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.
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.