- cross-posted to:
- health@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- health@lemmy.world
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.
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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.
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.
My anxiety also came from living with an abusive father. It sucks always second guessing yourself and never feeling safe and secure because your baseline is abuse.
EMDR helped me. I hope your ex found or finds some healing.
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.
And this is belittling then, how?
He didn’t call them dumb he called their actions dumb. Wow u missed the entire point of his post.
Just read the other comment strain, where people argue, that exactly this parenting fucked them up. Positive reinforcement is the go to parenting style.
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
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.
Ya, I think the study is mostly aimed at the negativity and denigration of the child. While I almost never raise my voice and would absolutely never call my children “stupid”, there are times where a raised voice helps break though to the child. It’s also good when you leave such a raised voice for imminent situations. For example, kid starts reaching for something dangerous, a shout will stop them cold, especially when they aren’t used to dad shouting.
Oooh yeah. My parents gently raised me and a shout from one of them was immediately understood not as them being angry but them being scared. By contrast we had some friends who were just incessantly yelled at in anger all the time. The difference was stark in how willing to accept advice, correction and trust in the experience of adults was. When you are essentially just told to obey and then yelled at you don’t really grasp the underlying principles that advantage you later because at any point that anger could just be you hitting a parent’s pet peeve. It’s also really hard to respect someone who doesn’t respect you back.
We grew up pretty damn straightlaced. By contrast our yelled at peers ended up by and large going completely off the rails once nobody was in a position to force them to obey and about half of them went really far astray.
I think it’s more yelling as habitual, not yelling when it’s sometimes necessary. No one is saying not to yell at your child to stop them from putting their hand on a stove. It’s yelling at them when they leave their legos out that is the problem.
I think it also depends highly on the circumstances, if your child did something very very bad (hit bother with a hammer say) then youd actually be derelict in your duties as a parent not to yell at them (and ground them, etc) in that situation. Going too soft on them when they really go off the rails can be just as bad or worse than being too hard on them.
Yep. If you are calm and reasonable most of the time, then yelling actually remains an effective tool rather than desensitizing the child to it and/or causing them the damage this post is about.
In my house, I’m pretty chill but we have no problem being loud when playing or joking. We have a bunch of pets too, so it can be chaotic. But when my serious big voice comes out, everything freezes and gets figured out pretty quickly. Usually. Lol.
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.
and you won’t understand how your action created the circumstance you’re in and you’ll complain to everyone about it.
I see you’ve spoken to my in-laws.
Hi mom!
Well that’s one way to get them to move out on their own I guess
Not just yelling at kids, just being in a house where people are verbally abusive can fuck a person up, if my parents were not yelling at each other they were yelling at one of us kids. to the day 30 some odd years later just being around someone who is pissed off triggers my anxiety.
i really feel that about being around someone who is pissed off. i also get little adrenaline rushes whenever anyone shuts a door forcefully
I also get adrenaline rushes and instinctively angry when loud noises that can be avoided, happen.
I have also developed (without going for it) some very good stealth skills and I am not an especially tiny person.
I also grew up with a fairly short temper, though I wonder if it’s genetics or the upbringing. Learned over time I can control it, but the berserker rage is still there.
Just last night i went out to help my dad change a flat and it brought up so much shit from him yelling at me over everything when I was a kid. That was 30 years ago and he wasn’t even yelling at me this time just pissed off at the situation.
This crap definitely sticks with you.
Any yelling beyond “don’t do that thing that is imminently dangerous” can often just be parents taking out their stress on their kid. That’s kind of how it felt whenever my dad yelled at me. It was never something that seemed sensible to yell about.
ragers
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
You might be able to do it if you’ll get closure by talking to your dad about it.
My dad is the type that is never wrong, never does anything bad, and therefore never apologizes. I brought this up a few times and he always say I exagerrate or those instances never happened. He will never own up to it.
Unfortunately, both my parents are like that too. I went no contact for that reason, actually.
It is possible to get closure anyway, eg. by not doing the same mistake yourself or by surrouding yourself with healthy relationships and realizing your parent is just a human being full of faults and you’re your own person. I have examples around me of people who were able to get over it finally and also of people who carried it with them their whole life (and I don’t blame them). The sad thing is how many people have such burden in the first place.
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I loved my dad, but he would yell really angrily when he got mad at me and it would terrify me to the point where I would beg him not to hit me (he never hit me). I turned out mostly okay, but I can see how that could really screw someone up.
Same, but I actually got hit sometimes.
I feel you man. I am in the same boat as you.
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.
yea if my dad only yelled and never hit me
well i wouldnt like hitting people idk
but seriously Any communication is better than cell phone babies
i wish dad yelled insults at me
he never calls now, i should call him
be a better man
sorry tired
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This is psychology/sociology, not MINT. If you start to question whether childhood experience is a valid causal vector to influence adult behaviour you should become a philosopher while the rest of the world happily assumes causation.
Also if you had actually glanced at the study you’d have seen that it’s a systematic review. Skimming over it what it’s saying is “there’s a ton of unorganised data out there that nonetheless shows a clear and distinct pattern we should study the topic for its own sake”.
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.
frankly if my dad was in my life the whole time growing up saying those horrible things
i wouldnt of thought i was capable of being a rocket engineer and fuck myself
It doesn’t, really. I experienced psychological and sexual abuse as a child (but not physical). Both were equally bad. I had a good friend who got physical and emotional abuse, but not sexual. She said she preferred being hit by her father over the psychological shit she got from her mother, because it didn’t last as long or hurt as much.
All three are equally bad in the long term.
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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Yeah… being a parent and still just being a human makes you consider the circumstances.
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I got shouted at and called stupid all the time, but i feel being belted with sticks for minor things was probably what left more of a mark (mentally) to be honest
yea but the goal is to publish papers not due science
No wonder I’m so fucked up.
I want a big colorful name! How you do dat!?!
Unicode and emojis in the “display name” field.
Nothing personal against you, it’s certainly my failing, but when I see a username like yours, my mind just goes “stuff” and thinks of you that way.
I only learned that I was raised by a major league narcissist with anger management problems after I met my wife. She has training in clinical counseling and helped me realize that soooo much of my personality and habits can be traced back to my upbringing. Turns out my grandfather treated him the same way.
Generational trauma is a cruel monster that many of us never learn about. That’s a damn shame too.
just remember who you are
