Dr. Lindsay Gibson

Is it true that none of us have ever yelled at our kids?

Of course.

I mean, these are...

Behaviors to avoid if you can, and hopefully often you can.

But if things have gotten to the point where yelling has to happen, what I'm saying is if you allow yourself to yell, you will keep on yelling.

It's just like if you allow yourself to spank somebody.

or slap or whatever, you will just do it.

Right, it's the easy, immediate answer.

If you don't have a kind of a rule in place that we don't handle it by yelling, then you're, well, first of all, you're dead in the water because you can't think of what else to do, okay?

Because you're so used to this other way of getting things done.

But I put it in there as calling it an absolute because I really believe that if we are doing behaviors that can end up backfiring on us, and emotional reactivity, which is a lot of what yelling is, often does end up backfiring on us because we lose the impact of when we may need to yell for an emergency or we may need to raise our voice.

If we're doing it as a matter of course, as a way of handling things, we are really losing an opportunity to find other ways to teach our child whatever the lesson is that we want them to learn.

so we're all gonna you know fall short on these things but i do think it's worth it to sit down with yourself and game plan okay if the outcome i want is to not yell what has to happen for me not to yell and then you start game planning it

And then your child begins to learn whatever it is that you just figured out.

Right.

Because you just modeled that for them.

And you can let them know, we're going to try to get out of the house in a different way tomorrow morning.

Here's what we're going to do.

Right.

Well, I tell you a video, I think it was on Instagram that I watched that it was a little child.