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.

    • treefrog@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      Every woman I’ve dated was sexually assaulted at some point in their lives. Most of them in childhood.

      Which puts my anecdotal accounting at close to 80%. With myself and the girlfriend raped as an adult the two outliers.

      • fosforus@sopuli.xyz
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        11 months ago

        Every woman I’ve dated was sexually assaulted at some point in their lives.

        There’s an interpretation here that doesn’t sound very good for you.

        • treefrog@lemm.ee
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          11 months ago

          People can interpret it how they want and I was aware people would read into it. People read into everything though.

          My interpretation is that growing up in an abusive environment I resonated with other damaged people and that me identifying with protecting my mom from my abusive dad rather than trying to be like my dad, helped other damaged people feel safe around me (generally, when I wasn’t having a meltdown from my own trauma anyway).

          And since my first girlfriend had nightmares from her abuse I learned young to be supportive of people with sexual trauma.

        • treefrog@lemm.ee
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          11 months ago

          And just about every single one was a family member. My ex-wife it was the neighbor kid. But outside of that all immediate family or in one instance, a cousin.