Shimbo Pastory
This article was published in The Citizen Newspaper – Tanzania on 26th October, 2021
Societal Situation
It is common in many societies to find parents and guardians addressing their children with tags, names and metaphors that suggest depravity, incapability, deficiency and diminution.
This has gone so far that a child can be called by a name of an animal, a wild insect, or a disliked tree, fruit or place. The intention today is to find out if that has any long-term social, mental and psychological effects, both in the early upbringing as well as in later life as an adult.
Shared Consensus
Going back to the roots and watermarks, in most cases our instincts, mores, norms, value ethics, philosophies, schools of thought and religious beliefs, to mention a few, elevate the human person above animals. As such, referring to a human person as an animal, whether one is young or old, poor, infirmed, challenged, or wrong is offensive.
An Academic Backdrop
In psychology, this tendency of labelling is called ‘attribution’, whereby a judgement is made about the cause of another person’s behaviour in a manner that both underlies and predicates an emotional response. In his book, ‘An Attributional Theory of Motivation and Emotion (1986), Bernard Weiner, an American psychologist, delved deep into his proposed three-dimensional model of attribution.
According to Weiner, attributions influence stability and locus of control to a reasonable extent. In that, future behaviour is shaped by cognitive assessment of affective responses as well as intrinsic and extrinsic motives.
Where the requirements for stability are met, the person’s expectations for the future are positively influenced.
When requirements for control are met, one can persevere courageously in life, even when faced with hardships. Stability and locus of control are indispensable for normal and balanced physical, spiritual and psycho-social functionality.
Linguistically, the attribution of animal features to humans is called zoomorphism. For example, “A’s head is like a goat’s head,” or “B stares like a pig.” But this is not so much accepted, regardless that it is a figure of speech. It is oftentimes considered offensive for a human person to be referred to as an animal.
What do Psychologists say?
In the strive to bring forth a better awareness of this matter, I conversed with Dr Chris Mauki, an internationally reputed expert in social relationship and counselling psychology who divides his time between the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM), Tanzania and the University of Pretoria, South Africa.
Speaking of the nature and purpose of such animal attributions, he said, “They are purposely chosen from the language and the register that a child has mastered.” This means a child is being compared with an ugly that he/she knows to cause him or her embarrassment.
Affirming animal attributions to children has negative effects. He highlighted among others, a dysfunctional parent-child or child-family relationship (distancing), self-hate, poor creativity and innovativeness as they feel less and incapable, suicide, unending anxieties later in life that the world has never favoured or loved them, and a great possibility of victims becoming verbal and physical abusers to peers, spouses and children.
According to Dr Chris, most times this happens because memories of such words uttered to a child in outbursts of emotions stick in their subconscious minds. He recommends that parents and guardians should warn and guide children to help correct them, not to hurt their feelings.
I was also able to speak with Dr Leonard Onwukwe, a practising Clinical Psychologist and Eclectic Psychotherapist, and a lecturer at Imo State University, Nigeria. Dr Leonard was fast to highlight the great danger of an attribution becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy in the life of an innocent child. The child’s social psychology, he said, operates in line with the labels ascribed to them.
He unveiled that, “since children know what those metaphors represent in the culture and language facility of the place, they develop inferiority complex which can only be overcome by choice, decision and strength of the will. There is also a great danger of them becoming frustrated in their mid-adulthood due to the psychological scars caused by such attributions.” Children develop a sense of guilt, lowered self-esteem, lack of trust and lack of confidence.
Recommendations
I recommend that parents and guardians stay away from labelling as it is not corrective. The wrong should be condemned as a human act, and as a human fault.
The child too should be blamed as a human wrongdoer or offender. Mistakes should not serve as reasons to debase a person’s dignity. Children are not salamanders, goats, dogs, cats, snakes or rats; and they know that.
Together with that, children should be given a chance to speak before they are judged as it helps them to mature psychologically. Meanwhile, society should be keen to identify early enough children who need special assistance from psychologists so that they can be helped.
