How To Stop Yelling At Children. Manual

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Author: Ekaterina Sigitova

Many parents understand perfectly well that they shouldn't yell at children and scold themselves for yelling - but for various reasons they cannot stop. Pity for parents, pity for children. I have put together a very detailed guide to teach you what to do if you really want to quit. The instructions will not contain instructions on how to intimidate and train children so that they no longer need to shout at them. There will also be no magic passes "just understand that …". And most importantly, there will be no tragic enumeration of the consequences of the scream. It still doesn't work, it just overloads the parents with a sense of guilt - but for some reason, every article starts with this.

This manual contains only specific steps, schemes and self-help, only hardcore.

Before you start reading, be very careful about two points:

I know you are drowning in an ocean of guilt and shame every time you fail again, and between these times, and in general almost all the time. You consider yourself a bad, unrestrained, hysterical parent and think with horror about how many years your child will go to a therapist when he grows up.

So that's it.

Stop right now. It is necessary to stop the flow of toxic guilt, at least while working with this manual. Not because you are right, not because you are behaving well, not because of this. But because while you are in the zone of guilt, you and I will not be able to change anything at all. This is the kind of fuel that only feeds itself and burns everything around. So, to begin with, it is very important for us to move out of the “right-to-blame” layer into the layer of responsibility. Try it.

So, you need to do your best to stay in the area of responsibility, without falling into guilt and shame. Save energy and don't pour water on this mill because you will need it for another. Deal?

It will take some time before you learn not to scream. At least a few weeks, sometimes months. If you scream a lot, then this is an old and sturdy pattern of behavior. It is impossible to quickly learn another template (the old one is always closer and does not require effort). So, for a while you will learn, try new things and gain experience. Most likely, during this time you will scream again several times. This is fine for several reasons:

- firstly, absolutely no one can immediately "get up and go", you have to fall and stumble several times;

- secondly, a relapse is not always a relapse, sometimes it is the “last check” before the final transition to a new life;

- thirdly, children are sharpened to try their parents for strength and stability. This is part of their childhood process, so they can invent new ways to get you to react while you deal with the old ones.

But you can handle it all in the end, I'm sure. Just not immediately, not instantly. You need to be patient.

Well, let's get started.

Let me tell you about the wonderful things that start to happen when you stop screaming:

1. Children will feel safe with you and will not be afraid of you;
2. Children will feel that you are in control, that you are a stronger and more responsible figure than them;
3. Children will learn many ways to react in situations when someone is tired, angry, exhausted, etc.;
4. Children will learn responsibility and become accustomed to looking for solutions to the problem, not just ways to release emotions for relief;
5. Children will learn that in order to solve a problem, it is sometimes necessary to change their behavior, and not just wait out a scandal;
6. Children will listen to you not only when you speak in a raised voice; and, in principle, they will listen to you more;
7. Children will not yell at others, incl. then on their children.

Why are you screaming? There are background factors for screaming, and its immediate causes. Let's consider them separately.

Maternal isolation.

Maybe both paternal and grandmother's. The condition is that you are invariably responsible for the child 24/7, for months and years in a row, which is why you are sharply limited in your personal and social life. This is one of the known risk factors for parental aggression. The term "maternal" means that women are most often isolated, incl. in the presence of husbands. The mechanism here is this: the parent who feels "locked" because of the child, and is forced to pull the burden of parenting alone, gradually gets tired. When fatigue is close to critical, natural defensive anger against the "cause" begins to build up.

Exhaustion.

We include lack of sleep, any overload, background fatigue from life, depression, many chronic diseases, and so on, which consumes your mental and physical resources. People are not made of iron, it seems to be an understandable and simple thing, but we diligently ignore it and drag on, on parole and on one wing. But the less the resource, the more primitive the mental defenses (since there are no more forces for more complex ones). Among the most primitive there is always a cry somewhere.

Perfectionism.

Perfectionist parents have a wildly hard life (I say without a drop of irony). Any children are pieces of raging plasma, chaos itself with a capital X. Not every adult with a stable psyche is able to withstand them for a long time. And for an unstable person, for whom the order and correctness of what is happening is very, very important, all the more difficult with children. If the children are also their own, then they, in addition to creating chaos around and inside, also personally emotionally involve the parents, because they are not “right”. They do not comply with any rules and laws, do not meet expectations, etc. In general, in hell for perfectionists there are not chipped cauldrons at all, it seems to me, but children. A lot of children. You scream here.

Stress.

A parent's scream is one of the possible automatic stress responses of the psyche to a strong negative event associated with a child. So strong that the parent-child system is threatened (real or perceived). In response to the threat, a natural process is triggered in the parent's body that alters the chemistry of the brain and body. The process is similar to that when a hazard occurs. So that we can act quickly, certain hormones begin to be produced in the body, with the blood flow they go to the target organs (heart, brain, muscles). At these times, the complex and rational parts of the brain are temporarily "turned off" in order to shorten the reaction time. We are starting to use an older and more "animal" part of the brain. Unfortunately, all of her answers boil down to the well-known "hit, freeze or flight", so that thoughtful and safe parenting behavior does not work.

Powerlessness and despair.

Your child does something wrong over and over again. And it is very important for you not so much the ideal fulfillment as the feeling that he at least learns and changes, and his feelings do not. Everything is exactly as it was. You fight like a fish on ice, you waste your last strength - and still you cannot move or change anything. And in the next situation, which mirrors the previous ones, a powerless cry arises: I CAN'T ANYMORE!

Completely expired forces.

This is a defensive cry. It appears when there is a real threat to your mental state. For example, you have used up all your mental and physical strength, but the child, home, everyday life and the environment continue to actively demand from you right now, without asking if you can. At the moment when the last drop of strength remains, and someone again demands something, your body gives an alarm signal - and this demand begins to be regarded as an attack. And we shout: STOP! LEAVE ME ALONE!

Rage.

Dr. Winnicott, a psychoanalyst, wrote that absolutely all mothers feel that their children are controlled, exploited, tortured, dried up and criticized, and any mother periodically hates her child, which is perfectly natural. Unfortunately, different mothers are very differently resistant to this conflict - to love and hate the same child at the same time. Those who are not good at keeping this balance can often break into screaming, and not only at him.

The feeling that we are being torn apart.

Also a defensive cry, with the aim of stopping the tearing. One child is crying, the second right now wants to play robbers and waving a plastic knife in front of your nose, the phone rings loudly, the spouse from another room asks about something, from all this you stumble and drop the cup, and you need to immediately sweep up the fragments, otherwise someone will cut themselves. At the moment of overlapping many aggressive requirements of the environment, your psyche turns on a red signal: DANGER! I DO NOT ENOUGH FOR EVERYTHING!

Disappointment in the child.

Do you know the painful feeling when your child knows and remembers everything perfectly at home, but at a lesson or at a concert he hums, makes mistakes and shows the level much lower? And is the unpleasant sensation familiar when you explain to him 30 times, and on the 31st it turns out that he did not understand? And when you discover that in some ways he still thinks and acts very primitively, although he seems to be smart? How do you feel when other children are more successful and smarter? Do not bitter thoughts creep in that something is wrong with him? … All this is called "violated expectations", and it is experienced the more acutely, the higher these expectations were initially. Unfortunately, few people know that children are children. If a child slows down on "showing skills and knowledge", then it is not he who is dumber than you thought, but simply from stress he loses part of his brain resource. That is, your child is not the perfect one who produces excellent results in any situation. Basically, parents have nowhere to find out about this, and they struggle with their expectations very painfully. And they scream at the children from this pain.

Personal trigger firing.

A trigger is a stimulus event, something that triggers an immediate violent reaction in you. Typically, all triggers come from the past and mean either unresolved (micro) trauma or negative experiences. For example, you cannot tolerate duplicate messages. Or your visor falls when there is a loud screeching around. Or you are literally thrown up when you are interrupted and not allowed to finish. Or you jerk when touched without asking. Or you instantly become enraged at the hint that you are a bad mother. Etc. A trigger is always a portal to a piece of living past pain, and the result at the level of your behavior is appropriate.

Damage and desire to punish.

Such screaming is a frequent consequence of a parent's childhood trauma (including from screaming and corporal punishment in his own childhood). Traumatics, even well-developed ones, have very little resource. And they also have lifelong memories of the nightmare that they had to endure during the very injury - just then the lack of resources turned out to be critical. They don't want to go there anymore. They are ready to defend themselves with teeth and claws if they feel that they are slipping there. Therefore, parenting for traumatic people is a separate challenge to all their forces, not only because of the threat to the resource. But because every now and then the characters of the Karpman triangle jump out on the stage. For example, the desire to yell at a child for his moral or other damage is a cry of pain and rage of the victim: PUNISH THE AGGRESSOR!

Feeling of loss of control and helplessness.

It is important not to get confused here. The scream is itself a moment of loss of control and helplessness. But sometimes it is also caused by feelings of loss of control and helplessness. Such a vicious circle. For example, for some business it is very important for us that everything goes in order. Once - and something disturbed the order, we coped. Two - failure again. We did it again, but with difficulty. Three, four, five … At some point, the strength is not enough, and everything goes to hell. Whether you scream or not depends on how important it is for you to maintain control here and in life in general. If control is your sore subject, then you will often break down on this point.

Experienced fear for the child.

I do not mean that cry STOOOY !, which we issue if we see that a child is running under the car right now. No, I'm talking about the post factum cry, when the threat has already passed. You've probably seen how parents yell at children or punish them after being pulled out of a dangerous place, or finding a lost one, etc.? The reason is an extremely strong emotion of fear, which the parent's psyche cannot cope with on its own. There is no habit, for example, or no one has taught, or something else. Then all this waterfall falls on the one who caused the feelings. It doesn't matter that he is small and should not be responsible for this emotion at all.

Feeling imperfect as a parent.

When we have children, it's pretty normal to fantasize about how this will all be. What kind of children they will be, what kind of parents will we be. Fantasies, one way or another, revolve around the "ideal image" - for some it is a pastoral with three happy children and a calm mother at Sunday breakfast on the veranda, for others. It’s not for me to tell you that the realities of parenting, as a rule, turn out to be completely opposite. And when we very painfully knock about our failures in achieving this ideal, when we are afraid that the child will see our parental mistakes and also understand everything - we can scream.

Desire to "blow off steam"

Item is partially similar to item 9, with one slight difference. In this version, the parent shouts at the child from his own strong experiences, to which the child has nothing to do, even indirectly. Got a hand, in short, and wasn't strong enough to answer. Unfortunately, those who scream for this reason very rarely read such manuals, because for them the scheme "hit the nearest, who is weaker" works well all their lives, and they consider it very correct.

What to do with all this?

I think you need to learn new behaviors, ways of reaction and habits that will help you in all these moments - so that you can avoid them "without a fight."

1. Announcement.

Directly inform the children and family that you are going to stop yelling. This is psychologically extremely difficult to do, but at the same time it will help you a lot (not only to re-establish contact, but also not to give up). You can add that you will learn, and, unfortunately, you will not learn right away. There will be mistakes, but you will gradually control yourself better and better, and in the end you will definitely win the cry.

1. Permission.

Give the children permission to interrupt you or leave the room when you start screaming. Without consequences for them. Yes, this is impolite and against the rules of decency, but your cry does not fit into them either. So give the kids this opportunity to act so they don't feel like victims. In addition, the child in this way will give you a very clear signal that you have lost control - which in itself will help you return to reality.



1. Support.

Ask family and close friends for support and help. Talk to them, admit your problem. It may turn out (and, most likely, it will turn out) that some of them had or are having similar difficulties. Your loved ones may also have fresh ideas for things to do, or helpful insights into your typical triggers. It's great if one of them agrees to help you right at the moment of the cry - you can agree on exactly how.

1. Mantra.

Come up with a mantra that will be your lifeline and catapult from your emotional funnel. Learn to remember and use it in situations when you are stormy, you have lost control and do not know what to do. This is usually a simple 3-5 word phrase meaning something that you would like to strive for and for which in general it all started. I really like, for example, this one: "I choose love." Or I also met such an option: "Shout - only for salvation." If you say these words to yourself when you lose control, it is much easier to stop.

1. Feelings

In our mentality, two extremes are very common: we either accumulate emotions, or let off steam at everyone in a row. Often one turns into another - the pressure in the boiler builds up and the lid breaks off, and then we save it up again until the next breakdown. Meanwhile, both are harmful to health and family. Start to master the intermediate option: notice your emotions, acknowledge them and give them a place. That is, bring feelings and experiences into communication BEFORE your head starts to burst.



1. Stop.

Stop at any time. Not only at the beginning of a fight, and not only when you are already tired of screaming. No, it is possible in the middle of a phrase, and when you are emotionally unwound, and when you have already suffered - in general, absolutely at any second, as soon as you realize that something is wrong again. At any time, you can interrupt yourself and not continue, and this will be a huge breakthrough, and you will be great. When you do this for the first time, you will find out how resourceful this feeling is. I really wish you to taste it as soon as possible.

1. Time-out.

Use a parental timeout. What exactly does this mean? If you find yourself losing your temper, separate yourself from the child physically, move away from him (ideally, to another room). Wash yourself - preferably with cool water. Sip some water or eat something small like a crouton or apple. Breathe deeply and slowly, 10-15 times. And return to the child - not earlier than in 5-7 minutes. All of this is needed for the biochemical compounds in your blood and brain that are responsible for anger, stress, and impulsive actions to disintegrate or be transformed.

1. Triggers.

It is quite natural to lose your composure if you are attacked by something insurmountable and excruciating. Therefore, you need to think about how to minimize such attacks. Write on a sheet of paper all the triggers that throw you personally into the screaming zone (see the theoretical part - you can take and supplement your own from there). Hang this sheet where you will often see it. Gradually memorize triggers, get used to noticing their appearance, as well as the layering of triggers. When you are already well oriented and notice everything in time, start planning to avoid, work out or compensate for triggers (there is little point in planning earlier, because the choice will appear only after you become comfortable with observation).



1. Analysis

The item is interconnected with the previous one. Take a close look at your life and how many "risk zones" you have and how they are distributed. For example, periods when you are very tired, when triggers are stacked on top of each other, when you are overwhelmed with tasks or find yourself in a desperate situation.

It will be great to end up doing something like a table, graph or map that will highlight the problem areas. Can you imagine Yandex traffic jams? Something like this may look like this: the road is green - everything is in order, it turns yellow - increased attention is needed, if we go to the red zone - there is a high risk of breakdown and screaming.

I will give here an example of a tablet of a spherical working mother with two schoolchildren. In every cell of the day and time there are inscribed activities and processes that potentially threaten to disrupt the internal "regulator". Explanations in brackets. Empty spaces mean that everything is "clean" at this time. Then you can paint all the "dangerous" cases in red, "average" in yellow, and "almost good" in green, and see what happens.



More than three yellow or 1-2 red in a row - potential breakdown and scream. Several yellow and several red together - an almost guaranteed breakdown and scream (here it is clearly the very morning and evening 18-20 hours).

If numbers are more your thing, rate each case on a 10-point scale. 0 - cloudless, 10 - extremely difficult and stressful. Then add up the scores and make something like a graph like this.



You can immediately see where the peak voltage is (usually, the potential stall zone is 15 points or more, but you can have an individual value higher or lower).

This is one way you can invent your own. The essence of all these visualizations, firstly, is that you learn to perceive your day as a tracker, with natural ups and downs of energy and mental strength, and know how to notice the entrance to the risk zone. You can also ask for help and substitutions when you feel that the limit is near. And also calculations and graphs help to blame yourself less, because it becomes very clearly visible that you are actually depleting a common resource.

10. Optimization

Think about what and where you can change in your life so that as many "red zones" as possible turn into "yellow" ones (or the scores dropped to 10-12 at least). Believe me, I understand very well how difficult and even impossible this can be. But, unfortunately, the answer "nothing and nowhere can be changed" will mean that you will continue to break down in exactly the same places as before. Because if your day is built on Wednesday so that by 17-00 you have no strength left, but you still need to function further and not sit down until 23-00, then I have bad news for you. There is no magic solution, really.

11. Delegation.

Give and delegate as much as possible. Not only where it is possible, but also where it is impossible. And just forget about the part (especially if there is no one to give and delegate to). Yes Yes. Very often those who are overloaded with responsibility shout in the family (including because no one else was eager to take it). And giving it away is wildly difficult, because it has grown. I'm ready to argue, only you know how to do what is required correctly and on time. Surely family members do not cope with the same tasks at all, or they cope in such a way that then everyone is worse off. This means that they will have to learn, and you will temporarily endure bad results. Yes, they may be unhappy with the dropped load, especially if before that you dragged it all meekly. But I strongly suspect that your non-yelling at children is in the interests of everyone, and it makes sense to clearly convey this.



12. Taking care of yourself

Take some time to relax. It is desirable not less than half an hour a day. Remember the joke "Sha, children, I make you a good mom"? You definitely need such time, free from children, everyday life, work and other worries - and not once a week, but more often. Because if the vessel is regularly empty, it must also be filled regularly. Most likely, attempts to win back personal time will first run into resistance - the same children and spouse (children, by the way, generally do not understand well that their parents do not belong to them). But this is a guarantee of your mental adequacy, so you have to be more persistent.

Are you tired? Nothing, it's almost over.



And finally, something



Is there anything you can do about shouting while you master the algorithm and work on the strategy? Can. There are a number of little tricks you can use to temporarily turn off the screaming. I call them cheating, because they are not very reliable, they do not change the essence of the problem and only act on one or two specific situations. But for the first time they will do.



And finally …



Whoever has read this far and is not tired is a fine fellow. The last thing I want to say here is …



This is their job. They are immature people, they study how it all works and what to expect from the world in general. They definitely need to try your boundaries in order to understand where their own, and what to lean on. They will certainly experiment with permissiveness and thus learn responsibility. Their prefrontal cortex is still underdeveloped, so emotions often take over and they lose the ability to think and respond appropriately.

They are just children.

And you started shouting at them not at all because you had nothing to do. Often this is absorbed from the family, from their own parents. And many of us have no other patterns at all, so it may seem like these bad patterns are ingrained and there is no way to overcome them.

So that's it.

I want to draw your attention to the fact that you have a lot of tools and resources. Your parents did the best they could, but they didn't have psychotherapy, the Internet, ready-made child psychology studies, parenting courses and groups, this manual, and much more. In addition to all these wonderful things, we have the knowledge that exactly of their methods did not work. We can create our own new ways, and our parental behavior - at least on this basis. In fact, our base is much larger.

You are wonderful mums and dads, and I am sure you will succeed.