Most parents know that yelling isn’t an effective way to communicate with children, but we often find ourselves doing it anyway especially during times when we are tired or stressed. For example, how many times each day do you find yourself shouting “Calm down”, “Stop shouting” or “Stop crying” to your children?

The problem is that when we yell at our children, their body’s nervous system accelerates and hormones such as cortisol (also called the ‘anxiety hormone’) are released because the body is responding to our raised voice and/or anger by going into ‘fight or flight’ mode. By shouting at our children, we make it far more difficult for them to be able to listen to us and comply with our orders, because the physiological response that this causes in the body prevents them from moderating their behaviour. Worse still, we are also failing to teach them how to regulate and be in control of their own emotions, because we aren’t modelling this behaviour ourselves.   

Wouldn’t it be so much better if we could help ourselves and our children by finding a better alternative to this? In this article ‘Why do we get angry at our children and what can we do about it?’, we’ve explored some of the reasons why parents find themselves being ‘triggered’ by their children’s behaviour, and we offer some alternative tools and solutions to help parents deal with their anger more effectively.

These are just a few examples of our Best of Parenting Tools. You can find more ideas and solutions to typical parenting challenges in our book ‘Kids Don’t Come With a Manual – The Essential Guide to a Happy Family Life‘.