Do you yell at home more often than you would like? Life can be stressful, and when you're stressed and juggling lots of responsibilities it’s hard to remain patient and calm when your kids aren’t cooperating.
If you can relate, please know that you are not alone. In full transparency, I used to yell quite often as my kids were growing up. At the time, I was running and growing a company. Being a mom and wife, while working full-time managing a growing business really stretched me to the max — Stress and overwhelm were my best friends, and my patience level was next to none.
I searched for solutions to help get my kids to listen and cooperate better. I thought if they behaved better, I wouldn’t get triggered and yell. I read books and tried numerous different strategies, but as soon as I got frustrated all of the well-intentioned strategies went right out the window and I resorted to yelling again.
Thankfully, I finally got to the end of my own rope and hired a business coach to help me learn how to manage my stress and overwhelm and become a better leader at work. The coach helped me realize that I could not lead or work effectively from stress and overwhelm, and to become a better leader I had to get better at managing my emotions.
I didn’t realize that the work I was doing to better manage myself and my emotions at work was also affecting my parenting until my daughter commented that things were different at home. When I asked her what had changed, she responded “You did Mom”.
I encourage you to stop and think about how you parent when you are feeling frustrated, stressed, overwhelmed, anxious, or even guilty. When you are parenting from these emotions, are you reactive, short-tempered, demanding, and often end up yelling like I did?
Alternatively, if we look at what feelings might make you most effective as a parent, would your list include calm, loving, compassionate, empathetic, and confident?
It’s easy to feel calm, loving and empathetic feelings when our kids are behaving well and listening — and it’s easy to think that if our kids would only behave, we could stay calm and feel loving.
The problem is that our kids' challenging behaviors usually trigger frustration, stress, or anger in us, and ironically this is when we need to stay calm and non-reactive the most. When kids act most unlovable, is when they actually need the most love.
So many parents want solutions to help their kids listen and behave — because they believe that if their kids would listen and behave, they wouldn’t yell.
But the truth is your kids don’t have to listen and behave for you to stay calm and in control. No one else is responsible for your feelings, only you: How you feel is an “inside job”, and you don’t want to put the pressure and responsibility for your feelings on your kids. It’s not their job.
This is the skill that I now teach — using my simple Parent From Neutral process, I help parents learn how to manage their emotions so they can respond calmly and effectively, even on the hardest of days.
I’m going to be sharing How To Stop Yelling using my Parent From Neutral process in a FREE and VIRTUAL Workshop on Thursday, May 2nd. I will be teaching the root cause of what causes the yelling, common mistakes that make it even harder to stop, and a simple and easy process that you can use to keep your cool even on the hardest of days. Click here for more details and to register.
