Personally, I wouldn’t yell at my children if they would just do what I’ve asked the first time, or maybe do the thing I’ve asked them to do 463 times in the past. Or if they didn’t chase one another through the kitchen at dinnertime, brandishing light sabers. Or if they got up when the alarm clock went off in the morning, or put their shoes on so we could leave the house, or moved that glass of milk, the one that’s right by your elbow and … too late.

This week’s lively online parent conversation revolves around a relatively recent study from the University of Pittsburgh in which researchers found the negative impact of “harsh verbal discipline” (defined as shouting, cursing or using insults) on adolescents could be “comparable to the effects shown over the same period of time in other studies that focused on physical discipline.” In a press release on his results, researcher Ming-Te Wang, assistant professor of psychology in education at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Education and of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh’s Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, said that even lapsing occasionally into the use of harsh verbal discipline can still be harmful. “Even if you are supportive of your child, if you fly off the handle it’s still bad,” he said.

Got that? Even your occasional lapses – even that time you asked the child, deeply absorbed in “Artemis Fowl” over breakfast and gradually, slowly pushing the book right into your coffee, to please sit up and be careful, and when he did, he knocked the whole cup into your lap – even that time was “bad.”

Bad, I tell you. Bad. Because you, you parent who occasionally shouts at your dreamy, distant, rebellious or just plain maddening teenager or pre-teenager? You are failing, and – again according to the press release – nothing, no amount of “love, emotional support and affection between parents and adolescents” can “lessen the effects of the verbal discipline” or “mitigate the damage inflicted.”

When does someone try to mitigate the damage that overgeneralizing research results has on parents?

Over at Slate, they’re asking, “What are your tactics for avoiding screaming at your heinously ill-behaved progeny?” In The Washington Post, they’ve got suggestions for “how to keep behavioral problems from turning you into a screaming lunatic, and how to recover from it on the (hopefully rare) occasions when you do yell.” On Clutch, Yesha Callahan proposes that while everyone she knows yells, the parents who are “cursing or using insults” must be the bottom of the barrel” parents.

And on Motherlode? On Motherlode, I’m calling this one out. I’ve looked at the study. I’m not accusing the researchers of any failings.

I’m merely saying that I refuse to buy it. I refuse to let this one crawl into my brain and take up residence in my psyche, where it could snuggle up right next to the baby sleep expert who wrote something like “even leaving an infant to cry alone a single time is damaging to the trust you are building between you” and caused me untold sleepless nights. If a parent’s hollering over a lapful of hot coffee is now considered to be as “damaging” to a child as it would be to lash out with our fists, then the real message of that research is this: Only the perfect parent can rest easy, while the rest of us must just live with the knowledge that we’re inflicting harm with every “occasional lapse.”

While my reaction to this research has been a little tongue in cheek, I find myself honestly infuriated by that message. There’s nothing good about constant “harsh verbal discipline.” But putting the “occasional lapse” into infuriated shouting in the same category as getting physical seems to me to just invite the parent who struggles with temper to give up. If no amount of love and no parent-child bond can make up for the moments when anger gets the best of us, then we might as well bring on the feral wolf parents and spend our savings on a cruise around the world, because who knows what damage we’re doing with our other occasional lapses. Alternatively, we could invest hours after those lapses in berating ourselves and self-loathing.

Or maybe we could shrug, note the many ways in which our parenting styles aren’t yet in “Glass Castle” territory, and go back to trying to do the best we can with what we’ve got.

Contact KJ Dell-Antonia at:

kj.dellantonia@nytimes.com