Posted on 10/16/2023 3:25:32 PM PDT by Albion Wilde
KEY POINTS
• Childhood verbal abuse (CVA) is currently categorized under the broad umbrella of “emotional abuse.”
• Along with four other child maltreatment subtypes, CVA should be a stand-alone child maltreatment subtype.
• Recognizing and defining specific types of CVA is a starting point for preventing it.
• A recent systematic review and meta-analysis identifies at least 22 unique types of childhood verbal abuse.
In my opinion, the list of unique types of verbal abuse omitted one important one: lying, or malicious untruthfulness to children. I'm thinking here of the spiteful ex-wives who destroy the father's reputation in the kids' eyes, and not just stuff like saying there's an Easter bunny.
(Excerpt) Read more at psychologytoday.com ...
The ability to give and take verbal attack is a skill and a strength, not some sort of “trauma” as you imagine. I actually learned it in intellectual debate and on debate teams as well as polemical articles. Ayn Rand was one of the best, for example.
This inability to talk back hard and to take verbal attack is a major reason conservatives and the right lose the debate against the left. We have the facts but they have the ability to attack and defend. You aren’t helping.
That article is from a far-left woke rag, by the way. Get better reading material.
Hahaha, she would say it with such a dismissive tone of her voice, too...:)
Probably much in the way my Mom or Grandma would say, “Oooh Fah!” whenever they’d had enough of our nonsense.
The trick to disciplining a child is self-discipline and the self-respect to correct them with love, which does not mean gooey sentimentality, but matter-of-fact consequences for unacceptable behavior. Sounds like you mastered it!
Had to LOL about the “go cut down a switch” line that was handed down in our family from Victorian times as well. I never used that on mine, because we lived in a concrete city! But for some offenses I did make mine write a one-page essay based on the Ten Commamdments why this behavior was wrong. Only had to levy that fine a few times!
I also made him go back to a store and apologize and return a small item he swiped when he was about 5 years old. I remember having done the same thing when I was his age, only it was candy, and I ate it. Dad was not pleased.
For lesser offenses, I pointed out the reasons why this behavior was not right, the fact that everybody has to answer to higher authoriites and be disciplined (not just kids), and “now let’s talk about consequences” for this misdeed. He is now gainfully employed, paying his own way since graduation, and married; so I hope rational discourse gets passed on when they have kids.
You were a hero for them, whether they know it or not. Orphaned kids in today’s environment often have fetal alcohol syndrome or drug withdrawal from the mother’s choices during pregnancy, or situational prenatal stress such as anger or fear that may result in ADD or ODD (oppositional defiant disorder) that is very hard to deal with. Sounds like you rose to the occasion in spite of unfortunate luck of the draw. God bless you and those kids.
Oh that brings back memories. Dad would wield the leather belt and apologize later (in his own way). He was really kind of a big teddy bear. I seriously don’t remember getting walloped with the belt all that often. Like you, the threat was usually sufficient to curb my evil ways. Yes, I miss the guy.
Mom, on the other hand, could be vicious. Her weapon of choice was a switch, usually freshly snapped off a backyard bush, just after her catching me in the commission of a crime. I’d take Dad’s belt over Mom’s switch any day. She was probably more fair than Dad, and slower to rile. But, Katy bar the door when I pushed her past the breaking point. To the day of her death, I don’t think she ever said she was sorry for the pain she inflicted with those slender woody cat-of-one-tails. Still, I was very proud of her because she was a strong, strong woman that put up with my errant Dad. Eventually, I was her primary care giver, and we actually grew closer as I managed the last several years of her life. I miss her too.
Thank you for you previous comment...
Ha ha ha ha! We had the same experience at my Irish rage-aholic uncle's funeral!!! Something would trigger him at so many of our big family dinners and he would blow up, with the red face and bulging veins. Kids scared; almost peeing ourselves.
At his funeral, the priest expressed great appreciation for him. Concluding, he said, "He helped us so much around the church. What needed to be painted, or repaired, he would always donate his time and skills. But there was one thing about Mickey..."
[Family gasps, side-eyes one another, tenses up, shoulders up around our ears.]
The priest continued, "He loved a good cigar!"
[audible exhales, eye rolls and suppressed titters from the family]
God bless our dear uncle where he is. WW2 veteran. We didn't know about PTSD then, but now we do. For the past 40 years, I've decorated his grave most Memorial Days.
LOL, I think there is a pattern I see in the posts! (I laughed at the “Cat-o-One-Tail” comment!!!)
Well, those folks with a mean drunk as a father full well have a different experience, that is for sure, but a mean drunk as a mother might be just as bad.
Or worse.
Si, "va'a Napoli", literally "go to Napoli." Wonder what this idiom really meant -- "you think you'e something special" or "you're acting like hood rats" — who knows? "Chi sa?"
Good for you! Mothers need to recognize that they don't own their kids; and the kids share their dad's DNA and many of his traits. It's not right to talk trash about him to his kids, even if you have to calmly explain that there are different values that need sorting out. Just explain, don't defame.
Mom wasn’t the drinker...Dad was. But Mom could be very cold...which maybe was her being “strong”.
It was probably all of us with Irish mothers.... :-)
Heh, my experience with Naples was that it was a gritty, nasty, smelly city. When our liberty launches came in to drop us off at Fleet Landing, it was certainly the most disgusting Fleet Landing I had ever seen, a literal carpet of floating trash, dead animals, oil, and stink that the launch would nose through.
Absolutely disgusting.
The city itself was marginally better. This was back in the Seventies, and I read something recently that said the city had been “gentrified” and was a nice destination.
Back then, and I assume, for some decades (or centuries before) it was very likely a place that when someone said “Go to Naples” it was the equivalent, understood by all Italians, to mean “Go to Hell”!
I’m so sorry you had a bad experience there. I’ve been there multiple times, and while it did suffer terrible poverty in some periods over the centuries, and the aftereffects of WW2 lasted through the late 60s, it was nice again in the 80s and onward. Some of the buildings from the 17th, 18th & 19th centuries are magnificent. At one time, Napoli was called “the Paris of the south.” It’s also a short trip over to the ruins of Pompeii, and the mountain itself. Looking down the steaming crater — so incredible.
That said, there has always been a mafia and street crime problem. Even the locals will advise women travelers to watch their handbags and look out for pickpockets. The Naples Archaological Museum is unlike any other in the world. The opera house, the Galeria shopping mall, the school of music, the beautifully constructed and embellished old churches, the Spaccanapoli street — so worth the visit. Don’t get me started on the food...
It helped that I studied the language after my first trip over there and by the second trip, I could blend in and be mistaken for northern Italian or at least European. Many of the American tourist women were an embarrassment, braless in tank tops and crotch-wrinkled shorts, since the southern Italian women dressed conservatively, usually in skirts. Or used to. Glad I traveled all over Europe (staying with friends, sleeping in rental cars, student hostels, cheap pensiones, etc) when I was younger. Wouldn’t want to go now.
“impossible to discipline as they chose to do the wrong thing 99% of the time regardless of any consequences”
bkmk
“job jar” bttt
I have probably been to Naples at least a half dozen to a dozen times (this was in the Seventies, and we pulled into Naples at least three or four times each deployment because there wasn’t money enough to steam more than 10 days to two weeks at a time)
LOL, got pulled out from under a bed by the management and kicked out of the “Jolly” hotel, watched a riot on Fleet Landing in the rain, got chased by a Transvestite with a knife while on Shore Patrol (up near Villa Roma I think, which was the “off limits” place, and drank too much nasty-ass Peroni, which was said to be made from the harbor water!
They also didn’t allow any liberty there on New Year’s Eve, because it was said there was some kind of custom of throwing all manner of things out of windows on New Year’s Eve, so I remember watching the fireworks from the flight deck that night...looked like Beirut!
But...I did enjoy a visit to the extinct volcano calderon that had been turned into a military recreation park, and that was lovely! Never did go to Capri, though...I hear that was beautiful.
And I know what you mean about being American over there, although my haircut was the worst offense, and identified me as an American even if I had been butt-naked!
So you did get to some of the good parts! Bravo!
Yes, a Neapolitan custom is to throw unwanted items out the window on New Year’s Eve, to start with an uncluttered house for the new year. Presumably the poor and trashpickers and flea marketeers are out with pushcarts that night. Old, old custom from before the days of things like Salvation Army donation stores, which I don’t know if they even have over there.
I did get to Capri once, and it is very lovely. I hiked up the high cliff to the Villa Jovis, built during the reign of Tiberius. What a view across the misted Mediterranean! And most certainly the Blue Grotto is astounding. I was skeptical about it, thinking it would be just an overhyped tourist trap, but it turned out to be truly a wonder of nature—a luminous blue color beyond description.
I also had the very satisfying experience of being able to help some French tourists who were trying to make their way around in Capri’s town center. Many Italians dislike the French intensely and had cold-shouldered them, just as years earlier my college travel mates and I had been treated most arrogantly by shopkeepers and waiters in Paris—a bad memory of how the French despised Americans who spoke their language imperfectly—my eight semesters of French from American schools were contemptible to them. So it gave me great pleasure, twenty years later, to converse with those lost French lambs, a young married couple, translating their Italian-language reservations and maps into their language. They were not too proud to understand my French — LOL!
I’d never heard it before but it makes me think of something and that makes me laugh. One of the family members left behind in Naples decided he was going to go into government and he was going to “clean it all up”. He was referred to by the family here as “the idiot”.
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