You’ve probably been out in public and heard a parent shouting, swearing, or calling a child names. Or maybe you’ve found yourself in the position of losing your temper with your own children.

Harsh parenting is defined as regularly engaging in negative coercive behaviors; it can include yelling, name-calling, hitting, criticizing, shaming, and isolating children. A large body of research demonstrates that harsh parenting is bad for kids.

Recently, a longitudinal study followed more than 4,200 Brazilian children from birth to age 18. Mothers participating in the study completed surveys after delivering their babies and then every two years until their children turned 18. At the end of the study, the 18-year-olds also completed a survey.

The data demonstrated that 45% of children in the study had parents who they considered moderately harsh, and 5% had parents who they considered very harsh.

Children with moderately or very harsh parents were less able to regulate their emotions, experienced lower levels of self-esteem, and were less likely to help others compared to children whose parents were not harsh. Children of harsh parents also experienced more relationship problems with their peers. Although children whose parents were very harsh experienced greater problems, even those whose parents were moderately harsh experienced social and emotional problems as 18-year-olds.

This new study backs up earlier research that finds harsh parenting hurts kids, including a systematic review of the effects of harsh parenting in China. This analysis combined data from 45 studies on Chinese parents and children. It found that children with harsh parents were more likely to become aggressive and defiant, more likely to shout or act violently, and more likely to develop attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

“Harsh parenting may work in the short term as a mechanism for controlling behavior, but it has negative downstream consequences for children,” said Kimberly Ann Kopko, a child development expert at the Cornell’s Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research (BCTR).

“When parents engage in harsh parenting, they deprive their child of the opportunity to understand how and why their behavior is problematic,” she said. “Lacking an explanation for why the behavior is unacceptable, and lacking an explanation for alternative ways of behaving, children are not able to learn self-discipline or how to regulate their emotions, two very important life skills.”

It’s not surprising that kids with harsh parents end up having social and emotional problems. But what leads to harsh parenting in the first place?

A Taiwanese study published last year suggests that parents’ own experiences during childhood put them at risk for becoming harsh parents.

For this study, researchers surveyed more than 6,000 parents of children ages 6 to 12. They found that participants who adopted harsh parenting techniques were more likely to have experienced stressful or traumatic events in their own childhoods. In addition, these parents were more likely to exhibit the symptoms of psychological disorders, such as depression, thoughts of self-harm, and anxiety. In short, parents who experienced psychological symptoms as a result of their own childhood trauma were more likely to become harsh parents themselves. This sets up an intergenerational cycle of traumatic childhood experiences leading to harsh parenting later in life.

There are intervention programs designed to break these cycles. Researchers at the University of Washington evaluated 20 of these programs and identified five evidence-based interventions for a variety of age groups – from birth to the teen years – that demonstrate effectiveness in building parental skills.

The programs all follow the Social Development Model, which is based on the idea that youth learn behaviors from their relationships with family, peers, and other institutions. This model provides clear expectations for behavior, focuses on bonding, and rewards positive social behaviors. Among them is the Nurse-Family Partnership, a program originally developed at Cornell’s Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research that supports expecting and new mothers with visits from nurses.

The take-home message: Harsh parenting is detrimental for children’s social and emotional development. Research suggests that harsh parenting likely stems from traumatic events that occurred during parents’ childhoods. If you find that you have adopted harsh parenting practices, there are interventions that can help you learn more productive ways to interact with your children.