I would like shouting to be as socially unacceptable as pushing into the queue at the post office. Let me tell you why. Anger is not an effective way to relate to your children – or, for that matter, to yourself. Raised voices tempt frustration and trigger angry responses. They erode the self-esteem of your child, cause anxiety and even promote poor future behaviour. It is time that we stop wasting so much energy on something so utterly redundant.
Of course, many of you will know this already. We know that shouting doesn’t help. Yet lots of us will have experienced being unbelievably patient for long periods of time, then snapping and exploding inappropriately at the most unexpected moments. Every parent has had these experiences and then beaten themselves up about them. To stop this behaviour that often feels so intuitive we need to understand what is going on in these moments; essentially your emotional mind playing havoc with your ability to be rational and consistent. You will also need to appreciate that in these emotionally heightened moments, focusing your energy on controlling your own behaviour is far more effective than trying to control your child.
The process starts with working out why your child is causing such a disproportionate response in you. Do you know which buttons they are pressing? Do you even know what those buttons are? Our buttons could be driven by learned behaviour that has become intuitive. They can be linked to our worries, our own guilt and deficiencies. Our children may be causing us to project our own anxieties or insecurities back onto them.
There are times when it might feel like your child doesn’t love, like or value you as a parent which would be a trigger for many of us. In some cases, shouting can be a trauma response. As parents, life may have made us hyper-vigilant towards perceived threats. As a result our emotional responses can be off and running before rational thought has had a chance to put its trousers on. More often, it is a FEAR reaction; False Expectations Appearing Real. We are good at projecting our own fears onto our children. So the child stealing an illicit hour of late-night gaming sparks a cascade of false expectations. The worry accelerates from ‘They cannot be trusted’ to ‘What else have they been lying about?’ to ‘She’ll end up in prison for fraud, I just know it’.
These fears that your child will take the wrong path are strong, and rightly so. Parental worry begins as soon as your child is born and lasts a lifetime. But you can stop it affecting how you deal with behaviour.
The journey to becoming an emotionally regulated adult starts with some research. For five days, note down every time your response to your child is instinctively emotional. You will find the regardless of the context, there are certain behaviours that cause you to respond with an almost automatic harshness. Make a note of when your emotional buttons get pushed. Are they more easily poked when you are tired, overworked or overwhelmed?
Once you have spotted your buttons, you can start to get rid of them. That is not always straightforward. You will need to learn to pause. When you feel your emotions rising, allow yourself a moment. Give yourself an instruction to breathe, to focus on something different or imagine yourself stepping back from the situation and thinking it through before you respond.
With practice, you will be able to eliminate almost anything that would give away your emotional response. Strip out the screw face, the eyeroll, the tut, the shrug. Remove every scintilla of aggression and frustration, every shard of irritation and anger.
You may have to fake your performance as an emotionally regulated adult until it becomes consistent. To help you, you can lower your shoulders, open your palms and release your jaw. Think of a few words you can say that will help diffuse situations. ‘You really matter to me. Let’s take a moment’ might help. Thinking of a recent occasion where your child was kind, loving or otherwise brilliant will also automatically redirect some of your emotional thinking.
Practice zooming out and rationalising what is in front you. Remind yourself this is just behaviour, just a moment. It signifies nothing and it is not a reflection on your parenting or your child’s future. What is for certain is that in the moments you either have the opportunity to foster emotional safety; to model calm and consistent behaviour and end the cycle of shaming that so many of us have been exposed to.
This is the very first principle of relational parenting in action; When the parents change, everything changes.
Paul Dix is a specialist in children’s behaviour and the author of When the Parents Change, Everything Changes: Seismic Shifts in Children’s Behaviour
