Name Calling? Growing up process or worse?

The other day someone told me that name calling cant result in psychological impairments in a childs life, it is simply a toughen up phase with no seriouse future complications. I didnt really research much about it, actulally I based this entire post on books I had read or shows I had watched in the past.

Name-calling is very common among children and ultimately results in irreparable psychological harm for long periods of time. To some it may just be a phase, but it is a phase that starts early in the years of childhood and lasts up to the eve of adulthood. When children are excessively teased for being “fat”, “ugly”, or “stupid” they don’t realize that they are only words, or that those opinions shouldn’t matter, they start to feel abnormal or imperfect, which leads to psychological problems later in life.

The psychological damage produced by the excessive amount of teasing can elevate to harmful and even life threatening levels, whether it be late in life or in ones teenage years. In a television show entitled “Celebrity Fit Club” a women by the name of Victoria Jackson, struggled with a severe weight problem, which is due to the fact that when she was young she was continually called “fat”. The ironic part about it is that in the pictures shown of when she was young, she did not look fat or overweight in any particular means. She then said that the name-calling caused her to be depressed and when she was depressed she would eat as a means of “drowning her feelings”. Name-calling makes you and breaks you, meaning that name-calling has the potential to make one perceive how they look and ultimately who they are, and if these comments are hurtful then they have the ability to cause psychological problems.

Psychological problems are likely to arise later in life, however, if not later than much sooner. Regrettably, teasing is and can be one of the determining factors of life. A close friend of mine, who was teased for being obese, unattractive, and, sadly enough, for having a disability called epilepsy, committed suicide before the end of her junior year on June 10, 2004. Apparently, she had overdosed on her epilepsy medication and sleeping pills. The reason for this act of “rebellion”, as some people called it, came in the form of a letter that laid on her bed side and read, “Will you stop teasing me now?” Sadly, it is the worst and unexpected tragedies, such as this, that show one how “teasing” isn’t just “teasing” and that name calling truly does have the ability to scar a person for life, or for how ever long one chooses to take it.

In the book The Forty Studies that Changed Psychology, there was an article of a study that psychologists called “See aggression, do aggression”. The study proved that when children see or hear something they reenact it. In another experiment, testing the theory of the power of suggestion, the professor picked two random children from one of the experimental groups and said that child A was the strongest in the group and child B was the weakest in the group, the children acted as if the words were an indeed fact. Child B would remain isolated from the group and child A would be social and happy. The same goes with name-calling, when a person is continually called fat, even if they are not, they become self-conscious and start to believe that they are what people say they are, which can lead to psychological problems later in life that may escalate to more complex health problems such as the woman in “Celebrity Fit Club”.

It’s difficult to see a child calling someone words they know are disrespectful, but doing nothing about it because they think it’s some kind of phase and/or toughening up process is just ridiculous. The reason some do, may be because it is worse to think that words alone can be the building blocks for a child’s life. To some, today name-calling may just be some kind of a phase, a toughening up process, or a time to become strong, but tomorrow it will be the reason for someone’s lack of confidence, someone’s severe depression, or someone’s answer to the question “Is life worth living?”


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