Robin, you are the author of a book entitled Parenting for a Peaceful World and I have to say that when I received your book, I could not put it down for nearly two days, and the only reason I could put it down was I misplaced it for a couple of days and then I found it again, so I have not completed reading it, but I am about three-fourths of the way through and it is just phenomenal. It is fascinating.

Robin Grille: Yeah. Look, I am glad you are enjoying the book and the information in it, it was so fascinating to me also, which is what made me really have to get out and write this book, which took me about five years to write and there was years and years of research that went into it.


Carrie Lauth: Yes, I can tell and part of what was so fascinating about it was chronicling child-bearing practices through the centuries and that is a bit depressing to be honest. Was it very upsetting for you to learn some of the things that you did about child-bearing through the years?

Robin Grille: Well, initially it was shocking to me. It was deeply upsetting because I had never realized just how brutal a lot of parenting customs have been in just about every civilization around the globe for such a large period of history, but the reason that I put that in the book is that ultimately the news is extremely hopeful because there has been a steady evolution in child-rearing practices over the centuries and psychohistorians have defined that, discovered that very clearly.

Particularly in the last few decades, child-rearing approaches have been evolving so rapidly overall towards much more empathic and much more caring, nurturing, and natural ways to relate to children and already that has begun to make a big difference in the world now. I like looking at that sense of evolution because we continue evolving child-rearing customs in this way. Our prospects for the future are extremely, extremely positive.

Carrie Lauth: Yes, yes. It is a very hopeful book. That is for certain. Now, please share with our listeners a little bit more about your background professionally and so on.

Robin Grille: Yeah. I am a psychologist and I am in private practice. I do a lot of counseling and psychotherapy with families, with couples. I do not work directly with children, but I do like to work with adolescents and when parents come to see me for help with issues to deal with their small children, I prefer to work with the parents than to empower the parents in how to relate in new ways to the children to create just more satisfaction and more pleasure in their relationships.

Carrie Lauth: Okay, so one of the things that we wanted to talk about today was how to set healthy boundaries with our children. Your book talks a lot about the impact that shaming and of course punishment, which is something that we are learning more and more about, but even some of the psychological punishment like shaming a child, some of the impacts that that has on a young person.

Robin Grille: Yes, shaming really needs to be talked a lot because I guess it is clear, it is a lot easier to define what corporal punishment is and the research around the world is just so utterly convincing that corporal punishment will just create a lot of, not just psychological problems, but generally in the community it ends up creating, if not directly more of a tendency towards violence, it certainly desensitizes people.

It makes people a little bit more accepting of violence and I do not need to say much about how bad that is for all of our societies at the moment, whereas with shaming, shaming is a little bit harder for some people to identify, but it gets done a lot in so many families and almost every family there is an element of shaming when parents get really exasperated with their children’s behavior.

Very commonly, a way to control children is by causing them to feel ashamed and we call them names, we tell them they are naughty, we tell them they are silly. In more extreme cases, we tell them how stupid they are. There are other examples of shaming. There are other forms in which it comes like when we compare our children, “Why can’t you be more like your big brother?” “Why can’t you be more like so and so?” “The other children aren’t behaving like you, why can’t you change?” Or even the gender bias expectations like little boys do not cry, boys do not cry, or girls do not behave that way, etc.

So, when we make a child feel ashamed, we might get some kind of, you know, we feel like we have won because we get children to be more compliant potentially, but there is something very scary that is brewing underneath and what researchers have found and psychotherapists I am noticing more and more is how toxic and how corrosive shame is.

It is probably a lot worse than corporal punishment. It makes us all feel very inhibited. It dulls their creativity. It can be quite a major factor in developing depression, anxiety disorders, particularly social phobias. It really, really places the limit on people and it is sad for what that leads to in our relationships with one another. So much of conflicts in relationships have their origin in trying to stop their partners from saying things that make us feel ashamed that we felt when our parents shamed us when we were children.

Also, shaming is a major factor in violence. It makes people very angry and very reactive and a lot of the bullying that we see in schools, very often the bully becomes the bully because they feel so ashamed inside. They compensate for the shame by trying to get on top of the hate as if were trying to get in control and they try to get good feelings about themselves through their violence, they are getting people to obey them. So, we are really quite collectively needing to learn new ways because boundaries are so important. They are absolutely essential with our children particularly from the toddler years onward. We are all faced with an urgent need to learn how to set boundaries strongly without recourse to punishment and without recourse to shaming.

Robin Grille