Shame Technique Used By Parents And The Children's Social Behavior

Shame as a core member of self-conscious emotion involves the self centrally. It has been one of the research hotspots of psychology in western since 1990's. As a method of socialization, shame technique is used by parents to make their children feel shame and follow rules. Its use often makes the children feel hurt and disappointed and it obviously has negative effect on children's development of self-esteem. There are more concerns and researches on this field in our country in recent years.Many researches have shown that shame has large cross-cultural difference. Because of the use of shame as a prominent technique of social control and child rearing, group-oriented cultures emphasize shame more. The importance of shame in Chinese culture is associated with the dominant social and moral thought of Confucianism. The purpose of our study is to investigate the shame technique using in parent child-rearing in China and find its relationship with the development of children.This study examined the use of shame technique of 241 parents whose children is from 5 to 7 year-old. The results show: (1) the frequency of shame techniques used by parents= is not as high as expected and it decreases when parents have higher education. (2) Parents are going to use more shame techniques when children grow older. (3) there is weak but significant correlations between technique using and children social skills .(4) children who exposed to more shame techniques persist longer in difficult task.(5) children who exposed to less shame techniques are more willingly take challenges.