atTired of Yelling at Your Child? 6 Tips To Stop Screaming
If you’re a parent, you’ve probably been there: your child says or does something that pushes your buttons, and the next thing you know, you’re yelling and screaming at the top of your lungs. And they’re responding in kind.
Afterward, you feel drained, upset, and frustrated. You wonder why it always has to come down to a screaming match.
No Parent Is Perfect—We All Yell at Times It’s important for parents to remember that we’re not perfect, and we can learn from our mistakes. A periodic scream or two doesn’t make you a bad parent. We all yell at our kids at times.
Let me tell you a story about my own family. I had a long commute home from work when my son was growing up, and from time to time, I would be in a bad mood when I got home. I would arrive late and find our adolescent son not doing his homework. Instead, he’d be sitting on the couch, eating and making a mess—usually with his feet on the table. I like to keep everything in order, so this was extremely annoying to me. I won’t lie—there were some days when I was worn out, hungry, and frustrated, and I yelled and screamed at him.
After that happened a few times, I made it a personal goal to respond better in the future. And by applying the tips in this article (and some practice and patience), I screamed much less and became a more effective parent.
Why Do Parents Yell at Their Kids? Most parents yell and scream at their kids because they’re frustrated. At the exact moment when you lose it, you don’t feel like you have any other options. It becomes like a knee jerk reaction or a trigger being pulled. In other words, you don’t think about what you’re doing. You just respond.
Parents can also let their frustration with their kids build up over time. They go from incident to incident without giving consequences, and the frustration grows bigger and bigger. Eventually, they break and react by screaming rather than dealing with the misbehavior consistently and effectively.
Why Screaming at Your Child Doesn’t Work Yelling and screaming at your kids sends the message that you’re not in control. And if you aren’t in control, they might assume that they’re in charge. It’s also important to understand that kids feel unsafe and anxious when their parents appear out of control. These are bad messages to send to your child, and it undermines your authority in the household.
I want to stress that it’s okay to speak strongly to kids. But getting angry and then ratcheting up to screaming is not helpful, especially if it’s over anything and everything. When you scream at everything, the screaming loses its effect and has no significance when there’s actual misbehavior.
Success in parenting is feeling good about the job you’ve done in teaching your child how to behave—and you can’t feel good about yourself if you’re screaming all the time. When chronic screaming becomes the norm, children are also apt to think it’s okay for them to scream all the time, too. Your kid learns that screaming is a suitable response when you’re frustrated or overwhelmed. It doesn’t teach anything positive. Instead, it teaches that life is out of control, and you’re out of control.
【atTired of Yelling at Your Child? 6 Tips To Stop Screaming】Here’s the bottom line: if you use yelling to get your kids to comply, you’re not teaching them better problem–solving skills. Yelling at a problem doesn’t make it go away. Indeed, it usually makes the problem worse. When kids are screamed at all the time, they learn to tolerate the screaming rather than change their behavior. Eventually, your child tunes you out altogether.
And if screaming were effective, parenting would be easy. We’d just scream at our kids, they’d change their behavior, and our problems would be solved. But, we all know that it isn’t that easy.
6 Tips to Help Parents Stop Screaming at Their Kids If you find yourself screaming at your child frequently, it’s not going to be easy to stop yourself—at least not right away. Learning how to change the way you communicate with your child takes practice. You need effective tools because your kids will push your buttons to try and get you to lose control—which is what they’re used to. But you can learn to have control and communicate with them effectively. Here are six tips that will help you get back on track.
