What’s the alternative to yelling at our children?

P arents love their children, but this doesn’t mean they always like what their children do. And when they don’t like what they do, they react in different ways.

“I know it’s awful, but I find myself screaming at my three-year-old a lot. He drives me crazy. He seems to purposely defy me, and that really triggers something in me.”

It makes sense that people scream when they’re triggered. When the subconscious mind is reminded of danger, it steps right in to release the emergency signal that sends adrenaline into the bloodstream. As far as the brain is concerned, a life-threatening emergency is underway — even if all that happened was that a toddler stuck his tongue out at his mother.

How does a toddler’s rudeness trigger such a torrent of emotion? Perhaps the mother was consistently hurt by a parent or older brother or is badly treated by her husband. Perhaps she cannot take yet another display of hostility or disrespect as it assaults her already fragile sense of self. And while the toddler’s intention would clearly be different from that of the previous abuser’s, the similarity of the optics is enough to open the floodgates of trauma.

Why We Scream

There are also other provocations for this unseemly behavior.

“I know it’s my own fault: I ask too many times. For example, I resolve every morning to be pleasant. But then I ask my 13-year-old to get up for minyan and he pulls the blanket up over his head. I’m patient and nice about it at first. I come back in a few minutes and try again. No luck. I get a little irritated.

I start to talk about responsibilities — working up a lecture, but still in control. But when he finds the energy to open his mouth and tell me to leave him alone — then I snap! I really let him have it — yelling, threatening, insulting — I become a lunatic!

“And then I’m so full of shame and remorse that I beg his forgiveness when he finally gets up. It’s a horrible cycle; I horrify myself and my child.”

Good parents want their kids to succeed in life and this desire can make them feel frantic when their children seem to be heading in the wrong direction. In the above example, asking too many times led to parental irritability which led to fury. The child was uncooperative, which wore away at the mother’s patience. The child then became rude, and this tipped the balance; bad attitude on the part of the child can seriously rankle a parent.

Yet the mother didn’t feel justified for letting the child have it. Rather, she was mortified at her own behavior. Without a plan of action, the scene will be repeated ad nauseum. This mother needs a strategy.

Other parents scream because their parents screamed. Their parents showed them that misbehavior was a catastrophic event requiring an intense response. Now, these grown-up children scream at their own youngsters for not listening, for failing to clean up a mess, for refusing to get ready for bed, and so on. Everything is an emergency, everything is a big deal. These parents, too, need a new strategy.

The New Strategy

To keep our screaming at bay, misbehavior should be perceived as normal in young people who lack experience, are curious, are tired, hungry, or sick, are troubled, or are genetically or otherwise challenged to behave appropriately in certain situations. Misbehavior is not a conscious affront to the parent. This perspective can help a parent stay true to her role as an educator. When she sees inappropriate behavior, she’ll be triggered to provide education.

For this, the parent needs effective teaching skills. Displays of anger are not educational in nature; they are expressions of helplessness, frustration, powerlessness, and pain. Effective teaching skills remove the feeling of helplessness, allowing the parent to reprogram the child’s behavioral patterns.

Increasing overall positivity, pointing out appropriate behavior, reducing overall negativity, setting clear and quiet boundaries for inappropriate behavior, are all examples of teaching skills. The more a parent sees herself as a teacher, the less she will resort to screaming. The more she focuses on calmly correcting the child’s behavior, the less she will focus on how she awful she feels about that behavior. It will move her away from the feeling-screaming mode into the thinking-problem-solving/educating mode.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 641)