Getting ‘real’: How effective is child-shaming?
Few recommend going public on repeated basis
The two young boys walk along what looks like a country road. They have their backpacks, woolly toques and mitts. And a crude cardboard sign reading: “BEING BAD AND RUDE TO OUR BUSDRIVER! MOMS MAKIN US WALK.”
The photo, posted to Facebook last week by an unidentified Windsor, Ont.-area mother, was shared more than 38,000 times before it was taken down, according to the CBC. The woman said she was teaching her boys a lesson for misbehaving by making them walk seven kilometres to school, “to show them what every day will be like for them when they get kicked off the bus!”
“S**t just got real for them,” she wrote. “2 hours later they made it!”
According to the CBC, the post drew more than 28,000 “likes,” with many apparent enthusiastic endorsements of the woman’s parenting skills.
“Awesom job mom!! This is how you raise children,” wrote one. “You re fricken rockin the mom hat girl good job,” commented another.
The story about the “naughty” Canadian children being made to walk “FOUR MILES” to school made international headlines — for some, a welcome sign of tough parenting in an era of hovering helicopter parents and “child-driven parenting.”
But it’s also raising concerns about the messages children internalize when publicly shamed. “It’s certainly not a type of discipline that we would recommend,” noted Kim Brisebois, director of intake and after hours at the Windsor-Essex Children’s Aid Society.
In fact, it’s been a busy few days for parental shaming.
Also last week, a Virginia father shared a video of his “bully” son being forced to run to school in the rain. Bryan Thornhill’s Facebook Live video, recorded while driving behind his jogging son, picked up more than 1.6 million views.
“He got actually kicked off the bus for three days because he was being a little bully, which I do not tolerate, cannot stand and
THEY’RE GOING TO RETALIATE ... YOU’RE NOT GETTING THE LONG-TERM WIN YOU’RE HOPING FOR IN RAISING A MODEL CITIZEN.
therefore he has to now run to school,” Thornhill says in the video.
“If you don’t do what you’re supposed to do, you’ll get punished. If you say we need gun control, people? Here you go, this is what we need. Parenting. Very simple thing.”
Kid shaming isn’t new. In recent years there have been a string of stories of parents using online “shaming tactics,” like forcing children to hold signs with a public confession. The trend has been likened to everything from a discipline method as old as The Scarlet Letter to, at its worst, abuse.
In the U.S., one Illinois lawmaker has introduced legislation that would make “parental cyber-bullying” an offence if a parent or legal guardian of a child under 18 posts “any verbal or visual message” on social media that he or she reasonably believes would “coerce, intimidate, harass or cause substantial emotional distress to the minor.”
The Ontario mother told the CBC she received some threats after posting the picture and said she contacted the local Children’s Aid Society to explain just what motivated her.
Brisebois couldn’t comment on the case. However, she said some parents turn to social media as a last resort, a kind of cyber support system, and that how parents may be handling parenting in the digital age may differ from the past.
“Sometimes parents are just at a wit’s end and don’t know what to do and will revert to” social media, she said.
But studies also show that when parents routinely use shaming as punishment, children can grow up to be more depressed, less confident, more anxious and less supported, she said.
“I think parents sometimes feel more limited in the discipline they can use in today’s society, when physical discipline is certainly not condoned,” Brisebois said.
Some parents may look for a creative way to send a strong message. “I can understand how a parent, when they’re frustrated with behaviours, might resort to something like this,” Brisebois said.
“And then we have a lot of people on social media saying, ‘good for you. You’re a tough parent. This is what we need.’ But that comes from a place of lack of education around the impact on children when we use these types of techniques.”
Shaming can also damage parent-child relationships and lead to resentment. “If you’re shaming them, they’re going to hate you,” family therapist Alyson Schafer told the Post in 2015.
“They’re going to retaliate. They’re going to lie and sneak around. You’re not getting the long-term win you’re hoping for in raising a model citizen.”
Public shaming also doesn’t appear on the Canadian Paediatric Society’s tips for positive discipline.