The New York Timestakes a look at the latest parenting trend: yelling instead of spanking children. It's not that most parents want to yell at their children, it turns out. But they have accepted that spanking children could lead to developmental problems and aggression later in life. So they've tried time outs, counting and other strategies that have absolutely no effect on a misbehaving small child. Tempers fray, they snap and they yell. But then they feel bad about it later.
"I've worked with thousands of parents and I can tell you, without question, that screaming is the new spanking," said Amy McCready, the founder of Positive Parenting Solutions, which teaches parenting skills in classes, individual coaching sessions and an online course. "This is so the issue right now. As parents understand that it's not socially acceptable to spank children, they are at a loss for what they can do. They resort to reminding, nagging, timeout, counting 1-2-3 and quickly realize that those strategies don't work to change behavior. In the absence of tools that really work, they feel frustrated and angry and raise their voice. They feel guilty afterward, and the whole cycle begins again."
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One study that did take a look at the topic — a paper on the "psychological aggression by American parents" published in the Journal of Marriage and Family in 2003 — found that parental yelling was a near-universal occurrence. Of 991 families interviewed, in 88 percent of them a parent acknowledged shouting, screaming or yelling at the kids at least once (though it didn't specify how many did it more often) in the previous year.
"We are so accustomed to this that we just think parents get carried away and that it's not harmful," said one of the study's lead authors, Murray A. Straus, a sociologist who is a director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire. "But it affects a child. If someone yelled at you at work, you'd find that pretty jarring. We don't apply that standard to children."
Psychologists and psychiatrists generally say yelling should be avoided. It's at best ineffective (the more you do it the more the child tunes it out) and at worse damaging to a child's sense of well-being and self-esteem.
"It isn't the yelling per se that's going to make a difference, it's how the yelling is interpreted," said Ronald P. Rohner, director of the Ronald and Nancy Rohner Center for the Study of Interpersonal Acceptance and Rejection at the University of Connecticut. If a parent is simply loud, he says, the effect is minimal. But if the tone connotes anger, insult or sarcasm, it can be perceived as a sign of rejection.
So, it's not the volume that's the problem, it's what the parent is saying? We suppose that makes some sense. If a parent screams personal insults at a child, of course that will be damaging to the child. But if the parent merely expresses frustration by saying loudly "I'm so tired of looking for that stuffed bunny!" that's not a personal insult. Generally speaking, we don't think screaming is an effective way to communicate with anyone -- children or adults.
