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.
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.