Shadowing Practice: Why Parents Bully Their Children - Learn English Speaking with Video
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54 sentences
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What is the most strange and saddest phenomena of psychological life?
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One of the strangest and saddest phenomena of psychological life is that there are parents, too many parents, who end up,
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while sometimes only half realizing it, bullying their own children.
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Why do parents bully their children?
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In short, in order to try to feel better about themselves themselves.
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Because they suffer intensely in the very same area that they are choosing to bully their child in.
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Someone made them feel awful and they surmise,
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by twisted logic, that they will feel better through the process of making their own child feel very bad indeed.
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They aren't doing it personally.
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The child is just collateral damage to a misguided project of healing and an attenuation of symptoms.
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It doesn't make any sense, of course, but But it may actually work for the parent for a time.
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Let's imagine a parent who harbours a terrible fear of being stupid.
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Somewhere in their own past, they were belittled and made to feel hugely inadequate.
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Now a child comes along, their own child, full of the normal hesitations and weaknesses of early infancy.
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Without really realising what they're up to, the parent grows inflamed and incensed by this child's apparent stupidity
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and starts to mock and attack in another person what they fear and hate in themselves.
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It makes them feel a bit better.
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The child becomes a repository of all that they fail to tolerate in themselves.
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They, the child, are the dumb one, so they, the parent, don't have to be.
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They, the child, are the stupid and ugly one, so they, the parent, don't have to be.
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And therefore, the parent is liberated to live more easily within itself self.
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The bad is contained and localised.
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It can't be in them if it's all in little him or her.
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It can take bullied children a very long time to realise that they have even been bullied.
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They don't after all grow up thinking
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that someone else has actually made them feel stupid or made them feel ugly or made them feel soiled,
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let alone their own parent whom they depend on and admire and long to be loved by.
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They simply think that they are stupid, ugly and soiled.
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There is no call for an explanation or a cause.
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Yet, if we are those now grown -up bullied children, we don't need to wonder too much more about what might have happened to us.
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We simply need to take stock of how we feel about ourselves
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and guess that the terrible judgements and sensations that we have about ourselves did not arise spontaneously.
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The feelings we harbour of ourselves are legacies of real occurrences in the world.
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Someone who isn't necessarily owning up to it made us feel a certain way
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and that is why now we are in such pain.
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Typically, those who've been bullied don't look backwards.
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Their illnesses point them relentlessly to the present and the future.
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The bullied anticipate terrible things happening to them that echo events
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that once happened to them but that they don't remember in any way.
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They are causeless paranoiacs, self -haters and warriors.
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Catastrophe is never far away.
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A person feels they're ugly because two decades ago a mother made them feel as such.
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A person feels they've done something very wrong because even further back someone did something very wrong to them.
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The fear contains the imprint of unconscious history.
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We overcome our bullying when we learn to discriminate between what actually belongs to us and what was placed in us.
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Between who we are and what we've been told we are.
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Between how our caregivers like to present themselves and what they've actually done.
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Our triggers and apprehensions lie along the fault lines of our early traumas.
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So they can guide us back to what we suffered through when we are ready to explore.
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We're on our way to overcoming bullying when we can say at last, I'm not ugly, I was made to feel unacceptable.
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I haven't done anything wrong.
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Something wrong was done to me.
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And in general, I am not awful.
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Something awful happened to me.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “Why Parents Bully Their Children”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: parent, bullied, ugly, themselves, stupid. This video has 54 sentences and 701 words to shadow. The speech runs for 4:07. The speaker talks at a natural 170 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 84% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| bully noun | /ˈbʊli/ | A person who is intentionally physically or emotionally cruel to others, especially to those whom they perceive as being vulnerable or of less power or… |
| ugly adjective | /ˈʌɡli/ | Displeasing to the eye; aesthetically unpleasing. |
| awful adjective | /ˈɔːfʊl/ | Very bad. |
| bullying noun | /ˈbʊ.li.ɪŋ/ | An act of intimidating a person to do something, especially such repeated coercion. |
| suffer verb | /ˈsʌfɚ/ | To undergo hardship. |
| soil noun | /sɔɪl/ | A mixture of mineral particles and organic material, used to support plant growth. |
| overcome verb | /ˌəʊ.vəˈkʌm/ | To surmount (a physical or abstract obstacle); to prevail over, to get the better of. |
| psychological adjective | /ˌsaɪ.kəˈlɑː.d͡ʒɪ.kl̩/ | Of or pertaining to psychology. |
| realise verb | Non-Oxford British standard spelling of realize. | |
| phenomenon noun | /fəˈnɒm.ɪ.nən/ | A thing or being, event or process, perceptible through senses; or a fact or occurrence thereof. |
| harbour noun | Standard spelling of harbor. | |
| necessarily adverb | /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/ | Inevitably; of necessity. |
| explanation noun | /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/ | The act or process of explaining. |
| illness noun | /ˈɪl.nəs/ | An instance (episode) of a disease or poor health. |
| belong verb | /bɪˈlɒŋ/ | To have its proper place. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| grow up verb | To mature and become an adult. |
| come along verb | To accompany. |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | were belittled · is liberated · is contained |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have even been bullied · has actually made · who've been bullied |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 19 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, they're, they've. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: explanation /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/, unconscious /ˌʌnˈkɑnʃəs/, sensation /sɛnˈseɪʃən/, hesitation /ˌhɛzɪˈteɪʃən/, apprehension /æp.ɹiˈhɛn.ʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: psychological /ˌsaɪ.kəˈlɑː.d͡ʒɪ.kl̩/, phenomenon /fəˈnɒm.ɪ.nən/, necessarily /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/, explanation /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/, unacceptable /ˌʌn.ækˈsɛp.tə.bl̩/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like bully, ugly, awful.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.