Couldn't finish what I had to say because I had to do a short shift. Other than the above, this study was done with parents and children with reasonably "normal" relations. That is certainly not the case for a good number of us. Or at least it wasn't for me. The source article says:
"The researchers conducted the study in 10 public middle schools in eastern Pennsylvania over a two-year period, working with 967 adolescents and their parents. Students and their parents completed surveys over a period of two years on topics related to their mental health, child-rearing practices, the quality of the parent-child relationship, and general demographics.
Significantly, most of the students were from middle-class families. “There was nothing extreme or broken about these homes,” Wang stressed. “These were not ‘high-risk’ families. We can assume there are a lot of families like this—there’s an okay relationship between parents and kids, and the parents care about their kids and don’t want them to engage in problem behaviors.”
Again with the assumption thing, but also this study was done on middle school students who had an "okay relationship" and were not "high risk families."
I hope in further studies, that somebody would see fit to include that group. It certainly applied to me, and also to about a quarter of our lower middle class neighborhood that I grew up in. I knew that other kids were going through what I was going through. Some better, some worse. We recognized each other but didn't discuss it much. We did stick up for each other with other neighborhood kids.
Maybe my neighborhood was statistically skewed and maybe 25% is nowhere near a reasonable number. But that was another thing that caused me to not know how to take what I was reading. Being from the "high-risk family" where there was physical abuse and some neglect in addition to the verbal stuff... my initial reaction was that the group studied didn't have exposure to traumatizing real life events and maybe that's why the study results came out that way.
I don't know. It just seemed like a bunch of assumptions after studying a bunch of "normal" middle school kids except for the part in the post above: "...these results are bidirectional: the authors showed that harsh verbal discipline occurred more frequently in instances in which the child exhibited problem behaviors, and these same problem behaviors, in turn, were more likely to continue when adolescents received verbal discipline. “It’s a vicious circle..."
I actually think I did do a bit of the problem behaviors thing and can see the cycle making some things go from bad to worse though my abusive father and neglectful mother clearly did not have an okay relationship with me or each other. But we know already about the cycle of familial dysfunction where abuse is concerned. Just rambling now, so I'll shut up.
