Angry Parenting Doesn't Work

I had no clue how quick my temper could be until kids entered the picture. One minute I'm the mother I picture myself being, and the next I've turned into some frazzled, shrieking creature. Where does that come from? When frustration and impatience take over, I fall back on my rawest instinct, and by doing that I'm telling my children they don't deserve my patience and that I can't keep myself together. It's not okay.

We love our kids. Obviously we want good things for them. The strange part is that this very love is often what drives us to act badly. We're trying to get them to listen or pick up some new skill, and then they whine, or dump something everywhere, or tune us out completely, and we snap. In that quick burst of anger, rather than modeling anything worth copying, we chip away at their sense of worth and give them a picture that looks nothing like love.

Everybody has days like that, and that part is normal. But if yelling, hair-pulling, and feeling revolted by your own children have become your usual state, you're the one who needs the time-out.

When a child arrives, we take on two jobs: keep them alive, keep them safe. Babies look like bottomless pits of need, yet what they actually require is pretty narrow. They need love. And love is the hard part, because it has to be steady and given without conditions. Keeping them safe is one of the ways that love shows up.

Kids who feel secure usually grow into balanced adults who can form close relationships with other people. Psychologists call this attachment, and building secure attachments is the central work of infancy. That's the reason you answer a crying baby and do your best to meet what they're asking for. It's also the reason you don't want your anger teaching them to be afraid of you. Love is patient, after all.

Studies point to a pattern: children raised around constant anger tend to show less empathy than other kids. They're also more prone to aggression, to depressive symptoms, and to trouble at school. They watch you fail to manage your feelings, so they never pick up how to manage their own. It stunts their growth and makes it harder for them to handle new situations. Lean on anger as your factory setting and the lesson you've handed them is that losing control is fine.

Think about what actually triggers us. Usually it's a moment that embarrasses us, rattles our nerves, or wears us down. When we try to clamp down on a child's behavior, what we're really after is control over our own state. We want the shame gone, the anxiety gone, the exhaustion gone, so we push the kid to change. Instead of staying calm and teaching them to steer themselves, we manipulate and strong-arm their will. It doesn't work, and it makes you look awful, especially with an audience.

I didn't like how I was treating my older toddler (yes, there are two of them in my house). I'd wake up braced for combat, and bedtime felt like the ceasefire. No one should live that way. While hunting for some trick to force him into behaving, it hit me that I was the one who had to do the changing.

The approach that clicked for me was "1-2-3 Magic" by Thomas W. Phelan, Ph.D. It's a counting system that shuts down bad behavior instead of dragging you into an argument. The logic rests on something adults tend to forget: very young children genuinely don't understand what you mean when you yell at them. They haven't lived long, and they aren't miniature grown-ups. Our adult brains can't quite accept that, so we keep negotiating with them as though they were our peers.

The method is almost embarrassingly plain. When they do something you want stopped, you count to one. I say "That's 1." If it keeps going, you count to two, and then three. Reach three and they get a timeout. Easy enough on paper. What surprised me was what happened to me as I kept at it. I got calmer across the board and started meeting my son's misbehavior from a softer place, more like a parent who feels for him. This particular method might not suit everybody, but everybody should land on some method. The quiet you get from shifting your approach soaks into everything about how you carry yourself. Odd as it sounds, the steadier you are, the steadier your kids become.

Step one, make a plan. Once you've admitted you want to become a warmer, calmer parent, map it out. The blowups happen in the heat of the moment, so a plan lets you respond on purpose rather than on impulse.

Step two, share the plan. Tell your spouse or partner, the grandparents, teachers, whoever helps with the kids. Raising a child really is a group effort, and keeping things consistent gives your child both security and backup.

Step three, educate yourself. Read up on child psychology across the developmental stages. Kids don't carry your years of experience; everything they do is a little experiment. More empathy on your end can reveal just how baffling and scary the world looks to someone small. You were little once yourself.

Step four, expect the acting up. They're going to misbehave. Your reaction is part of their experiment, since they're forever poking at the edges of what's allowed. Deny them the explosion they're fishing for and the behavior may settle. If it continues even after you've corrected them calmly, start looking for whether something larger is going on.

Step five, work on yourself. This is as much your project as it is theirs. Be present. There's time for chores, sure, but there's also time to play and just be together. Don't hover. Give kids room to get things wrong, then help them make sense of what happened. Let the small stuff slide. Ask yourself whether it's even worth a word. Breathe, think, breathe again, then react. Grow as a person apart from being a parent, because you're still your own individual with needs that deserve care. And above everything, teach your kids. That's the whole point. You are their entire world, and they're counting on you to show them the way.

- Melissa Lavery, M.S.