How to stop yelling at your kids
TL;DR: Many individual behaviors we try to treat in therapy are manifestations of society-level problems, not personal failings. This is one pillar of my non-judgmental stance in treatment.
You are in a big box store with your child. You try to avoid the toy aisle, but they find it. They want a nerf gun. You say no, calmly. Your child grabs a nerf gun off the shelf and holds it tight to their chest. You take a deep breath. You’ve already dealt with vomit and Comcast today. You dig deep and validate their feelings of frustration and disappointment. But guess what? Your child doesn’t want validation. They want the nerf gun.
They bolt for the exit. You sprint after your child and grab their arm too hard, as you have vowed not to do. Shame accelerates the anger and ignites. You rip the gun from their arms and explode. Your child is screaming and flailing. Your heart is pounding and breaking.
At home, you sob and type “how to stop yelling at your kids” into the search box. The answers, like “get more exercise,” are both obvious and impossible.
Fear not. This article will never tell you to count backwards from ten. Instead, we will name the deep stress of living in a sick culture that creates the conditions for yelling. To reduce yelling, we will not splash ice water on our faces. We will rebuild the world to sustain us all. Following this simple six-step plan, we will be parenting with grace in no time.
Step 1: Start receiving universal basic income (UBI)
Universal basic income means we no longer have to exchange our essential life force for survival under capitalist overlords. The assets of corporations and billionaires have been redistributed so that everyone receives enough money to cover the necessities of life, like food, housing, healthcare, education, childcare, and transportation.
You know how we yell every single day at 7:48am when our child is not putting their shoes on because we are going to be late for work? Our kids don’t need to hurry up. Our economic system needs to slow down. When everyone’s wellbeing is guaranteed, when no one is denying our vacation request, lo and behold, we are not yelling.
Our souls incarnated to fulfill a specific role in the cosmic dance. With UBI, we are free to pursue our purpose whether it is deemed worthy of remuneration or not. We can say, “Oh, I’m a breather, I’m a respirateur, isn’t that enough?” like Marcel Duchamp. Feeling a true safety net, the impulse to yell naturally recedes.
Step 2: Enroll your child in your local year-round, publicly funded school run on a non-authoritarian model that cultivates students’ intrinsic motivation and deep empathy
These schools reduce yelling because kids’ behavior improves dramatically when they are affirmed as uniquely valuable humans, when their needs for movement and autonomy are met, when the learning is relevant to their existence. Their expansive, psychedelic mind is no longer shoehorned into a Cartesian, de-animated hellscape of linearity and presumed objectivity, and they mellow out.
We aren’t yelling about homework because guess what? There is no homework. Their homework is to play with the baby. Their homework is to chop carrots. Their homework is to sit by the fire and gaze into the flames.
Before, when we were snapping at them to pack their g-d backpacks already, underneath that annoyance lurked the fear that sending them to school could be sending them to their literal death. How can we be calm when we got an email last night about how to talk to our kids about today’s lockdown drill? We don’t want verbiage on how to talk about it, Mike. We want to live in a society that doesn’t require our babies to cower in terror in their place of learning.
Luckily, at our new school, there is no fear of a school shooting because everyone in the greater community is known, valued, and seen. The spiritually desolate conditions of alienation that led people to think they needed assault rifles to be empowered have been replaced by conditions of support, belonging, connection. We are yelling so much less now knowing we can send our children to school confident that their small, soft bodies will return in tact.
Step 3: Live in co-housing
Yelling happens when we have too much to do, too many roles to fill. Once we are settled in affordable, attractive co-housing, the kids have access to so many different people that we don’t have to be their therapist, nurse, chauffeur, tutor, playmate, chef, and wise sage. Socializing doesn’t require color-coded calendars, just opening the front door. Birthday parties happen effortlessly because someone is a baker, someone is a magician, and everyone is already hanging out in the commons. Pale pink flower petals shower down gently from the sky. Yelling is the furthest thing from our minds.
Step 4: End climate change
The nexus of all stressors is knowing that we are on a path to a biosphere incompatible with human life. What even is parenting in this insane context? We read about impending water wars while our teen takes an hour-long shower. They want Takis, we envision the Pacific garbage gyre. No wonder our shit is lost. “For the hundredth time, put your laundry away!” as if that keeps the micro plastics shed in the wash out of their bloodstream.
So instead of yelling at our kids, we yell at our state senators. We yell as we smash a JP Morgan effigy piñata in the town square. We yell “Land back!” We yell to end fossil fuel subsidies. We yell that Amazon doesn’t pay taxes. We yell that we can’t use a reusable container at the deli or bring our water bottle into the WNBA game. We yell with our neighbors at the hearing about the refinery. We yell with our co-workers that we want 401k options that don’t include investing in weapons manufacturers. With all this yelling directed at the true bad actors, boom! Not yelling at kids. Easy peasy.
Step 5: Process all of our personal and intergenerational trauma
Yelling signals that our trauma has been activated. Is our child being rude? Or is the nervous system signature of fleeing Poland three generations ago being rude? The pain of our ancestors has had no reckoning, so it erupts through the mundane modern cracks of car seat installation, wet towels on the floor, spilt milk.
To stop yelling at our kids, we must heal intergenerational trauma. No problem. All we have to do is call our local fully staffed, low-fee mental health clinic with appointments available next week for individual, couples, and family therapy. Mental health cooperatives have also developed community-wide culturally and historically informed rituals to structure larger-scale society-level trauma metabolization—fun!
After a few quick decades of CBT, DBT, EMDR, ACT, MBSR, EFT, somatic experiencing, Jungian psychoanalysis, narrative revisioning, Gestalt therapy, humanistic therapy, and expressive arts therapy, we will have processed all of the personal, collective, and intergenerational trauma, and incidents of yelling will decrease markedly. Just wait and see.
Step 6: Hie thee to the red tent
Anyone who menstruates or loves someone who does knows that the intensity of irritability and yelling follows a cyclical pattern. For most of the month, the righteous rage lies quietly under a weighted blanket of estrogen. Then it is briefly unmasked and seizes the hormonal moment to tell the hard truths that drive evolution. It just needs the right space to express its full power.
Inside the red tent is a reprieve. We are cared for, rather than caring for. It’s bonbons and romcoms all day, baby. Soft lighting, Mayan uterine massage, the darkest of chocolates, the softest of blankets, all the heating pads and cramp bark tincture and NSAIDs anyone could ever want. We twirl tampons over our heads by the strings and ululate. If it looks like a crime scene, that’s because we’re manslaughtering the patriarchy.
We emerge from the red tent spiritually exfoliated, crackling with wisdom, calm and centered. Supported in this way, our rage is wielded and channeled so that it doesn’t misfire as yelling at the innocent. So ask around to find out where your community’s red tent is hosted, likely right there in your new co-housing community.
Once we are all receiving UBI, attending a nurturing school, living in co-housing, frolicking in a stable biosphere, healing intergenerational trauma, and bleeding in peace, we predict that yelling at kids will be close to zero. We will be freed up to create a positively reinforcing galactic spiral of hope and action begetting more hope and more action, iterating hasta la victoria siempre, until the only yelling is shouts of triumph and joy.
