Sometimes in therapy I talk to adults who tell me how it felt to be the ‘worst behaved’ in the class, and the time that the whole class lost their playtime because of them. How no one would play with them or even talk to them the next day. These aren’t inspirational memories. They don’t say ‘and from that day on, I was a reformed character’. They talk about how they felt shunned by their peers, and how they thought it must be all their fault. They talk about going home and getting shouted at or worse when their parents hear what happened. Here’s the strange thing about children which I’ve learnt as a therapist. Something can appear to work in the short term whilst causing harm in the long term. This is particularly the case when it comes to using shame and anxiety to control behaviour. For what works to create compliance can have long term unintended consequences for some. Like low self esteem and a lack of trust in other people. A sense that you are a loser or worthless. A feeling of hopelessness. A sense of deep shame which is held in the body. They carry these things forwards with them. Children are learning how to think about themselves, how to think about the world. And some children have a much harder time than others. They get punished a lot more than others. They can grow up surrounded in negativity about themselves. There’s a problem, however, because in the short term we don’t see any of it happening. In the short term, it can seem to work fine. We might not even see the distress involved, you can’t see it on children’s faces. ‘They don’t even care’, adults say. It’s only when looking back that people say, those things hurt me. No one wanted that to be the case, but it was.