Purpose

With the belief of shame in Confucianism, most ethnically Chinese parents teach their children by shaming practices, which guides their children’s behavior, and helps them to build the ability of self-disciplining with a feeling of shame. Shame is one of the self-conscious emotions. A feeling of shame helps individuals pay close attention to others’ negative comments, and to realize one’s failures and limitations, thus enabling them to express the emotions of indignation and self-criticism. Three-year-old children gradually become able to perceive social norms, common standards, and others’ perspectives, and to possess the ability to evaluate their behaviors. This study focuses on shame among three-year-old children. The objectives of this study were to identify the relationships among parental shaming, three-year-old children’s shame, and the children’s social behaviors; and the mediating effect of children’s shame in the relationship between parental shaming and children’s social behaviors.

Design/methodology/approach

This study used data on 36-month-old children collected from Kids in Taiwan (KIT): National Longitudinal Study of Child Development and Care, and recruited biological parents of children included in the data as the study sample; only those who held Taiwanese nationality were enrolled in the sample. This study finalized the sample at 1,873 participants (including 312 fathers, 1,561 mothers, 947 boys, and 926 girls). To conduct the data analysis, we used the R software for Windows, calculated the correlation between each pair of variables by using Spearman’s rank correlation, and used the Wilcoxon test to explore the differences between dependent samples. Finally, the lavvan package was implemented to analyze the linear structural equation model, with the Bollen-Stine bootstrap repeated 5000 times to obtain robust results. Moreover, a 95% confidence interval (CI) was used to serve as the criterion for judging whether the effect was significant.

Findings/results

The results of the hypothetical model had an acceptable fit. The study’s main findings are as follows: Parental shaming was found to be significantly and positively correlated with three-year-old children’s shame. Parental shaming was able to predict the three-year-old children’s shame and was moderated by children’s gender. In particular, the influence of parental shaming shows more effects among girls. The study result proves that when parents use shaming more, girls have a higher probability of feeling shame.

Additionally, regarding the association between children’s shame and their social behaviors, children’s shame was significantly and positively correlated with the behaviors of cooperation, compliance, and withdrawal. Finally, the mediating effect test showed that stronger parental shaming was associated with a higher level of children’s shame, which in turn resulted in more social behaviors (i.e., cooperation, compliance, and withdrawal), but this phenomenon only happened among girls.

Originality/value

This study analyzed the sample with a structural equation model, delving into the relationships among parental shaming, children’s shame, and children’s social behaviors, demonstrating the influence of ethnically Chinese parental shaming.

Implications for policy/practice

Based on the results of the analysis, this study recommends that parenting educators could guide the parents of young children to understand the developmental process of socialization, equipping them with proper parenting strategies for children to learn how to build interpersonal relationships with others. This will help young children internalize the capacity of adapting to society, and establish fitting boundaries for young children’s behavior.