Will I Ever Be Good Enough By Karyl Mcbride

The Power of Shaming

Shaming children is emotionally abusive. Children deserve and are entitled to reach out, attach and bond with their parents. Children expect that the parent will provide safety, protection, acceptance, understanding and empathy. When this does happen, children grow up knowing their worth and demanding respect from others and themselves. According to Karyl McBride, a licensed marriage and family therapist and author of Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers, when children are emotionally or psychologically abused, they grow up feeling unloved, unwanted, and fearful. Normal development is interrupted and it sends the wounded child into exile. This is when negative internal messages are

Gail Gross, Ph.D., Ed.D., M.Ed., is a nationally recognized family, child development, and human behavior expert, author, and educator. They are repeating a cycle of what she calls bullying, even abusive behavior, that only serves to perpetuate more bad behavior, as kids take out their anger on others at school or at home. Shaming is also often a last ditch effort for parents who have tried other ways to curb bad behavior. "When a parent can't think of anything else to do, they resort to shaming. They think they've done a dramatic enough discipline behavior that will stop their child's behavior. By exposing them, they think they will control them," she says. But she says shaming is a loss of control and a display of immaturity for parents. "It's not really discipline at all. It's reactive behavior. They have created so many problems in the long-run," Gross says. Admittedly, it can be easy to react emotionally when dealing with a child's ongoing behavior problem. "Parenting is stressful, and it's constant," Gross says, and some parents shame their kids online to lower their own anxiety and perhaps gain empathy.

From dramatically escalating consequences—and dishing the details to anyone who'll listen— to 'calling out' troubling behavior on Facebook and Instagram, publicly shaming kids can seem effective at first. It certainly gets their attention, right? But the problem is that it never works in the long run as a tool for shaping your kids' behavior. Telling embarrassing or revealing stories in an attempt to manipulate the child's attitude or behavior. Taking what should be a private conversation about behavior and consequences and making it public, by sharing it with friends, family, or the world at large (via social media). Parents intentionally making a child feel bad about himself or herself, as a person, instead of focusing on the childs actual behavior you're trying to change. Sadly, these techniques can seem to work in the beginning, but shaming your child will quickly backfire. According to Jennifer Wolf, whom posted an article in The Spruce.