Is it Ever Okay for Me to Yell at My Kids?

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Reena Ninan
Episode #218: Is it Ever Okay for Me to Yell at My Kids?

Everyone is doing so much in the parenting world, and I have found I have losing my cool constantly. So I was thrilled to be able to talk about the subject on yelling. I’ll get right to the letter.

Lisa Damour
Let’s do it.

Reena Ninan
Dear Dr, Lisa, I’m reaching out to you as a worried and exhausted parent who feels like I’m losing my way. I’m a working mom who has to go into the office daily, juggle work trips and manage everything that comes with raising a family. It feels like I’m constantly stretched thin and in the midst of all the stress and chaos, I’ve become the parent I never wanted to be the one who yells all the time. The mornings are the hardest. Getting the kids out the door for school feels like an endless battle. Then it starts all over again in the afternoons and evenings, homework, study, chores, bedtime routines. It’s like every part of the day is another opportunity for me to lose my temper. I hear myself yelling at them constantly, and I hate it. I know this isn’t the kind of parent I want to be. I worry that my yelling is damaging my connection with my kids. I also fear that I’m modeling the worst behavior and the worst way to handle stress, teaching them to respond with frustration rather than patience. But I don’t know how to stop it’s like the stress just takes over. The words come out before I even have a chance to think I’d be so grateful for your guidance. Are there strategies to help me stop yelling and manage these moments better? How can I stay calm when everything feels overwhelming? I want to create a more peaceful home, both for my kids and for myself, but I’m struggling to figure out how to get there. Thank you for all the work you do and the wisdom you share. I’m hopeful you can help me and so many other parents like me find a better way.

Oh my gosh, amen to every bit of that.

Lisa Damour
A triple plus for honesty here, right? I mean, absolutely.

Reena Ninan
So can we just acknowledge this is a very common thing?

Lisa Damour
Yeah, yeah. So Reena, do you yell at your kids?

Reena Ninan
Oh my gosh. I mean, I just… I don’t want to, but you put it this way, I feel like I lose my cool all the time, this year, more than most, right? And I think part of it is because I’m entering the phase of challenging, and I just don’t have the patience for somebody to challenge what I’m asking you to do, or somebody not to care. But is it harmful for our relationship with kids when parents yell?

Lisa Damour
I think occasional yelling, and I’ll tell you under the conditions I think that maybe it’s not harmful, but if you’re yelling all the time, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it would be harmful for any relationship between any two humans if one person’s yelling all the time and the other person is on the receiving end of that.

Reena Ninan
Do you know what it is my kids say: “You’re bringing in bad vibes.” So it might not be like yelling, but they’re just like, I’m like, can you please…? And they look at that even me, like, it’s like more nagging. But they view that equally like yelling.

Lisa Damour
Well, and actually interesting that you should say that. We have some research lab studies that–

Reena Ninan
Oh God…

Lisa Damour
No, that to teenagers who feel everything more intensely, what actually may objectively be an adult being stern is perceived by them as yelling. So you might not even be yelling, and your kid might be feeling like you’re yelling. So that’s not great.

Reena Ninan
That is exactly what they feel.

Lisa Damour
Yeah, the lab science has their back.

Reena Ninan
Walk us through the potential consequences of having a parent who yells all the time.

Lisa Damour
Well, there’s a few. And they’re real. So one is, I think kids are going to just start to be avoidant, or kids are going to yell back. I mean, I don’t think our kids are just going to buckle. I mean, no outcomes that we really want. I think also, yelling is problematic if you do it all the time, because then it doesn’t mean anything. If you yell about everything, then everything is at the same level. And one of the ways to think about it is: Did you ever have a smoke alarm that went off all the time?

Reena Ninan
Yeah.

Lisa Damour
You’re making toast, and it goes off. You blow out a candle, it goes off. You know, smoke alarms are supposed to warn us when there’s a problem, and they’re supposed to be loud when there’s a problem to get our attention. Reena, if you had a smoke alarm like that, that went off all the time for no reason, what did you do with it?

Reena Ninan
Took the battery out.

Lisa Damour
Uh-huh, exactly. People just take the battery out, which is basically, they’re like, I’m just going to ignore this, because it is meaningless. It’s annoying and meaningless. It’s not giving me any feedback about the severity of fire hazard. Or, in the case of parenting, my parent yelling isn’t telling me anything, because I can’t tell if it’s a little thing or a middle-sized thing or a big thing I’ve done, because they yell at everything. Kids start to ignore it. They detach from it, because, frankly, they have to. And so the risk is you actually don’t help them build a good conscience. The goal of correcting kids, whether it’s done gently or, it can also be done less gently, and we’ll talk about how to think that through… The goal is to help them start to internalize a sense of conscience. If they’re about to do something that’s not okay we want them to actually become a little bit anxious. And we want them to become anxious because there’s a part of them that’s saying, Don’t go there. And maybe part of them is saying, Don’t go there, because in the past, the parent has become angry about it, and so that’s a good reason to not go there. You don’t get that sort of development of conscience with a kid who’s taken the battery out of the alarm who just has stopped listening altogether.

Reena Ninan
Oh god, I have so many questions. I feel like, can you just give me a list of when I can yell and it’s okay?

Lisa Damour
Well, okay, so is it is it ever okay? Right? I think that that’s a really important question. I am not gonna say no. I am not gonna say all conditions are unacceptable. I do think there can be times where, if it is really big, the parent might be like, I can’t believe you didn’t feed the dog for three days! If it’s really big. Or, I can’t believe you snuck out of the house in the middle of the night! I don’t think it should ever involve swearing at kids. I don’t think it should involve being abusive with them in your language. But Reena, picture this scenario: Where a kid sneaks out, comes driving in at 6am hoping to get in before the parents realize. Parents are standing in the kitchen waiting for that kid, and the kid comes in and the parents are like, Hi, we want to talk with you about what has happened. The kid’s gonna be like, All right, this does not add up. Like, this is super weird. They’re expecting the person like, What the what? Like, where the heck have you been? But it’s gotta be for the big stuff. So it’s gotta be rare. It’s gotta be rare. And then, I mean, there are some families I can imagine who are like, It’s always big stuff with my kid. My kid is acting out at an 11 all the time. That’s a different kind of problem. That is a problem where your kid is suffering, and suffering in ways that involve taking it out on the people around them. You and your kid deserve quality support, professional intervention. If you’re yelling at your kid all the time because they are misbehaving big time all the time, please, please get yourself and your family the support you deserve. The occasional… Good kids do dumb things, and sometimes good kids do really dumb things. The kid’s expecting the parent to react to that.

Reena Ninan
Got it. So are there long term consequences when you yell at your kid?

Lisa Damour
I think yes. If you’re yelling all the time… Not the, what I’m going to call, for lack of a better term, sort of “permissible voice raising” under expectable situations… If you’re yelling all the time, I think that you’re not going to enjoy your kid very much. Your kid’s not enjoying you very much. All of the warmth that you want to have, it’s very hard to make happen in that context. I do think the kid’s going to avoid you. I think the letter writer very aptly says kids are gonna think that this is how we cope, right? When things are frustrating and things are going well, don’t be surprised if you get a call from school that your kid yells a lot, right? I think that there can be really interesting ramifications of this. So let’s help this sweet person who so sweetly wrote to us think about how how to not do this this way.

Reena Ninan
So when you’re overwhelmed and you’ve got so much going on, from work to running the household to dealing with your kids, how do you cope with your level of stress and not yell at your children?

Lisa Damour
Okay, so the magic words you just said are “level of stress.” So one way we can think about this, Reena, is let’s imagine that we’re all like a vessel, like a pitcher of water or something, a pitcher. And let’s say that there’s water in it, and that the water represents our stress level. When I listen to this letter, I get that image in my mind. And what the image is, is that this person’s water level is right at the lip of the vessel all the time. The baseline demands on this person are so high that then their kid acts like a kid, doddles on the way out the door, comes home and needs to be sat on to do some homework, and that that throws another cup of water on, and this person is spilling over. This person is spilling over. And because the water level is so close to the edge, to the top of the vessel, all the time, this person’s spilling over all the time. So a solution among others, is the water level has to come down. Something has to get this person to a place where their baseline stress is not so high, so that they can actually be less reactive to the unavoidable stresses of deciding to have children.

Reena Ninan
That is so interesting. And so how do you walk yourself away? Are there strategies when you feel like you are bubbling over that work to get it together?

Lisa Damour
Two questions, really. One is, how do we get the level down? And then if you can’t, what do you do? So I let’s start with the second one, which is what you’re asking: If you feel like you’re about to lose it, should you remove yourself? And I’d be like, Oh yeah. Yeah. So I think that becoming conscious of that, and even the parents saying, I’m really angry. I feel like I’m gonna yell. I don’t want to yell. I’m gonna go take a walk around the block. I will be back. Do that. Do that. It means that you’re not yelling at your kid. It also is you modeling better coping in the place of coping that you’re not feeling good about. But I also think at the top of the letter there was like, This person has so much on their plate: job, kids, you know, I can’t help but think, okay, those stresses may not be negotiable, right? I mean, they may not be able to get those down. The supports have got to go up, right? What other supports can this person have, whether it’s asking for more help from family or talking to their employer about whether there’s some flexibility to be had in terms of their work demands?

Reena Ninan
But what if none of that’s realistic, like work just expects you to do this, like you can’t go to them. You’re juggling the household and the kids, like it is what it is. You might have some childcare, you might not, but you are really the one carrying the burden of all of this. How do we walk away in a way that we don’t feel like we’re on this treadmill and about to fall off of it?

Lisa Damour
I don’t want to be pollyannish about this. I know there are families who are in exactly the situation you described. Or I think about families who are impoverished, or families who don’t even have a home, right? We have research on what it means to live without a permanent residence or a stable residence, and that they are moving their family from shelter to shelter or couch surfing, right? Like to suggest, Oh, what you need to do is to garner more support so that your stresses come down and then you won’t feel so reactive to your kids… I mean, that’s just not an option. They’re living at at the absolute edge and trying to manage so much, and the fact that they’re upright is kind of a miracle, right?

Reena Ninan
Yeah. Yeah.

Lisa Damour
So there are families in that spot. I also think that sometimes we feel that there’s nothing to be done, and there may be more options than we are willing or have considered until now. If a person finds themselves in this situation, I do think there is value in saying, Where can I take some of the strain off of this system? And it can even be things like, Can we buy more frozen prepared foods? If part of what’s straining the system is trying to figure out how to get dinner made…

Reena Ninan
I have to tell you, it’s a very it’s a big stress.

Lisa Damour
Yeah. And, as you know, we love Costco, and Costco actually has some pretty decent prepared frozen meals, right? If doing that a couple nights a week puts a little room in the system. The thing I like about the water and the vessel metaphor is it doesn’t matter what’s causing the stress, right? A lot of stuff is filling up that vessel. It’s dinner, it’s the dog, it’s maybe a difficult boss. Anything you do to address that is going to drop the water line and make you less reactive to your kids.

Reena Ninan
I want to get back to yelling. If you have yelled and yelled and yelled and you realize you’ve got a problem, but that’s what you’ve done, can you repair past damage on yelling?

Lisa Damour
I think you can. I think you can. I’m a big believer in repair. I don’t think it’ll be easy, and I think you have to be serious about the repair, but I do think that you could very, very thoughtfully and carefully go to your kids and say, I owe you a lot of apology about how yelly I have been. I don’t like it. I know you don’t like it. It’s not the parent I mean to be. I’m going to give you an explanation. This is not an excuse… Talk about your stress level. I’m going to tell you what I’m going to do about that stress level so that I’m going to try to fix this, and then say, My aim going forward is to yell far, far less. And I don’t know that you want to promise like, I will never yell again, right? Kids will be like, Yeah, we’ll just be waiting for it. But say, I’m gonna work on this, and I’ll do my best, and I’m really sorry, and I’m really trying to fix it. And then you have to do it, right? You can’t be like, There, I apologized. We’re back to square one. No, no, no. The apology is the first step, and then the rest flows from that.

Reena Ninan
So Lisa, what if your kids are legitimately misbehaving? What approach do you take then, when you’re so frustrated, you really want to yell at them, because they keep doing it over and over again?

Lisa Damour
So I think you start if you can, and if you’ve got the bandwidth to be like, Hey, knock it off. “Knock it off” is a perfectly reasonable thing to say to kids. And again, I’ve sort of gestured at this in various ways: Kids expect it. Kids know what they’re supposed to do and not supposed to do once they get past four or five years old. They know the rules, even three year olds know the rules.

Reena Ninan
But “knock it off,” I feel like, for so many parents, just doesn’t work. Like they keep doing it.

Lisa Damour
Okay, give it a try. Right? Start there. Be like, “Knock it off.” I think then another layer of this is, “Hey, you and I both know that you’re doing something you’re not supposed to be doing, right?” Refer to the kid’s knowledge of this. You know, “Cut it out.” See if they’ll do it. “I think you know you need to stop. It’s time for you to stop.” I think you can start to do that. I think you can start to have consequences. “I’m asking you to stop. If you don’t stop… We were gonna go get pizza tonight. We’re not gonna get to.” Come up with some consequence that makes sense. I think Reena, when my kids were little, that was always the hardest thing to come up with some rational consequence, because I invariably threatened something that I wanted. Like, “If you don’t cut it out, we’re not going to the zoo.” I’m like, “Oh man, now we’re stuck at home today, all day.” So try to come up with something that actually, if it can fit the crime, if it can be something that you really will follow through on, that’s really best. I will tell you, Reena, I made an adjustment in my parenting between my two daughters. So, Older Daughter, I apologize that you were the one I learned this on. Younger Daughter, lucky you. Because one thing I noticed with my older daughter, and especially when she was a younger kid, and could push buttons, is I would be like, “Hey, please stop. Don’t do that anymore,” while I was quietly getting really, really angry. And then I’d be like, “Aghhh!” Then I would sort of lose it and surprise her and frighten her. And I felt terrible about that. So I think hopefully with her, but definitely with the second kid, the adjustment I made that, you know, people can certainly disagree with this. This is something I felt worked pretty well for us. When a kid was misbehaving, I would say to my second daughter, “Look, I need you to stop, I need you to cut it out. Knock it off. Knock it off.” And I would do it in a calm voice. And then I would say, “You know what, my voice sounds calm, but I’m actually getting angry. And having to ask you over and over again, I’m starting to feel mad, and if I have to keep asking you, I’m gonna be mad.”

Reena Ninan
Ooh, I like that.

Lisa Damour
It worked. At least for us, it worked. Here’s what I found: Then, if she kept at it, I’d be like, “All right…” And then I could be hopefully never unkind, but I could raise the volume level a bit. I could show that I was frustrated and angry and I didn’t feel bad about it. So I was like, “You totally had a warning. This did not come out of nowhere.” I will also tell you with my particular kid, that I really work hard to never generalize from my experience of parenting to anybody else’s experience of parenting, because there’s so much that’s so different family to family. Usually, when I’d say, “You know what, I sound calm, but I actually don’t feel that calm, and I’m working hard to not get mad. But if this keeps up, I’m gonna be really kind of frustrated,” usually, the kid was like, “Okay, I’m good.” Like, they would back off at that point. That was enough to bring it back under control.

Reena Ninan
I like that warning that you’re saying: “My voice may be calm, but I’m about to lose it.”

Lisa Damour
“You’re making me angry.”

Reena Ninan
And it’s a great way for them to also learn, this is something you can use as well, right? We’re talking about strategies that work that aren’t yelling.

Lisa Damour
Yeah, and I think in the home, we do get angry with each other sometimes. And I think to say, “You know what, I sound calm. I don’t feel calm. I’m getting pretty frustrated, and you need to know that…” I think in the outside world, it’s a great thing to model. It’s so interesting to think, Reena, I’m sure you have this from your journalism background about deescalation strategies. You have to have conversations with really difficult people, right? Were there things that you learned when somebody was being out of line, that that you had techniques for managing that?

Reena Ninan
No, because in TV news, everybody’s always out of line.

Lisa Damour
Okay, it’s like, just standard fare?

Reena Ninan
People are not nice to each other, I feel. But I will tell you something someone told me recently. Somebody was acting really obnoxious and at a business meeting, and the person who’s way older than me and wiser said, “Be like water. Just don’t feed the fire with fire, and just be like water. Just back off.” And I actually found that to be interesting, because the analogy of meeting fire with fire just is not a good thing, right?

Lisa Damour
It’s such a good analogy because the other thing is, kids yell at their parents, I think at least as much, if not more, than parents yell at their kids. And especially if you’re on the receiving end of your kid yelling, yelling back at them is not going to make it better. So I think that guidance around if your kid is yelling, if you can be like, “We’re not gonna have this conversation this way. You might have something you need to tell me, we’re not having it this way.”

Reena Ninan
Lisa, before we wrap up, I just want to ask you, I was joking about a cheat sheet for when it’s okay to yell. But can you just give us basic guidelines, just for us as we’re leaving to take away? What are the times where it’s really okay to yell?

Lisa Damour
Okay, I think it should be rare. I’m gonna say again, there should be nothing abusive about it in any form. And frankly, I think it’s when your kid totally expects it. I know kids are very aware of when they have crossed a significant line. And I do think if you can say, “Would it be strange to my kid if I responded to this the way I responded to them forgetting to put their coat on the hook?” If you can say “yes” to that, I think that that lets you know that your kid is not going to be surprised if you raise your voice, and reasonably expects that you’re going to raise your voice. But again, very, very rare, never abusive.

Reena Ninan
Very rare, never abusive. So, Lisa, what do you have for us for Parenting to Go?

Lisa Damour
So Reena, it is interesting, just this question of, Can we get angry at our kids? Or what does it mean to get angry at our kids? Because they make us angry? There’s no question that having kids, from time to time, you will feel angry with them. And I think sometimes it can be like, Oh, you never want to be angry with your kids. You always want to be as gentle as absolutely possible. I think the counter argument is: Part of what happens at home is we teach kids how the world works. And if kids are being jerks, or if they’re being turkeys, or if they’re being totally out of line, the world is not going to be gentle with them. If they are inappropriate, their boss will get angry with them. Their coworkers will get angry with them. And part of our job at home is to prepare kids for those realities. And so when kids are out of line, whether it’s yelling or a more moderated response to be like, “Hey, cut it out. What are you doing?” Or, even better, “That’s not like you. What’s going on?” I think is part of how we show kids what they should reasonably expect from the world beyond and help them, ideally, not even go down that road, because they know what they’re gonna get.

Reena Ninan
I’ve never tried that before, of telling them just to cut it out, because at the point the water is boiled over and I’m very angry, but I’m gonna try that. I’m gonna see how it works. You really believe in it. I think that’s great.

I’ll see you next week.

Lisa Damour
See you next week.