Children can be downright wild. That’s why being a parent can get frustrating at times.
Nobody said that parenting was going to be easy.
But that’s no excuse to constantly scream at your children. In fact, it can be doing your children permanent harm.
Everyone loses their temper once in a while.
We are human after all.
But a study published in The Journal of Child Development says regularly yelling at your children can have the same effects at hitting them.
Kids who get are yelled at regularly tend to have higher rates of depression and anxiety.
It also can cause them to have lower self-esteem and behavioral problems.
Screaming at your children is only setting them up to yell at others or expect to be yelled at when they get older, Positive Outlooks explains. And those are just some of the psychological impacts.
“The power parents hold over young kids is absolute. To them, their folks are humans twice their size who provide things they need to live: Food, shelter, love — Nick Jr. When that person they trust implicitly frightens them, it rocks their sense of security. And yes, it’s truly frightening for a child, “ Dr. Laura Markham, founder of Aha! Parenting and author of Peaceful Parent said.
This is because yelling changes the way a child’s brain works.
It creates neural pathways that tell the child they are in danger which forces them to react in a fight, flight, or freeze mode. That type of response will then be engrained in their personality.
Yelling is also just ineffective.
It just makes your kids not want to listen to you.
Basically, yelling just serves a release for the parent who is too weak or tired to deal with emotions their in a healthy way.
“If the goal of the parent is catharsis, I want to get this out of my system and show you how mad I am, well, yelling is probably perfect,” Dr. Alan Kazdin, a professor of psychology and child psychiatry at Yale, told the New York Times. “If the goal here is to change something in the child or develop a positive habit in the child, yelling is not the way to do that.”
The best way to discipline your children is to engage in calm conversation.
Try responding with a sense of humor while maintaining authority but still connecting to them. It’s important to explain what they’ve done wrong
Use positive and negative reinforcement. If they do what they’re supposed to, praise them.
If they don’t establish consequences without yelling or being aggressive.
Yelling at them once and a while is OK “When you have kids hitting each other, like siblings, or there’s real danger,“ Markham said.
This is when shocking them actually works and halts a dangerous situation. There is an actual risk and danger so the neural pathway to a fight, flight, or freeze response is justice.
But once you do get your child’s attention, be sure to modulate your voice and remedy the situation in a calm way. You can find more tips on how to stop yelling at your kids while being an effective disciplinarian here.
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