When parents yell at their children, they can trigger processes in the brain that can have serious consequences for the personality. Studies show how serious the effects are.
Belmont – Experiences in early childhood often shape people throughout their lives. Anyone who experiences emotional violence at a young age instead of unconditional love will find it difficult to be at peace with themselves and the world as an adult. What many parents are not aware of: Emotional violence begins when children are yelled at or scolded. As neuroscientists have found, our brains do not know the difference between physical and verbal violence.
In her book Words Like Arrows – About Emotional Violence Against Our Children and How We Prevent It, educationalist Anke Elisabeth Ballman writes about the processes that take place in children’s brains when they are shouted at. “Words can shake a child, hurt them deeply, change their development, have a lasting effect or even bring it to a standstill. If a child is yelled at, shamed or blackmailed, that is violence. Ballman substantiates your statements with studies by neuroscientists at Harvard Medical School.
Yelling at children can cause severe trauma – studies by Harvard Medical School make you sit up and take notice
With the help of so-called fMRI scans, the researchers from Harvard have been looking for the location of language in the human brain for around twenty years. Although it has not yet been possible to definitively determine this, the scientists were able to observe that the responsible areas in the scanner light up as soon as fear, excitement, stress or anticipation were involved. The result: Corresponding physical reactions in those affected. Based on their experiments, the researchers were able to prove that violence through language was experienced as threatening as physical attacks. In other words, anyone who yells at, blackmails or shames a child can trigger serious trauma.
Harvard Medical School study
In their study, the scientists led by Martin Teicher from Harvard Medical School in Belmont (Massachusetts) examined 193 young adults between the ages of 18 and 25. Using surveys, they determined which of the test subjects had experienced physical or psychological violence in childhood and then carried out brain scans.
As the research showed, there is a crucial difference between people who experienced psychological violence as children and those who were not exposed to emotional violence. Those exposed to verbal abuse and stress as children had smaller hippocampuses than those who had not experienced violence. The reason for the too small hippocampus is probably the hormonal stress processing, which is particularly susceptible to disturbances in children under five years of age.
Small hippocampus: Those affected are more prone to mental illness
But what does it mean when people have a hippocampus that is too small? In fact, this part of the brain plays a huge role in the evaluation and regulation of emotions, as well as the ability to manage emotions. In concrete terms, this means that it decides how people cope with stress or whether they are susceptible to mental illness. In the study, those who experienced insults, humiliation, and threats in childhood were more likely to be depressed, suffer from anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, or borderline personality disorder
Parents can probably sometimes not prevent themselves from getting loud or yelling at a child because they are stressed themselves. If this is the case, however, they can make up for the mistake by taking one crucial step: Once they sincerely apologize to the child, trust and the certainty that the loving connection is reconnected can be significantly strengthened.
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