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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.
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.
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.