For Shame

                When I was in fifth grade, I received a poor grade on a math test.  We’re talking really poor, like a fifty or something along those lines, no higher than that for sure; an utter failure.  My parents would not have been happy with a failing grade on a test.  Would they have grounded me?  Maybe, maybe not, but they would have been ashamed of their dunce of a son that could not manage more than a measly fifty on a test.  So I hid it.  I was so full of shame that I hid that test in the top of my locker and I “buckled down” and wound up cruising through the rest of school with high honors.  Was that a scholastic turning point for me?  I don’t know if I would go that far, but I’m sure that if my parents praised everything that I did, good or bad, that I may have let that grade slide, not seen it as a sign that maybe I should pay attention a bit more and concentrate on my schoolwork, and instead continued down that slippery slope until I was asking “would you like fries with that?”

                Many of the decisions I made in my youth, and still make today for the most part, are made with shame in mind in the form of: “Will what I do bring shame to me and/or my family”?  By having that run through your head, it tends to take a bit of the impulsivity out of one’s actions.   I believe that that sense of shame is not a bad thing, instead coming from a general understanding of right and wrong and social etiquette.  Am I going to pick my nose in public?  No, because it is not socially acceptable and carries a bit of shame with it.  Am I going to sit on my ass and collect welfare for the rest of my life?  No.  Same reason. 

                There are many reasons that people can feel the opposite, having little or no shame.  They could have been brought up in a household where their parents had no shame, and therefore instilled none in their children, or they could have been brought up in a household with these new-age yuppie parents that think their children shit gold and can do no wrong.  All this does is lead to spoiled, entitled brats with little to no real skills or work ethic, or any real desire to better themselves because they’ve never had to.  Everything they have done has been good enough, and when you are perfectly willing to settle for “good enough” and that has even been celebrated by the adults in your life, it’s hard to transition to wanting to be better.  Is it a coincidence that you can usually spot the people that are long-term welfare abusers?  The people that have no pride or respect for their home or their appearance, the people that think that cat piss is just the new fragrance from Calvin Klein or the people that talk a lot on social media, trying to drum up an inordinate amount of support for everything they do in order to validate themselves.  This is because if they have lost the requisite amount of shame to not take long-term handouts from anyone, then they have probably lost the requisite amount of shame to realize that when your clothes are holier than the pope it’s time to retire them.  You can probably see a lot of these people around the first of the month at any Wal-Mart across the country. 

                This is in no way condemning everyone that is on public assistance as there are many different reasons that people are in that situation.  It is, however, condemning those that use public assistance (or anything they’re not working for such as child support or alimony) as their only source of income.

                Now, there’s a difference between shame and bullying.  First of all, no one should shame a child but an adult (preferably a parent), and an adult needs to realize that you’re not shaming someone to tear them down completely and leave them a puddle of tears.  Shaming a child, or telling that child that you are ashamed of them because of an action deemed reprehensible based on our social mores, should be done as a matter of fact.  “That test score is unacceptable, you are smarter than that.  Now you’ll have to buckle down and study harder” is much different than “You big dummy.  Do you want me to get Velcro shoes for you too, or can you handle the laces?”  Obviously tact is important in everything, but especially here where you are not trying to make an enemy of your child, but you are trying to make it so they realize that bringing home a test with a shitty grade (as in the example above) or just making poor decisions in general will cause you to feel ashamed. 

                This obviously will only work if you praise the crap out of them when they do something exceptional.  They’re a solid 90 student but pull out a 100 on an exam?  Go nuts with your praise and congratulations, not money, that’s silly, but praise will do it.  If you give them money just for getting good grades, then they will most likely grow up thinking that if they get good grades in college they are owed high paying jobs when they graduate, which is silly as no one owes anyone anything (the sooner your kids realize this, the better). 

                The endgame here is to get where I was in fifth grade, to have that shame take over to the point where your child wants to better themselves, not to the point where they want to kill themselves though, that’s silly.  The idea is to create a sort of self-policing within the child, so that they grow up and think twice about their actions, and what it could mean in the long run to them in terms of shame.  Let’s not forget about adults either, they could do with a healthy dose of shame themselves, isn’t that right Miley?