Make a Better Choice — How to Stop Yelling at Your Kids

Do you tend to yell at your children when you’re angry and your patience runs out?

Put your clothes away. Get off the computer. Come down for dinner. Take the dog out. Stop hitting your sister.

Sure, yelling when you’re angry is a great way to release energy, and also a loud way to exert your power and control.

Depending upon the age of your children you may even get behavior change and instant compliance after yelling.

But consider that the impact of your loud emotional catharsis may extend much further than the immediate situation that has caused you to be angry.

Yelling at children can damage their self-esteem, your relationship with them and their ability to manage future relationships as well. Research indicates, households with regular shouting tend to have children with higher rates of anxiety and depression, along with an increase in behavioral problems.

Yelling at your kids makes you look weak and out of control to them and others. It can be quite frightening for your child to see you yelling and the memories that are produced from yelling incidents may linger for a lifetime.

Parents yelling is not a strategy

The whole point of holding your children accountable and disciplining them is to teach them valuable life lessons and help them grow and develop. Yelling at them will not help that. Yelling is not a strategy, it’s a release.

And the explosive release of your energy is not healthy for you or your children. Your angry reaction could be as a result of your stress response system being activated.

Once this happens your anger overtakes your brain and body. Your brain begins to be bathed in energy-depleting and exhausting neurochemicals to try and calm you down; your body will react in ways that will seem like you’re under attack. Your heart will begin beating faster and chances are you’ll be perspiring and feeling tension somewhere in your body.

There are other ways to express your anger to your children (or anyone) that will make you feel better and improve your relationship with them, while also teaching them life lessons and helping them grow and develop.

You can use more positive strategies to help communicate to your children that they are misbehaving and you’re displeased with their behavior.

You can change your angry thoughts

Realize that anger is an inevitable emotion, and your thoughts are what’s fueling your anger. Change your thoughts, change your anger.

When you get into a situation or a conversation with your kids that begins to get you angry you can begin to better understand your thoughts and take control of them.

You can control your angry thoughts rather than your thoughts controlling you. You don’t have to feel out of control when you get angry.

When the emotion begins to rise inside of you, there are things you can do to stop your distorted angry thinking and change to more positive, productive thinking.

For instance, you can form positive mantras — short phrases that you can recall and recite to yourself to change your angry thinking quickly. Positive mantras are most effective when they are specific to your child and the situation that you’re in.

You may say to yourself things like –

“It’s just a stage — I will get through this.“

“He’s just being impulsive“

“I can get through this. I can cope. I don’t have to get angry.“

“She’s just trying to push my buttons I can handle this.”

Then in addition, you can express your anger in much healthier ways rather than yelling. Now that you are in a calmer place and feeling somewhat more emotionally regulated, you can respond in a healthy, assertive way.

Be assertive, not aggressive

Assertive communication with your child will clearly state your feelings and what you want. You will give your child clear specific information about your expectations.

There are three parts to your assertive response. You can state your feelings about or reactions to your child’s behavior, about why his or her behavior affects you in this way, and what you want to change.

First, identify what feeling is underneath your feeling of anger. Anger is a secondary emotion. Are you feeling disappointed, frustrated, embarrassed, unappreciated, or something else?

The next step is to identify why your child’s behavior affects you the way it does. Why do you feel the underlying emotion to your anger?

Then finally, describe what you want from your child in this particular situation. Be as clear and specific as possible. For instance be more specific than just I want you to clean your room.

You could say, “I want you to pick up your clothes off the floor and either hang them in your closet or put them in the dirty clothes hamper.”

These three steps will help you communicate the facts, your feelings and your fair request — a much more effective strategy to express your anger.

This is what’s called a healthy I-Message. Putting these three steps together — your feelings, why you have those feelings, and clearly what you want — provide your child with all the information he or she needs to make a choice about how to behave or react.

You may not necessarily immediately get the behavior that you’re looking for, but you’ve given your child information to help them learn; and you’ve helped deepen your relationship with your child by communicating without fear or power struggle.

You can follow the healthy I-message with other effective discipline strategies. (Remember that disciplining means teaching not punishing.)

It was a challenging day for Nicole’s mom

When Nicole left the kitchen a mess, her mother felt frustrated. She and Nicole had talked many times about Nicole‘s responsibility to clean up the kitchen after dinner. Many times Nicole’s mom would lose her temper and yell at Nicole.

Here’s how her mom could handle the situation with healthy assertive anger expression, rather than yelling.

Once she uses some deep breathing and positive mantras to get calmer, she could say, “Nicole when you leave the dinner dishes all over the kitchen, I feel frustrated and disappointed since we’ve talked about that so many times before. I would like you to go downstairs and clean up the kitchen like we’ve agreed.”

Now there may more that needs to be done to change Nicole’s behavior in this situation. Nicole may need some healthy consequences or more direction or support to change her behavior.

The fact that her mom did not yell, however, provides an opportunity for Nicole to meet the expectations. Yelling at Nicole may see an immediate effort to comply, but both of them will feel worse afterward and chances are Nicole may repeat the frustrating behavior.

After using healthy assertive communication, if more effective discipline tools are needed, there’s more you can do help your child learn, grow and develop, while feeling closer to you because of the lack of fear from your yelling.

Take the yelling tool out of your parent toolbox!

What can you do when you feel yourself getting out of control when angry with your kids? Check out this 15-minute webinar “How Changing Your Anger Can Help you be a Smarter Parent”