Yelling at children—especially younger kids—appears to be effective. They stop whatever they’re doing (or not meant to be doing) and start obeying you.
Even so, here’s why experts are recommending we reserve yelling only for when we need to protect them from impending harm or threat (such as when they’re about to run onto oncoming traffic).
1. It’s a short-term solution
While yelling may indeed produce an immediate result, it doesn’t actually address the behavioural problem. In fact, a study on 13-year-olds discovered that the yelling resulted in increased levels of bad behaviour the following year.
2. They stop listening
Imagine someone twice your size, face contorted in anger and speaking to you in a loud voice. Surely the only thing you want to do is run away and hide. Even worse, it simply teaches the child to fear you.
3. They yell back
Dr Laura Markham is a clinical psychologist and author of Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids: How to Stop Yelling and Start Connecting. “Yelling scares kids. It makes them harden their hearts to us. And when we yell, kids go into fight, flight or freeze, so they stop learning whatever we’re trying to teach. What’s more, when we yell, it trains kids not to listen to us until we raise our voice. And it trains them to yell back,” she writes on her website.
If you’ve yelled at your children (and let’s face it, which one of us hasn’t?) be assured you haven’t done irreparable damage. As child psychiatrist Dr Kyle Pruett puts it: “[Thinking you may have done long-lasting damage by yelling at your kid is] a somewhat narcissistic view of parenting. Because there are tons of other forces at work including their own neural-developmental progress.”
So, what should I do?
While we really shouldn’t be yelling at our kids, it’s what we do after we yell that matters.
“If we can model apologising when we have done the wrong thing and tell our children the steps we will take to improve and change our behaviour the next time, they learn about growth,” says psychologist Collett Smart.
The secret lies in a concept experts call “rupture and repair”. Reality means that our relationships with our children will rupture at some point (or at many points in a day), through yelling, anger or frustration. The repair is the ability to talk to our children about it after, when we’ve calmed down, and apologise for the fracture.
Needless to say, rupture and repair isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card. It doesn’t mean we can continue rupturing whenever and wherever. We still need to learn from the mistakes and do better next time. The key is to show ourselves some compassion and be able to move on from whatever we’ve done wrong.
Children don’t need a perfect parent. What they need is a loving, present parent who isn’t afraid to own their mistakes and apologise when they need to.