I am an adoptive father, twice over. Like all adopters, I have been mandated/encouraged/enabled to undertake a range of training and education on how the minds of children develop and work, and how trauma and neglect can affect that. Many adopters say lightheartedly that we are lucky, because all parents should have access to what we learn.

A lightbulb moment for me was encountering the concept of the different mindsets of guilt and shame. I feel strongly that understanding this is useful for parents like me, and that it also has wider applicability in society. I hope that this little explanation will be helpful,

People break rules: whether it is a child drawing on the wallpaper or refusing to go to bed, a citizen forgetting to clean up after their dog or driving a little bit over the limit, or a criminal shoplifting or assaulting another person, a rule has been broken. For a child, the parents may talk of ‘consequences’, or even directly of a ‘punishment’; for minor civil offences there are fines; for more serious offences, there may be jail terms. Why do we have these ‘consequences’ and ‘punishments’? To teach a child, or warn a lawbreaker, that breaking the rules is bad, and that they should try to avoid doing it again in future.

Much of how we treat rulebreakers is based on the idea of guilt: guilt in this context not being the fact of whether someone has broken a rule or not, but how the rulebreaker feels about the act.

Guilt means feeling, ‘I have done a bad thing’. The ‘badness’ is intrinsic to the act, the act is distinct from the actor. I can be redeemed from what I have already done by bearing the consequences, and I can be redeemed from future consequences by not committing future offences.

A child learns, by experimentation and experience, what the boundaries for acceptable behaviour are. An adult, who should already understand those boundaries, learns that he or she will lose money, liberty or time, perhaps on an increasing scale.

If all people think and react like this, having a system of punishments, whether it’s loss of screen time for a child, or being sent to prison for an adult, will work, offences will not recur, and our home or society will be a better place. But do all people think the same?

A child who has ended up in care will have experienced neglect, both physical and mental, and often suffered or witnessed traumatic events. Their ‘attachment’ model – their worldview of forming relationships with people around them – instead of being ‘secure’, can be maladapted, becoming ‘avoidant’, ‘ambivalent’, ‘disorganised’, or any of a constellation of problematic working models of the world. The consequence is often a child – a person – with very little sense of self-worth. The world has not valued them, so they feel themselves to be of little value. This brings us to shame.

Shame is this: not ‘I have done a bad thing’, but ‘I am a bad person’. It is not the act that is wrong, but the actor. A person with little self-worth who breaks a rule may very well know that they were breaking it, but the rulebreaking is of no significance compared to the rulebreaker; they already know, regardless of the act, that they are – because they have learned it to be so – ‘bad’.

So what happens when this child, or adult, suffers the consequences or punishments that follow the rulebreaking? Not the deterrence we imagine, because they feel that the punishment is not for the act, but for them. And the consequences are not without meaning, but with different meaning: it reinforces their existing worldview: because I am bad punishment is inevitable, therefore committing the act is meaningless, I will be – deserve to be – punished. So, I may as well commit the act, the punishment would be coming regardless.

And we should also bear in mind that children from these backgrounds will also have suffered from having limited control, or agency, over their lives. So misbehaving gives a double bonus – they have agency and pre-empt the inevitable consequences, and they get the reaction that confirms their malformed worldview.

Evidence strongly supports the view that offenders within the criminal justice system are disproportionately from backgrounds where neglect, abuse and trauma are common. Is it too much to suggest that offenders are disproportionately likely to have insecure attachment models, lack of self-worth, and therefore have a worldview built on a sense of shame?

What does this mean for me as a parent, trying to help a child navigate the myriad sets of rules we try to adhere to? It means consequences must take place as close in time as possible to the original act, so that the link is obvious, because thinking ahead or back in time, to understand a delayed consequence is connected to the act, is another difficult process for the child.

It means consequences must relate, in scale and effect, to the original act, again reinforcing the link. It means constantly reminding the child that it is the act, not the actor, that is being dealt with. It means seizing every opportunity to reinforce good behaviour rather than punish bad,. It means creating an environment where obvious opportunities to break the rules are avoided. Many of these lessons should be basic to how we deal with children within society – in schools, etc – and to how we deal with adults who repeatedly flout the rules. I’m not holding my breath.

James Doyle