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.

  • fosforus
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    1 year ago

    This is correlation study, and we all know what that means, right? Correlations are significant results certainly, but not at all conclusive.

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      This is psychology/sociology, not MINT. If you start to question whether childhood experience is a valid causal vector to influence adult behaviour you should become a philosopher while the rest of the world happily assumes causation.

      Also if you had actually glanced at the study you’d have seen that it’s a systematic review. Skimming over it what it’s saying is “there’s a ton of unorganised data out there that nonetheless shows a clear and distinct pattern we should study the topic for its own sake”.