Kids Need To Know Shame, Blame
It is sometimes good for parents to make children feel bad.
I know many experts would disagree. In “Eight Weeks to a Well-Behaved Child,” James Windell writes, “When parents criticize a child, the child’s self-esteem gradually erodes.” In “Your Child’s Self-Esteem,” Dorothy Corkille Briggs says “blame … is at the core of emotional disorder and low self-esteem.” And in the October issue of Child magazine, Thomas Gordon, Ph.D., says blaming children for their misdeeds causes them to feel “inadequate, unloved or unjustly accused.”
I wonder what those experts would make of the 11 children, ages 8 to 14, who recently tortured and killed a quarter horse in Silsbee, a small town in east Texas. The obscenity is not that these children of a friendly little town chased the animal around a pasture, beat it with branches or broke its leg. Not even that they rammed a sharp stick up its nostril.
No, the obscenity is that they laughed about it. Even pronounced it “cool” when sheriff’s deputies arrested them in front of their friends. “They thought it made them big guys on campus,” Hardin County Sheriff H.R. Holzapel told a reporter. “I said, ‘We’ll see how funny y’all think this is in the morning when you’re eating a jail house breakfast.’ And that’s when they looked at the deputies and said, ‘Are you going to lock us up?’ That sobered them up. It was sickening.”
It is time, I think, to say a few words for shame. “For” shame. As in, pro, affirming or supportive.
Certainly, shame could use a few kind words, what with all the bad press it’s had lately. In an era of non-judgmental self-esteem building, shame is as quaint as grandma’s quilting. More, shame is anathema.
In place of shame, we have accepted - uncritically - the notion that childhood should carry no-fault assurance because self-esteem must be instilled by any means necessary.
Forgive me, friends, but I am a heretic. I refuse to receive that wisdom.
Don’t misunderstand me. I agree that self-esteem is crucial in the development of a child. And I know a parent’s first responsibility is to protect her offspring from pain.
And yet … these worthy goals have been twisted and mutated to grotesque excess. We have raised some blameless, shameless children so insulated from the mores of community, so protected from the consequences of their actions, so “poisoned” with self-esteem, that they can’t see beyond themselves.
So, they don’t flinch as they visit nightmare bestiality on a horse - or, for that matter, on you. What do your feelings matter to them?
They haven’t the decency to feel ashamed.
I’m sure the blame for that will be widely apportioned. I expect MTV to get some. Network television and Hollywood movies will take their share. Probably, there will even be a little left for Batman and the X-Men.
Well, here’s a novel idea. Can we blame the kids as well? And while we’re at it, can we blame the parents and guardians who apparently never said the words, “You ought to be ‘ashamed’ of yourself!”
Does an embrace of shame make you cringe? I’m sorry. But, as much as love, as much as patience, as much as understanding or self-esteem, shame is crucial in the making of a functioning human being.
Shame teaches. I say this as a parent. And I say it as a former child who had occasion to wither under a parent’s disapproval.
Yes, it hurt. But the hurt wasn’t fatal. Indeed, the hurt made me search myself. I learned that I didn’t like that feeling, didn’t want that feeling, would do anything possible to “avoid” that feeling. Even behave.
That was the beginning of conscience.
And eventually, that conscience developed to the point that I no longer required my folks to tell me I should feel bad about doing wrong.
“That” was the beginning of decency.
It’s a beginning some children never make. And, the blandishments of experts aside, I don’t call that failure enlightenment. I call it a recruiting poster for an amoral army that already threatens to overrun us.
An unoffending beast lies dead in east Texas. The children who slaughtered it are not ashamed.
xxxx