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.
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.
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.
“things like this” being… Scientific studies?
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.
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.]
Letting your child touch something hot (like a stove) to teach them a lesson is in itself physical abuse…