A short excerpt from a YouTube interview (host Mihail Pautov and a guest) about the harms of shaming children. The guest explains that using shame can lead children to internalize a sense of being fundamentally wrong, truncate parts of their personality, and lose uniqueness; by contrast, a loving parent–child relationship with apologies and resiliency can reduce long-term harm.
Chapters
Mania. We have form of education by shaming people. Parents often say to their children, you should be ashamed. This is one of the most used terms to correct your child. Does this bring shame to us?
The relationship that parent and child have in the general way very much impacts what happens when they use that word. For instance, if I'm your parent and we have a really good loving relationship, certain things I do that are not the best way to do it won't have a negative impact because there's a. A lot of love and resiliency. And I apologize sometimes when I've hurt you. So I just want to make it easy for a parent to not think I've made a mistake. I'm a terrible parent. You know, if the child is taking in the idea that something's wrong with me, then that lives inside of them. And then they have a sense of themselves where their feelings come up, impulses come up to act, and they're not going to understand themselves. They're not going to understand. They want to be. That they're laziness means I'm dreamy and I'm creative, that my punch means I want to fight, that my loud voice means I have a lot to say. They're not going to learn that. So the person's going to start truncating themselves, cutting parts of themselves off, and those parts of them are going to be very vital to their uniqueness. That means I'm going to stop not becoming the unique person I am, then I'll become like everybody else.