DEEP DIVE: How to Yell Less

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1:03Laughing in the face of motherhood. This is Margaret. And this is Amy. Today, we're talking about how to yell less. Gee, could I use this for the entirety of my life? I'm a yeller, Amy. I'm a yeller. So am I, or I have been. It gets easier as your kids get older. You're not always living at that level of frantic. But I think we should talk about how to yell less because how to never yell or lose your temper is not really an achievable goal. Yeah, I feel like there are people who do the kind of like gentle parenting who would argue that yelling never is somehow an achievable goal. But I mean, that ship has sailed for me.

1:41I have a high temperament and I am a yeller. And I have a lot of thoughts about yelling. Me too. I'm going to come in kind of hot on this one, maybe even a little controversial, but I have receipts because I think I want to define what yelling is because I'm going to quote Emily Edlin here. She's a clinical psychologist. She's been on our podcast, as everybody has at this point. If they haven't been on our podcast, it's like you're not a real actor in New York City if you haven't played a dead body on Law and Order, and you're not a real parenting expert if you haven't been on our podcast. I'm sorry.

2:17That's well said. So Emily Edlin will link to her fresh take. She talked about autonomy, creating autonomous kids. And she says, I figured this out first. I want to give myself credit. I was like, I think we're getting this wrong. And then I did find receipts from Emily Edlin. So it's not just me thinking in this, but she says, the way that we describe yelling when we talk about it in parenting circles does not define the behavior consistently. When you want to study a behavior, in behavioral science, says Emily Edlin, you have to start with a solid definition or the results don't mean much. So I think the problem is, when it comes to yelling, is that we say that yelling, there is nobody, including me, who's going to argue that yelling is better than not yelling.

3:02I mean, I think it's like the goal is to yell less, of course. But when we say that all yelling is equally toxic and bad, we're lumping some very different things together. Like put your shoes on. How many times do I have to tell you to put your shoes on is very different from you little idiot. You should have never been born. Yes. Yes. And there's a study, as we like to discover, we see a study that supposedly says one thing and then you scratch it, you know, a little scratch and sniff. And that's not what the study said at all. So there was a study, 2014 Journal of Childhood Development. And this study has been trumpeted everywhere saying that yelling produces the same results as physical punishment in children.

3:45That striking a child and yelling at them is literally the same thing. And it causes the same levels of anxiety, stress and depression 10 years later. That's how they're measuring it. Frightening and scary. Very frightening, if true. And a lot of us are like, oh my god, if yelling at my child is like that bad for them. But what the study actually studied was not yelling. It examined reciprocal relations between maternal and paternal harsh verbal discipline and adolescents' depressive symptoms a decade later. So it didn't measure how often they raised their voices. It measured harsh verbal discipline.

4:22And wouldn't you agree that that and yelling, they can go together, but they don't have to go together at all. Yes, I would agree. And so I think that we need to give ourselves starting from the point of like, okay, we're going to yell less because for reasons we'll get into that it's not that useful anyway, or effective anyway. But leave aside that every time you do it, you need to put on the hair shirt and give yourself 100 lashes because it was exactly the same as you know, yeah. No, I agree with that. I definitely agree with that. And I do think on the flip side for myself of the things I think about the things that I do wrong as a parent and the things that I've really tried to examine as a parent and be better about as a parent.

5:08For me, I used to be very hard on myself about how I fed my kids and now my kids kind of eat anything and I'm like, oh, I shouldn't have worried about that. But for me, I would say my number one, if I were to list, and this sounds harsh, but I'm just going to say it because it explains it, like my number one failure that I see as myself as a parent is that I yell too much. And I think that it's took me a long time to realize both with my spouse and with my children that I'm scarier than I think I am. That I often am like, oh my God, could you get in the car? And then my kids seem upset. And I kind of think, but it's just me.

5:47I'm just upset. Well, of course I'm upset. The three of you all spilled ice cream at the same time in the new van or whatever it is, but that I forget. I have a story from my childhood that I was in a haunted house and I was notoriously frightened of haunted houses. And the other thing I was scared the most of in the world was lightning. And so we were in this haunted house in our town that someone had made. It was like a kind of old mansion and they turned it into a haunted house. And a guy, a vampire was coming out of a room filled with lightning. And I was screaming like eyes were all back in my head.

6:21How old are you? Oh, probably six or seven, maybe. And the vampire like lean down and was like, it's just me, Mr. Callagy. It was our neighbor who was playing the vampire. And it did nothing to alleviate my fear of the vampire. I was like, the fact that it was my neighbor pretending to be a vampire did not make it any better. And I think of that as the metaphor for the experience of a child whose parent is yelling at them. It's scary and overwhelming. And I think, guys, you know me. I'm not really that mad. I'm clearly just frustrated that you did X, Y, or Z, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that I take my teeth out and I'm like, it's just Mr.

7:02Kelly. That's right. Right. It's better to do that than not to do that. It's better that he did that than sent you home thinking vampires are real and they lived on the street. Probably. Yes. But on the whole, right, maybe don't. I have this in my relationship, too, that my spouse will say, stop yelling at me. I'm like, I'm not yelling. I'm not yelling. Am I probably expressing some frustration? But we can't always see accurately how we come across. We're delivering messages. You know what this brings me back to? Clever Hans. Never thought I'd reincorporate Clever Hans, but Clever Hans was the horse who could do math.

7:34The horse. Clever Hans, the counting horse. He could count up. We talked about him a couple of weeks ago. He somehow knew math and nobody knew how. And it was because if you said, Clever Hans, what's six plus two? And it would start to paw what the people, the questioners were delivering to the horse without meaning to, without realizing they were doing it, was raising of the eyebrows and other facial indicators that you were getting towards the right answer. So if a horse is that good at reading positive facial expressions, it makes sense that our kids can see in our negative facial expressions and perhaps intensified non-yelling yells, something that we're not necessarily even intending.

8:19Like, yes, I'm really annoyed right now, but that can be perceived as aggressive. Well, I teach a class actually called personal presentation. It's like a speech class. and when I'm teaching the class, we do an exercise called Mr. Personality and the exercise is one person goes out of the room and you give them a adjective, Mr. and Ms. Personality it could be and your adjective is let's say depressed. So everybody knows except you that the audience knows that you're Mr. Depressed but you don't know you're Mr. Depressed? The opposite. You know you're Mr. Depressed but the audience doesn't and you come back in and the audience asks you questions and they're trying to figure out what your word is.

8:57And it's such an interesting exercise in the way that people present themselves because they think they're acting depressed and people are like angry. And it's just like your default body posture is so strong or relaxed. And your default, it's very hard to work against your default body posture to get a different emotion through. And I think that especially when I was first having three little kids at the same time and doing a lot of yelling. I think that my default personality might have been like Ms. You know, like I just picturing those like characters, the round little Miss Screamy. They're just circles.

9:35Yeah. Little Miss Screamy. There's a book about Little Miss books. Yeah. And I feel like I did too much yelling. I still do too much yelling. So Carla Nomburg, who has also been on our show, we've also had on the podcast. Yeah, she's a repeat guest. She's like Alec Baldwin in Saturday night live. Yeah, she gets the special jacket. She wrote a book called How to Stop Losing Your Stuff with Your Kids. Use a different word besides stuff. And so she divided this yelling thing into two things. Toxic explosions, which I think is what we're talking about, what this study is talking about. Like, yeah, your kid is going to be depressed 10 years later if they grew up in a house with toxic explosions.

10:12Nobody wants to do that. We're all doing our best. Let's not do that. But then she talks about what she calls unpredictable and disproportionate reactions. And that those aren't awesome either, right? Where you're not a bad person, but they're not awesome. I'm not toxic, but I'm unproportional. Yeah, yeah. And I also think, to be fair, a lot of times the other people don't see the proportion. You know what I mean? I find myself saying to my kids, I know you don't love it when I'm yelling, but I have asked you four times in a normal voice. Yes. And so one of the tricks we won't get into solutions I found is trying to say, can you get to the table?

10:48Can you get to the table? This is the second time I'm asking you. Can you get to the table? This is the third time I'm asking you. Like trying to give a little vision into why does mom yell all the time? It's like I asked you nicely 40 other times. Right. Right. And that's true. And there are times, right, when you do yell, there are times you yell and it certainly is cathartic for you. And there are times when they really need to hear it. Like, I don't do this anymore, but I did when my kids were little and all three of them were in the backseat squabbling in their car seats, sometimes yelling, right?

11:24Lots of yelling going on in the car. And I'm like merging onto the West Side Highway and it's raining, right? And I'm like, stop it. Stop yelling. Stop. Stop it. I am driving. You can't do this while I'm driving. And a little bit of shock silence from the backseat is gratifying. But it was certainly an unpredictable and disproportionate reaction from where they're sitting in the backseat. They're not merging onto the highway in the rain. They don't understand that driving is dangerous. You know what I mean? It's still perceived by them as like, what? But I'm also going to argue pretty strongly that it worked, right?

11:54It works. But yelling doesn't work when you yell too often. And so we'll talk about that. Like, what are all the reasons that yelling is not particularly effective anyway? Because unfortunately, it isn't for 10 reasons, even if it can feel really cathartic in the moment while you're doing it. And sometimes, yes, you deserve to let off steam. You don't have to be a saint, but it doesn't necessarily get you closer to what you want or the behavior you want your kids to. I mean, I definitely believe that. I never get in bed at night and think, I wish I had yelled more today. That is never a thought.

12:30I did when I was younger and had younger kids. I would occasionally say, oh, I have the yelling flu, which meant I was like hoarse and tired from yelling so much. And I don't really mean I wasn't screaming at the top of my lungs at my kids all day. It was kind of it just felt I think that the volume of our whole lives was at that pitch. Watch out. Be careful. Go. You can do whatever. It just felt like our whole lives kind of existed at that pitch, which I think in some ways I know from studies that they talk about what is really difficult and causes PTSD is environments where there's a lot of violence or like bombs are coming in or whatever is going on.

13:16Unpredictability. Right. That the reality of that situation is that it's just calm and then explosions and then calm and then explosions. And that it's the unknowing of when it's coming next. It's the uncertainty of what's going to happen during the explosion. The explosion is going to be scary. You don't know when it's coming. And that that state is one of the hardest human states for anybody to exist in. And certainly, I'm not making a straight comparison between yelling and being bombed. But I think the vibe of there's an explosive person in the house, and I don't know what's going to set them off is it's very understandable why that's damaging for kids.

13:59Yeah, not something that you want to raise your kids within. And I would argue that life with little kids is really stressful all the time. And you can start to feel like I just saw something an Instagram of a mom going out into her backyard and just face planting into the grass. It's like touching grass to remember that I'm not being chased by a lion. I'm just trying to get three kids on the school bus. That's it, that we live in this sort of bath of constant low grade stress. And maybe that's what we need to focus on instead of like, bad person, bad person, you yelled four times today, and you should have yelled zero.

14:34Let's talk about how to like dial down the stress. All right, let's take a break. And when we come back, let's talk about why yelling happens, Amy. Amy, you know that in our relationship, you have historically been the one to care about skincare. But let me tell you, Osea Skincare is an award-winning bestseller for a reason. Osea has been delivering results you can see and feel for 30 years. And after several months of using Osea's Dream Bioretinol Body Serum, I myself am a true believer, Ames. I also have the Dream Bio-Retinol Body Serum right there next to my sink so I can use it at night and right after getting out of the shower.

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18:03orders over$65. These styles sell out, so don't sit on it. That's Z-E-N-N-I dot com slash podcast promo code podcast15. Well, good news, everyone. Yelling is a biological imperative. I mean, we yell to get attention. Babies cry to get our attention. We never did get a biological imperative theme, but we should have. Yeah, that we're hardwired to push people's buttons when we want a reaction from them. And yelling can work when there's a bear chasing you or when there's a bear chasing your friend and they don't know yet. Yelling is extremely effective when you're about to get in an accident because you can't think because your kids are yelling.

18:43Yelling might be the thing you need to do in that moment, but we over apply it and it becomes remarkably ineffective. I had a pediatrician tell me when my children were young, and this sticks with me to this day. Child's favorite toy is a jack-in-the-box. Wind it up and you don't know when, but it's going to pop. That is a child's interaction with the world to a certain point. And British people say, don't wind me up, like winding you up. It's like you're winding up a jack-in-the-box to watch them pop, you know? Right. But you are the jack in the box and the kid is doing the winding. You are the jack in the box.

19:22You're being manipulated by the kid, right? The only thing you can control is not being the jack in the box because, I mean, I now have high schoolers who I am constantly trying to say, if you ignored some of the behavior that is annoying you, they would do it less. Kids who are bothering you and because they know if they come over and say this phrase to you, you're going to explode and yell at them. That's why they're doing, you know, it's like they're literally winding you up. Well, Alan Kasdan, he's a child psychiatrist at the Yale Child Study Center. And he says about yelling, if the goal of the parent is catharsis, like I said before, that I want to get this out of my system.

20:02And I want to show you how mad I am. Yelling is definitely the way to go. It's the best way to show everybody how mad you are. Yes. But if your goal is to change something the child is doing or get the child to start doing something else, yelling is not the best way to achieve those ends. It doesn't serve the purpose. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I definitely get a little tweet tweet with like, let's work this out together. Tell me why you're so frustrated. I'm definitely so hardwired as like an Irish immigrant mom that's like, I just hit you with the spoon and keep making my dinner, you know, by the way, I don't hit my children with spoons.

20:42Don't write to me. But I do think that if you find yourself in the cycle of yelling, the jack-in-the-box cycle, it is definitely worth, in calmer times, investigating what is underneath that. I agree with that. Because when you think about it, when you yell about something, if you really think about the times that set you off, I would argue you're probably not yelling all day long about everything. You tend to yell about the same things. And they are the things that make you yell because you have to keep saying them, right? And that is worth circling. For me, back in the day, the we are late for the bus, we're late for the bus.

21:27That was the yelling time, right? Five minutes before we have to leave. And everybody has 20 minutes of things left to do before we leave. And every day, right? Why are we doing this every day, right? And you're bringing all of that frustration and very well-earned frustration and concern. And you don't want to have to drive them again because you missed the bus. You're right. You're right to be frustrated and annoyed. You're right that this is stressful. but if you're yelling about that same thing the thing you have to fix is not that you yell you have to fix the thing you have to fix the situation right which I have told this story before in different contexts but it really helped for me the reason that it was hard for us to get out the door in the morning is that my three kids would go upstairs to brush their teeth after having breakfast and who knew what we know like new continents were formed while they were upstairs doing whatever and that I'd be yelling for them to come down hurry up and then at least one of them would come down not having brushed their teeth or gotten their socks.

22:25They didn't even do the things they went upstairs to do. The frustration about that was through the roof. The fix was not me yelling more. The fix was getting downstairs toothbrushes and putting toothpaste and toothbrushes both upstairs and downstairs. So nobody had to go upstairs to brush their teeth anymore. And the thing that took 15 minutes all of a sudden took two minutes and we started leaving for school on time. Was it a forever fix? No. But feeling bad about myself wasn't the way to stop yelling in the morning. It was to fix the reason it was stressful. Yeah. And I think that this is the reigning piece of advice.

23:01Someone told me when I was pregnant, and I must have said it 10 ,000 times since then, but it applies to your example, which is, the phrase is saying no means standing up. When you try to parent from the couch, which is extremely understandable, but it's something my husband and I would say to each other all the time, that the two boys are starting to wrestle and they're, you know, kind of maybe having fun, but there's a sharp corner and you pretty much know it's going to end in tears or an ER visit. And you've just sat down with your like bowl of chili that you've been looking forward to for an hour.

23:39And you want to just start screaming, cut it out, cut it out, cut it out. And they're having fun. So they're ignoring you. That this, I think, cuts down for me on a huge percentage of yelling. And it's the upstairs downstairs thing too. We have an upstairs and we have a basement where the kids play video games. And the way our house is designed is extremely annoying for reasons I won't get into here. I'm going to start a whole architecture podcast to talk about how annoyingly designed my house is. But the kids are like off to the sides and upstairs. So from where I stand downstairs, I can scream at the top of my lungs and they can't really hear me.

24:18They can't hear you? Cannot. No. It's like they're kind of far in their corners. And now my kids all like music. So they have music playing in the rooms and whatever else is going on. But now I find a lot of my yelling is screaming upstairs, it's dinner time. And we really did at some point, put walkie talkies in people's rooms so that I just call them on the walkie talkie because it's just that kind of where are you we're supposed to be leaving. And sometimes they're like, what are you so mad about? It's just dinner. I'm like, I have been calling you for 45 seconds at increasingly loud volumes.

24:56And I think what is causing this yelling? And I think you see it so much at Thanksgiving, holidays, family gatherings. 10 different people are yelling different instructions to the kids, you know, or yelling at them, look at that toy you got. It's just the yelling of, I just want to stay on the couch with my cocktail. Stop touching your brother. Whatever it is, I'm comfortable where I am. So I'll just scream loud enough that you stop doing it as opposed to standing up and just separating the two of you. It's such a good point. And it sort of undercuts what we were saying in the first part about like, every time you yell at your children, you are ruining their future, right?

25:35That when you're all in the room and stop touching your brother, that sort of hollering that happens, nobody would argue that that's a better way to live than peace and harmony. But there's no world in which your kid does anything but happily ignore that. And that's the problem with yelling, right is that the more you yell the more you need to yell because your kids can get pretty good at tuning it out like your kids finally like what what are you yelling about but they could ignore the first 40 seconds pretty well it used to drive me nuts like if you hear me yelling up the steps and it's after 6 p.m it's dinner time like that's why i'm calling you stop pretending you don't hear me put it together people right and stop making me come up the stairs to get you every night like what do you think I'm calling you?

26:19It's a new day. What? Yeah. I know. We do have the rule now. If you hear your voice, you step out of your room. If you're in the basement, you step to the top of the stairs. That's good. That's the rule because I'm not going to have screaming conversations up and down the stairs. Right. And maybe involving your kids in like, let's not do this, right? This isn't fun for anybody. So let's do this. But the more you yell, the more you need to yell. And it's because they know that it's just part of it. And they don't have to listen until you really yell. Like they know you're, you're kind of mean at yell.