PRACTITIONER: INSTITUTE OF PSYCHOLOGY SHENYANG DATE: APR 1 2014 LOCATION: SHENYANG CHINA When Verbal Abuse Becomes Real Weapon... Institute of psychology in Shenyang, a major city of China, recently reveals 6 most frequently used utterances in verbal abuse of children among local parents: “Garbage”, “You know nothing but eating”, “Pig head”, “Shame on you”, “Why don’t you die”, “No one else is lamer than you”. In order to make parents have the clear awareness that oral attack to children will cause potential and deep damage to their mental health and may eventually contribute to the possibility of juvenile crime, the institute carries out a task-related activity which was involved in the interaction between parents and kids. The 6 sentences are made into 6 sets of steel blocks, and parents have to work up with their children to build them up into another shapes. If they do it following the instruction, they will find at last that these characters will actually become 6 kinds of deadly weapons, including knife, gun, axe, etc. The designers of this creative “game” want to convey a message to parents that the words can be weapons which hurt children. Some of the parents admitted in the later interviews that sometimes they do use inappropriate language to “educate” their children, and this activity gave them a chance to realize that. A mom felt very concerned about having used the same words in front of her son and she said she would never do that again.
