My reply:
I read a blog post today, ‘The Important Thing About Yelling.’ In the post a mother confesses to yelling at her children as a result of her busy life and those everyday life distractions. She tells about her experiences in yelling at her children and specifically explains a look she got from her daughter when she accidentally spilled a box of rice. The women explained that it was that look that broke her down, she had realized that her children were afraid of her. She said that she was not the mother that she wanted her kids to grow up with.
I think many parents feel like this at one point or another. I know that I have yelled at my son and sat there and thought to myself, “what did I just do?” Sometimes life get’s you down, it’s easy to loose control.
I don’t think there is a problem with raising your voice to your child when the time calls, but I don’t want to yell….ever. What does yelling do, how does it help? ….the answer is, it doesn’t.
1) Yelling is a sign of weakness…it shows you lack control.
2) Yelling creates a environment that no one wants to be in. If you constantly yell at your kids they are eventually going to pull away from you in fear that they will get yelled at for yet another thing they “did wrong.”
3) Yelling at another person just get’s you upset, it does not relieve any stress…it just causes more.
4) When your yelling, no one is listening to you, so you are not accomplishing anything, only conveying fear and in some cases embarrassing yourself.
I think it is important to remember that we are all human and we all make mistakes. It is easy to get off track in your life. In one instant everything you said that you weren’t going to do, all of those ugly behaviors you didn’t want to have, can come out. I think it helps to find someone in your life that can help you to stay on track. Like a spouse, if you can correct each other’s behavior in a loving, non-judgmental way with the mutual goal of helping each other to continually work a little harder to be a little better…I think that finding that person to help is key. In some ways my son even helps correct me in my attempts to correct him. I sometimes talk to Matthew about how I want to be talked to and I then ask how he wants to be talked to. In one of those conversations he told me that he did not want to be yelled at, and I said, “neither do I.” I correct him when he does something “wrong” (I hate that term because if you are learning, there is no wrong), and sometimes he even gives me a reminder of how I want to treat him.
When you think about how you would want other people to treat your kids, do you live up to your own standards?
It’s hard though. Everyday you see people acting in ways that maybe they didn’t intend to, I’m sure most people don’t wake up in the morning and plan to cuss out a cashier at McDonalds because they screwed up their order (I watched this happen last week). But what do you do? You can’t go around correcting people’s behavior. Unless that correction is coming gently from someone you know and trust, it won’t be well received. In fact, even if it is coming from someone you know and trust it still may not be well received. My husband often corrects me, as I do him, and most of the time neither one of us receives those corrections well.
So what do you do? Well I don’t know, but I sure don’t want to be that mom who you see yelling at their kids across the grocery store because at some point they got so used to yelling at them that yelling has now become their general form of communication.
I want a calm household, where we talk…not yell.
Kendra Lewis 