None of us want to shout at our kids.
We don’t plan for it, it just slips out.

It slips out of us because that’s how we were parented - that’s what was modelled to us. It slips out of us because that’s what we experienced at school. It’s because that’s what we’ve witnessed others doing.

We shout because we want to scare our children into behaving. We feel triggered by their misbehaving, their shouting, their attitude and we too become dysregulated and we lose it. Often because we don’t know how to connect. We’re tired and we’re embarrassed.

What we know from research is that the negative effects of shouting at children are frightfully similar to the negative effects of physically harming children. Where in the past adults have shouted, seen a behaviour stop and thought “oh that discipline worked really well” - what’s REALLY happening is that we’re scaring our children into fight, flight, freeze or fawn mode. A nervous system response that makes children so uncomfortable that they often end up misbehaving more. Then the adults shout more and the cycle continues.

To break this cycle, we need to learn to set boundaries kindly and calmly, without being a perceived threat to our children.
We need to learn to stop saying their name sternly when they are doing something we don’t like.

We need to teach ourselves to not be dysregulated by their dysregulation so we can model the calm we’d like to see.
We need to re-parent ourselves.

Don’t beat yourself up - no parent is perfect. Just know you’re in the right place with the right community here to learn another way. My behaviour highlight has lots of scripts of how you can respond to different behaviours and teach yourself to see all behaviour curiously and ask “what is my child trying to communicate with me?”.

Remember :
There’s no such thing as naughty.
All behaviour is communication.

Watch the full reel here

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