What happens when you stop yelling at your kids
When Savannah Berniquez asked her eldest son Tobi if she yelled a little or a lot, she was dismayed by his answer.
“You kind of yell a lot, Mommy,” he said.
It happened in July, during the first week of Savannah’s “No Yelling Challenge: Keep Calm and Carry On.” The challenge, which lasted a month, was intended as a sort of Shh!-lution to mommy rants, a way for mothers to resist the urge to shout at wayward children. It was thought up by Savannah, who writes the blog Ramblings of a Christian Mom, and two other mommy bloggers — her friend Cheryl Fast, mother of six children, and Michelle Marine, who is raising four kids in rural Iowa.
“I don’t want the kids to remember yelling when they think of their childhood,” Savannah tells me from her home in Chesterville, where she and her husband Louis are bringing up four children. Tobi turns six this month, the youngest is 10 months.
She has her hands full, as my mother would say. No surprise then that Savannah sometimes raises her voice when the children get on her last nerve. But it bothers her when it happens, she writes, no matter how tired and stressed she is at the time.
“When I yell at my kids, I hear myself and I hate it. And I know it’s a lack of self-control on my part. I am able to control myself in public settings, after all. It’s funny how my patience multiplies with the number of people around me. So why do I give my best when others are around, but I don’t when it’s just my children and I at home?”
Reading Savannah’s posts over the course of the month-long challenge is a revelation.
During the first week, she tells Tobi “if he hears me start to yell … he can tell me I’m yelling, and he won’t get in trouble for it.
“Only two days later, it happened. Definitely humbling to be frustrated and upset and raising your voice only to have a small voice say, ‘Mommy, you’re yelling again.’ It’s never fun to have your errors pointed out in the heat of it.”
Savannah also learned about the triggers that can cause mommy tirades. “I’m an introvert and in order to stay reasonably sane, I need quiet. I need to be able to think and hear my thoughts. My biggest challenge is the noise. Noise stresses me out. It’s definitely my biggest trigger for yelling. I’ve learned that it’s important for me step out of the room when it gets too noisy, and I can feel myself getting overwhelmed by it.”
In the final days of the challenge, Savannah saw some significant changes in the way her children behaved with each other.
“I’ve noticed that the kids aren’t yelling at each other as much when I don’t yell. They also listen to me more quickly. Go figure! Yelling doesn’t help, anyway!
“Over the course of this challenge, I’ve realized how often I speak to my children without respect, even if I’m not raising my voice. Sometimes, I can sound just plain old mean.”
Yelling was not a big part of Savannah’s childhood. “I was raised by my dad and I can’t remember him ever raising his voice,” she tells me.
I wish I could say the same. I was a kid in the 1950s. It was a noisy decade. On TV, Ricky and Lucy were always yelling at each other. In my neighbourhood, parents yelled at kids every day. I seldom got spanked, but yelling was my late father’s default mode.
When I think of him, I remember the catechism of child-rearing clichés he’d deliver at top volume:
Money does not grow on which woody self-supporting perennial plant? Trees. What would I decidedly not like? Something to cry for. Into which body of water would I jump if my friend Carmen did? A lake. How late would I remain at the table if the vegetables on my plate were not eaten? Until bedtime. Precisely what quantity of said veggies must I consume? Every speck. Which public utility was I unwittingly working for when I left a light on? Hydro.
My mother used to tell my brothers and I that Dad yelled because he cared so much about us. Nobody talked back to my old man, but I always wanted to ask him one question. If yelling makes us better kids, how come we’re still so bad?