Sunday, November 11, 2012

What if parents made a point of never humiliating their kids?

This post was inspired by this comic strip:








Her son is mortified by the idea of her speaking to his class, but she completely shrugs off his emotions.  Her husband might be enjoying the fact that their son is mortified, and she seems to be amused by this.

This is sort of a common cultural trope - kids are embarrassed by their parents, the parents see the kids' embarrassment as foolish and invalid, and the parents therefore take a certain delight in embarrassing their kids.  And, as a cultural trope, it's seen as all in good fun, at least by the parents.

But it seems to me that this is the kind of thing that could foster bullying attitudes.

A kid in a family like this will learn that feelings aren't worth respecting. If someone finds something humiliating, taking advantage of that fact to make them feel humiliated is normal, valid, and entertaining.  Surely no good can come of taking that attitude into the schoolyard with them!  The kid will also learn (as I did) that baseline human reality is that people want to embarrass you, and develop self-worth and defence mechanisms accordingly.

But suppose instead the parent said "I respect your feelings. If it would embarrass you, I won't do it."  And then the parent said to the teacher "It would embarrass Danny to have his mother come speak to the class, and I respect his feelings.  I'd be happy to come speak to your students in a year or two, once it would no longer bother him."

Then he would learn that respecting people's feelings is normal, and might carry that forward into the rest of the world.

4 comments:

Clarissa said...

What a brilliant post!

laura k said...

You are SO right. Some parents actually do this. It should be the norm.

impudent strumpet said...

Thinking back over various parent-child combinations around me, I can think of a number of examples where feelings of similar rationality were respected for small adorable children and for grown adult children, but shrugged off for teenagers. Even my phobias get taken far more seriously now than when I was a teen.

laura k said...

Yes. Teenagers' emotions are written off as some kind of insanity brought about by hormones. As if that makes them any less real or important.