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?
