of verbal abuse … is characterised by shouting, yelling, denigrating the child, and verbal threats”.
“These types of adult actions can be as damaging to a child’s development as other currently recognised and forensically established subtypes of mistreatment such as childhood physical and sexual abuse,” the academics say in their paper in the journal Child Abuse & Neglect.
One benefit of shouting at your kids and generally dismissing their emotions is that you can enjoy your retirement without them anywhere near you and die alone.
Well that’s one way to get them to move out on their own I guess
I really hate the idea of parents. Like two people raise you and are responsible for you? Reading Brave New World as a kid, it took me until the very end to understand it as dystopian. I thought the idea of your parents being barely a part of the equation, just absent minded and high all the time? Great. Trusting school to raise you entirely using weird subliminal studying methods was actually an improvement. It is dystopian, but yeah I basically think this idea of an atomic family unit to be the most bizarre and selfish, anti-social bullshit. My parents didn’t let me know my relatives, were able to choose who I was friends with, where I was able to go. And all the while I’m reliant on them to not be kidnapped or hate crimed and to support my goals rather than force me to sit at home. The abuse just continues on and on. I will never be okay, I can only hope to make some cool art before I die. But that start of life decides for you whether you will be important or not.
Childhood is basically an Achilles heel for every single libertarian concept, and one which authoritarians exploit every single time. Until every single human is born with complete knowledge and faculty, this weakness will always prevent full individualistic freedom.
I can only hope to make some cool art before I die
That, friend, is more than most people could hope to dream of. And I don’t mean that in the “poor kid in Rwanda” way. Let the wound do the talking there’s medicine there, not just for you.
hugs
It’s terribly lonely, isn’t it? And so hard to explain to other people.
I remember when I was allowed to go to school (kindergarten). I was so excited to finally have friends and thought everyone was automatically my friend. That’s how it worked on TV, all the kids were friends with each other on the tv shows. Turns out that’s not how it works, and everyone had friends already from preschool. I was a permanent outsider from that point on, bullied. Struggled to make friends. When I finally did, we moved.
Nobody cared if I was lonely, only if my grades were good (and they were perfect), and the floors were mopped and the knickknacks were dusted weekly. Anything less was an hour long screaming session.
Nobody understands why I don’t want children. How do you raise children without a family?
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I am 70 the words uttered by my father when I was 5 still ring in my ears. He said “I wish you had never been born”.
I am 32. I love my dad, he did his best. He was a good dad.
But I will probably never be able to forgive him for the times he shouted and yelled at me when I wasn’t a good kid. He went into fits of rage over mundane things like homework and failing school. I remember everything he said in those fits of rage. Every instance of it. And I definitely remember feeling terrified.
And will remember it until the day I die.
Even at 70 years old.
This makes me sad tbh. I’m 21, and get flashbacks of my dad yelling at me, especially when someone yells at me irl. I was scared that I’d spend my life trying to get rid of them… now I wonder if that’s even possible
Man this makes me glad that i have good parents
My dad and I have had our ups and downs but I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that the least productive we’ve been with each other is when he got too frustrated and yelled at me about whatever.
I’d instantly go from frustrated but still trying to calmly explain my side of things to “I DON’T KNOW WHO THE FUCK YOU THINK YOU ARE SON BUT HOW ABOUT YOU SHUTCHO MOUTH AND KEEP IT CLOSED UNTIL THE MAN WHO RAISED ME IS BACK AGAIN‽”
No wonder I’m so fucked up.
My dad loves to yell. Not at me, anymore, but he got it from his mother - they used to work out their problems in the form of screaming matches. I remember early in my teenage years he would bring up, almost out of nowhere sometimes, that he never hit us. He was proud of that. But man oh man, he sure loved to yell at us.
I only remember my grandfather yelling at me, once. It’s not even fair to say “yelling AT me”, because he was yelling FOR me - I was a dumb kid and I’d left the front door open to go outside and play. Once I got in front of him, he explained to me - calmly, quietly, but firmly - why I couldn’t do that. I never did it again. I don’t remember him yelling before or since that moment.
I miss my grandfather - he’s the source of some of my fondest childhood memories and I can only hope I do him proud. Meanwhile, when my dad dies, I’ll be glad to be rid of him. So, you do the math.
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My first girlfriend in highschool had severe anxiety and was so incredibly quiet and shy. It was so tough cuz she was a genuinely sweet and caring person once she opened up to you. I was extremely surprised to learn her family was nothing like that when I met them. Until I met her dad, and he kept calling her an idiot, and stupid, and useless. Then I understood why she never wanted to say anything. Every time she opened her mouth she was criticized by her dad. This attitude towards your own kids is insanely damaging.
It’s very difficult to notice that it’s happening to you sometimes.
It wasn’t until my mid twenties that I noticed every single thing I say my mother seems to instantly try to take the opposite side and tell me I’m wrong, purely because it’s in her nature.
That level of negativity combined with a hair trigger for screaming, and she wonders why I don’t talk to her about absolutely anything 🤷♂️
frog in a boiling pot.
Yeah, I think an important thing parents need to do (apart from tearing down their kids for no reason) is differentiate DOING something dumb versus BEING dumb.
A comment my dad made long ago when I was young kinda stuck with me “For a kid who’s really smart you sure do some really dumb shit sometimes”
I’ve tried to phrase things like that to my kids, not “you dumbass why did you do that?” but more along “you’re smart enough to know you shouldn’t do that, so why did you?”
Or you could use positive reinforcement instead of belittling your kids. You can explain, why stuff they did was wrong without calling them dumb. They are kids after all, they don’t know stuff, have a lot to learn and it is hard for them to completely grasp the consequences of their actions.
I don’t have a better solution, but “you’re smart enough to know you shouldn’t do that, so why did you?” feels a lot like the “you’re smart but you don’t apply yourself” I got a lot as a kid that always made me feel inadequate.
I fucked up sometimes, I didn’t do it on purpose and asking me why I did it as if I consciously made a decision to be wrong on purpose and wanting an explanation is basically asking me to either lie or say “i don’t know” which was never the “right answer.”
More about analysing the thinking that led to the situation. In most cases it’s things that they know or were told not to do but guy caught up in the moment
Honestly, I think that type of abuse is the worst because it cuts way deeper and leaves a permanent mark. I was yelled at (a lot), physically abused, and sexually abused, but I was always encouraged and supported. (Weird, I know. No, I’m not getting into it.). Because of the verbal support I received from my mother I was confident enough to stand up to my sexual and physical abusers even though she had not been able to as a child. I was also strong enough to break away from them and take on life solo after completely cutting them all off from my life (my mother had already passed away).
If you believe in yourself, you can fight. If you don’t, you might just sit there and take it. Psychological abuse is the cruelest and most damaging.
Like I’ve definitely raised my voice with my kids but couldn’t imagine a world where I ever would call them stupid. That is just trash parenting and amazing that anyone would do that to their offspring.
This is horrible to do, but I feel like this really downplays physical/sexual abuse.
How so? If the result is similar they are just different roots to the same outcome.
The main difference is that the resilience, or the ability of a child to cope with the abuse, may vary greatly between physical abuse, sexual abuse and psychological abuse (like what the article is talking about). So a single sexual abuse is much more likley to cause Trauma, then beeing yelled at once. But beeing yelled at for years? Beeing told that you are wortheles repeatedly? That is likley to cause a lot of harm, especially because it plants a sense of “not beeing good enoth” in you that can take a lot of work to overcome once grown up.
There is no need to rank diffent kinds of abuse against each other. We need to see them as equaly harmful for children and not trivialice them.
Maybe shouting at children all the time until they leave home is about the same as them getting sexually abused once.
But they aren’t equivalent in the slightest when compared in the same quantities.
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Every woman I’ve dated was sexually assaulted at some point in their lives. Most of them in childhood.
Which puts my anecdotal accounting at close to 80%. With myself and the girlfriend raped as an adult the two outliers.
what the fuck
And just about every single one was a family member. My ex-wife it was the neighbor kid. But outside of that all immediate family or in one instance, a cousin.
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People can interpret it how they want and I was aware people would read into it. People read into everything though.
My interpretation is that growing up in an abusive environment I resonated with other damaged people and that me identifying with protecting my mom from my abusive dad rather than trying to be like my dad, helped other damaged people feel safe around me (generally, when I wasn’t having a meltdown from my own trauma anyway).
And since my first girlfriend had nightmares from her abuse I learned young to be supportive of people with sexual trauma.
