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.

    • n2burns@lemmy.ca
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      2 years ago

      You miss-read (or didn’t read) the article if that’s your take-away. It’s saying the long-term effects can be roughly the same. It’s not equivocating the actions themselves.

        • n2burns@lemmy.ca
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          2 years ago

          Then I disagree with that assessment. “can be as damaging” speaks to the effects of the act, not its inherent heinousness.

          • Nima@lemmy.world
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            2 years ago

            I’m saying it’s a sensationalized headline. it’s meant to draw you in with a wild statement to make you angry and then the article is something completely different.

    • 【J】【u】【s】【t】【Z】@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      Why?

      I will say, verbal abuse is harder to pinpoint.

      In some ways, it’s easier to have a source of trauma to point to and say “that’s the cause,” so you can address and treat it.

      I was verbally abused. My inner dialogue was one of critisism, guilt and shame, that I didn’t realize until well into adulthood. I thought that was how everyone talked to themselves.

      If I had been physically abused, I would have known about it. Much less insidious to the mind.

      E: Was also just thinking about triggers. If you were a victim of physical trauma, your triggers might be very obvious. With verbal trauma, for me anyway, they were much less obvious. To think back, I went years and years having fight or flight reactions for no obvious reason, often manifested as anxiety or poor impulse control, wasted so many days just feeling anxious instead of working on myself. One trigger for me is loud voices. Had no idea until well into adulthood things started making sense. Damn near had a panic attack one day when a chef started yelling at the line cooks while I was waiting for my order.

      • aceshigh@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        absolutely. verbal abuse doesn’t leave anything physical behind, which makes it much harder to pinpoint the cause and effect. so you might be feeling depressed and anxious but not understand why because dissociative amnesia become your normal response to verbal abuse.

    • Empricorn@feddit.nl
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      2 years ago

      While what you and I feel doesn’t matter much, we truly need a scientific study of this. Oh, wait! That’s what this was. Please defer to objective consensus…

      • crowlemo@sh.itjust.works
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        2 years ago

        Lol. Fuck off. Objective consensus? Are you part of team “trust the science” thinking every fucking study is well done or non biased?

        • Sodis@feddit.de
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          2 years ago

          How about you take the study at hand and point out, where it is not well done?

    • HubertManne@kbin.social
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      2 years ago

      this. things like this are starting to annoy me. lets me clear. sexual abuse is worse than physical abuse which is worse than verbal abuse. The first should never happen in the least. Grabbing your childs arm roughly and yelling at them when about to touch something hot is fine and expected. Yelling at them and telling them to behave when they hit their sibling is fine.

      • GBU_28@lemm.ee
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        2 years ago

        I think there’s a missed distinction here.

        “Yelling” at your child to get them to stop something, or not step into traffic, or not eat pills is one thing. That’s certainly not verbal abuse.

        Shaming and berating your child for getting a C, telling them they are worthless, they are the reason Dad left, they are ugly is very different. This is clearly verbal abuse.

        It’s conceivable that the sustained verbal abuse as I defined it could absolutely harm a child in a long term way, and cumulatively have an impact similar to physical abuse.

        • HubertManne@kbin.social
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          2 years ago

          using equivalency phrases on things that are very much not equivalent. Also scientific studies are great in the hard sciences but in the social sciences become very iffy. Doing some correlation on questionaires is not equivalent to measuring small changes in a large structure to measure gravitational effects.

      • aberrate_junior_beatnik (he/him)@midwest.social
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        2 years ago

        Grabbing your childs arm roughly and yelling at them when about to touch something hot is fine and expected.

        Is it really? Honestly I’d rather a child touch something hot and learn the lesson that it is unsafe than potentially learn the lesson the people charged with taking care of them are unsafe. I mean, I remember burning a finger on the stove when I was little. It sucked but I was and am fine. I was lightly verbally abused by my Dad exactly once (he apologized after), and it was much, much worse. I was verbally abused by teachers and peers, and it was much, much worse.

        [edit: I retract the sentence “Honestly I’d rather a child touch something hot and learn the lesson that it is unsafe than potentially learn the lesson the people charged with taking care of them are unsafe.” It was poorly thought through and poorly worded. To be clear, I do not condone intentionally allowing a child to touch a stove to teach them it is dangerous. I also do not think that the threat of a child touching a stove justifies physically and verbally abusing a child, as OP said.]

        • ShakeThatYam@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          Letting your child touch something hot (like a stove) to teach them a lesson is in itself physical abuse…

    • wokehobbit@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      This is a generation of soft pussies. Triggered little bitches who can’t live in the real world.