Researchers at Florida State University have concluded that adults who were verbally abused as children have a greater likelihood of suffering from depression and anxiety. Specifically, the study says, strong self-criticism is the byproduct of insults and other criticisms heard while people are growing up.

There are treatments for adults who have suffered from the kind of verbal abuse that causes this often debilitating self-doubt, but Professor Natalie Sachs-Ericsson, the lead researcher on the report, focuses on what parents of today’s children can do. “Parents may have learned this style of parenting from their own parents,” she explains, ”or they simply may be unaware of positive ways to motivate or discipline their children.”

I heartily recommend you read the synopsis of the study, linked below. It certainly made me think of my own fallibility because I get into ruts in which I yell more than I should. In my own powerlessness as a parent, and often in response to the screaming or other sundry means of button pushing that one of my kids performs, I boil over. I find that this is a result of a couple of things: one is over-working myself, two is the pressures of co-parenting in a world in which time and money never seem to be enough, and another is anger at myself for not being more in control. More than it should, my self-criticism comes out by being critical of my kids. I get mad at myself because I worry that this counteracts all the time I spend building up my children’s self-esteem, making them laugh, and know how much I love and respect them. But worry means nothing without action, and I am leanring all kinds of ways to step back, blow my steam off elsewhere, and let my kids just be kids.

For more on my own experience with emotional spillage, see “Taming the Hulk Within” at http://www.familymanonline.com/columns.php?id=3.

I welcome your comments and stories. None of us is that perfect parent we might want to be, but perhaps we can help each other be the best that we can be.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=43894