Last Updated on September 14, 2023 by Lori Pace
All moms experience yelling at one time or another. Motherhood can sometimes be very difficult for some days. This is the hard, cold truth. Yelling is a natural outcome when you combine the behavior issues of our children with our emotional struggles and really bad days. However, mom yelling doesn’t all bad for every occasions.
The Reason To Mom Yelling
You don’t want to shout at your children, but it may only be the option at the time and it would always bring you a quick win. But what you’re unaware of is that your communication with your children was broken.
Yelling at our children all the time can be a problem. Imagine if your spouse yelled at you all the time because they were getting on your nerves. Instead of communicating respectfully, you yelled at your spouse and nagged.
The same goes for our children. Anger and shouting sends fear-laden messages to the brain about our anger source. Our children are just one example. Also, yelling sends fear signals to our children’s brains. Studies have shown that it also has detrimental effects on their brains. Combining how we feel when we yell and how it makes our children feel, it can really limit our ability to have close, intimate, and sometimes even playful relationships with them.
What We Need To Ask Ourselves
If you are yelling every day, I encourage you to stop and think about why.
- Do you feel like you are hanging on the end of your ropes?
- Are you feeling exhausted and stressed beyond what you have ever experienced?
- Are you looking for a better way to motivate your children to listen and not yell?
- Is there an unresolved source of anger bubbling beneath the surface?
Only you can answer those questions. Only you can decide if you want and need to change. It is not my job or anyone else’s responsibility to tell you that there are problems or that you need to make changes. You are smart enough and competent enough to make that decision for yourself.
What You Probably Don’t Know About Mom Yelling
Our kids are being taught to obey and listen when we shout. Second, yelling is more about us as individuals and how we feel in the moment than about our children and their actions in that moment.
Imagine that your spouse just returned home with the terrible news that his job is being eliminated by his company. He will be laid off next month. Your heart rate suddenly spikes and you feel overwhelmed by anxiety, fear and frustration. Your 4-year-old son, who is a big brother to your older sister, decided to make a mural on the kitchen’s wall.
What do you think your reaction would be to that wall and to your son? What would you do and say? Let’s try to change the situation a little. Imagine your husband comes home from work and announces that he has finally been awarded the promotion he had been dreaming of for the past two years.
You can move into the area you have been dreaming of for over a decade, with your husband’s increasing salary and bonus. You feel elated, and you are filled with hope. Then you suddenly notice your son’s art project as you walk into the kitchen to get a drink of water.
What do you think your reaction would be to your son and the wall? Do you think it would be different from the previous one? Are you tempted to yell and scream?
What Mom Yelling Is Not
Yelling does not have to be a way of controlling you. If shouting is about us, and not our children, that means we have the ability to control the only thing that we can control… ourselves.
We cannot make our children behave differently, make better decisions, or do things exactly the way we want. This is the definition of having a robot. If you have been a parent for more than 5 minutes, then you will know that there is no off switch and mute button.
We can still have the courage to change. One that helps us learn more effective ways to get our children to listen without having to constantly remind them (yes, it is possible). One that allows us to manage our emotions in healthy ways. The best gift you can get is your children listening to you, and the relationships that you have been able to build with them.
Less Yelling Is Just A Happy By-Product
It’s time for some work if you feel stuck in a cycle or yelling and are unable to figure it out. You don’t need to shout unless you want to. Your focus should not be on yelling. There is always an underlying cause which requires more attention.
You can be a calmer, more playful mom than you have been for a while. A person who isn’t overwhelmed and burned out. If I can do it… you can do it. It is a side effect of solving the problem, not a way to yell at your kids less!
