“Sticks and Stones”: The Lie We Taught Children About Words
Ash & Bloom Journal · Feb 2
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.”
This phrase is often offered to children as protection—an armor meant to make them resilient. In practice, it functions less as a shield and more as a silencing mechanism. It does not prepare children for harm; it prepares them to doubt their own pain.
The saying rests on a false hierarchy: that physical injury is real and emotional injury is not. That bruises count, but words evaporate. That if pain leaves no visible mark, it must not be legitimate.
This is not only untrue. It is psychologically dangerous.
Language is one of the earliest tools through which power is exercised. Long before a child understands institutions or authority, they understand tone, naming, and repetition. Words teach children who they are allowed to be, how safe they are, and what parts of themselves must be hidden to maintain connection.
To tell a child that words “do not hurt” while they are actively hurting is to teach them a more damaging lesson: that their internal experience is unreliable.
Words Do Not Merely Describe Reality—They Shape It
Developmental psychology and linguistics have long established that language is formative, not decorative. Lev Vygotsky’s work on cognitive development demonstrated that internal thought is shaped through social language before it becomes internalized. Children do not simply hear words—they absorb them, rehearse them, and eventually speak them to themselves.
By the time a child reaches adolescence, many of the voices guiding their inner world are not their own. They are echoes.
Neuroscience reinforces this. Studies on verbal abuse show that chronic exposure to degrading or dismissive language activates the same stress pathways as physical threat. The brain does not distinguish between a raised hand and a raised voice when the source is a caregiver. Both signal danger. Both register as harm.
Yet when children are taught the “sticks and stones” rhetoric, they are taught to override this biological response. They learn to reinterpret pain as weakness. To translate harm into personal failure.
When the Words Come From a Parent
The damage intensifies when the language comes from a parent or primary caregiver.
Children depend on caregivers not only for survival, but for reality calibration. A parent’s words carry disproportionate weight because they are delivered from a position of authority, attachment, and trust. When a parent repeatedly labels a child as “too sensitive,” “dramatic,” “ungrateful,” or “difficult,” the child does not experience this as opinion. They experience it as truth.
Judith Herman, in Trauma and Recovery, explains that trauma is not defined solely by the act itself, but by the relational context in which it occurs. Harm delivered within a relationship of dependency is uniquely destabilizing because the victim cannot safely challenge it.
When a child is told that words cannot hurt—especially by the same person whose words are hurting them—they are trapped in a double bind:
If the words hurt, the child must be weak.
If the child is strong, the pain must not be real.
Either way, the child loses access to their own truth.
Emotional Injury Leaves Fewer Scars—and Deeper Ones
Unlike physical injury, verbal and emotional harm leaves no clear evidence trail. There is no cast, no X-ray, no universally acknowledged recovery timeline. This invisibility makes it easier to dismiss—and harder to heal.
Bessel van der Kolk, in The Body Keeps the Score, documents how emotional trauma is stored somatically, shaping stress responses, self-perception, and relational patterns long after the original words are spoken. The body remembers what the mind was told to forget.
Adults who grew up under verbal invalidation often struggle to name their pain. They second-guess their reactions. They apologize for being affected. Many enter therapy not asking why they are hurting, but whether they are “allowed” to hurt at all.
This is not resilience. It is adaptation to chronic invalidation.
The Function of the Phrase Is Control, Not Strength
The cultural persistence of “sticks and stones” is not accidental. It serves a social function.
By minimizing the power of words, the phrase protects speakers from accountability. It shifts responsibility away from those causing harm and onto those experiencing it. It reframes emotional response as a moral failing rather than a natural human reaction.
Michel Foucault’s work on power is useful here—not because he focused on parenting, but because he emphasized how power operates most efficiently when it becomes invisible. When individuals police themselves. When harm no longer needs enforcement because it has been internalized.
Teaching children that words do not hurt is one way culture ensures they will endure harm quietly.
Reclaiming the Truth About Words
The counter-narrative is simple, but radical:
Words do hurt. And that does not make someone weak—it makes them human.
Strength is not the absence of impact. Strength is the capacity to name impact accurately and respond with agency. When children are allowed to say, “That hurt me,” they are not being fragile. They are practicing discernment.
Part of reclaiming power—especially for those harmed in childhood—is learning to re-evaluate the stories we were taught about pain. To recognize that minimizing language was never about our protection. It was about someone else’s comfort.
This blog exists to challenge those inherited scripts.
Because if narrative is the mechanism through which power is internalized, then telling the truth about words is one of the first ways power can be reclaimed.