Episode Summary 03: How to Stop Yelling as a Parent: Emotional Regulation Techniques That Work

Sometimes, these things seem like they come out of nowhere, but there are very often signs that this is coming. For some people, it's a tightness in the throat or the chest. For others, shallow breathing, clenched fists. Some people notice their thoughts speeding up, or focusing on the catastrophe that will happen if you don't get your child to change this behavior right now, you might recognize that the same situations come up over and over again, and feel these sensations happening as we walk down the hall, knowing the child hasn't brushed their teeth. Or see them playing video games when you know their homework isn't done.

Or hear raised voices from the next room. You might start to feel those physical sensations then, long before the moment that you actually snap. And these physical sensations are such important information. They're your body's way of saying, hey, something's happening here, you might want to pay attention. And that is a much more effective place to start working on this.

Hi, I’m Emma, and I’m listening from the UK. We all want our children to lead fulfilled lives, but we’re surrounded by conflicting information and clickbait headlines that leave us wondering what to do as parents. The Your Parenting Mojo podcast distills scientific research on parenting and child development into tools parents can actually use every day in their real lives with their real children. If you’d like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a free infographic on the 13 reasons your child isn’t listening to you and what to do about each one, just head on over to yourparentingmojo.com/subscribe, and pretty soon you’re going to get tired of hearing my voice read this intro, so come and record one yourself at yourparentingmojo.com/recordtheintro.

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Long time listeners tell me they love the show, but it can be hard to keep up with so many in-depth episodes. And I know it can also be hard for new listeners to know where to start. Last year I started releasing summary episodes that tie together ideas from multiple longer episodes. And this year I'm upping the ante even more by reducing the length of these summaries, hopefully making them even easier for you to quickly get the nuggets of information you need to apply in your real life with your real kids. Today I'm here with an episode to help you respond to your child's challenging behavior without yelling or stuffing down your feelings. You'll learn how anger is related to emotion regulation and how to regulate your own emotions more effectively so you can model this for your kids.

So I want to start today by asking you to think about the last time your child did something that made you really furious. Maybe they broke something precious to you. Maybe they refused to get in the car seat when you were already running late. Maybe they had a meltdown in the grocery store and everyone was staring. Can you remember that split second when it happened? That moment when your body reacted before your mind even caught up?

Your jaw clenched, your shoulders tensed, your breathing got shallow, maybe a hot rush of blood to your face. And what happened after that? Did you yell? Did you say something harsh? Or maybe you went the other direction, you clenched your teeth and you said, I'm not mad, while your whole body was screaming that you absolutely were mad. If you've been there, and honestly, who hasn't? I know I did when my daughter was young. Today's episode is for you. We're going to talk about what's actually happening in your body in those moments, why willpower alone is not enough to change that, and most importantly, what your children are learning from how you handle these intense moments.

Before we dive in, I want to make sure you know something really important. If you're a parent who yells regularly, you are not broken and you're not a bad parent. Why do parents yell? Well, we're all trying to manage enormous amounts of stress while helping tiny humans who don't yet have the brain development to regulate their own intense experiences. And we weren't designed to do it with nowhere near enough help. That's the real problem here. And it's also a lot harder to change. And the fact that yelling is common does not mean it has to be inevitable. There are specific learnable emotion regulation skills that can help you to respond differently.

What is emotion regulation? Well, it's our ability to monitor, to evaluate and to modify our emotional reactions, especially how intense they are and when they occur to accomplish our goals as parents. And for most of us, learning how to improve emotional regulation starts with understanding what's happening in our bodies when we get triggered. So let's look at what's happening in your body in those moments. When your four-year-old dumps cereal all over the floor right after you've cleaned the kitchen, your body reacts before you even consciously register what's happened. Your nervous system kicks into action, scanning for threats, getting ready to respond.

And this can happen when your own parent would yell at you for making a mess when you were a kid and you see the cereal all over the place and your body responds as if your parent was here and is about to scream or smack you upside the head. These are what we call parenting triggers, situations that activate our stress response based on our own past experiences. And it can just as easily happen if nothing like that happened to you, but you're short on sleep and you haven't eaten in a while and your kid has asked for fifteen hundred things already this morning and then we call it being flooded. This is your body doing exactly what it evolved to do to protect you from danger. The problem is your body can't tell the difference between a real threat like a tiger launching itself at you out of the savannah and the stress of parenting a challenging child. Your body reacts like it's the tiger when really, it's your child who needs your love and care.

Your sympathetic nervous system floods your body with stress hormones, your heart rate jumps, your muscles tense, your breathing gets shallow. And this is the key part. This all happens before the rational part of your brain even knows what's going on. This is a classic example of emotion dysregulation, when our emotional responses become overwhelming and interfere with our ability to think clearly and respond effectively. So, when you hear advice to just stay calm or just count to 10, you're being asked to override a biological process that's already in motion. It's like telling you not to blink when something flies toward your face.

The first step in developing more effective responses is learning to recognize your body's early warning signals. Sometimes these things seem like they come out of nowhere, but there are very often signs that this is coming. For some people, it's a tightness in the throat or the chest. For others, shallow breathing, clenched fists. Some people notice their thoughts speeding up or focusing on the catastrophe that will happen if you don't get your child to change this behavior right now. You might recognize that the same situations come up over and over again and feel these sensations happening as we walk down the hall knowing the child hasn't brushed their teeth.

Or see them playing video games when you know their homework isn't done. Or hear raised voices from the next room. You might start to feel those physical sensations then, long before the moment that you actually snap. And these physical sensations are such important information. They're your body's way of saying, hey, something's happening here. You might want to pay attention. And that is a much more effective place to start working on this rather than figuring out what to do in the moment that you snap. Learning to recognize these signs is one of the most important emotional regulation skills that you can develop as a parent.

So what can you do when you notice these early warning signs? This is where we can use what researchers call grounding techniques. Simple emotional regulation strategies that can bring your nervous system back into balance using tools like breathing, movement, or touch. The simplest technique is often the most effective. Take one conscious breath. Not a deep breathing exercise that takes five minutes. Just one single breath where you actually pay attention to the sensation of breathing. Notice the air coming in through your nose, filling your lungs, going back out. This does something really important.

It sends a signal to your brain and your nervous system that you are safe right now. It reminds your body there's no actual emergency happening. Your two-year-old is not a tiger. Your preschooler's meltdown is not a natural disaster. You can also try noticing what's happening in your muscles. Are your shoulders up around your ears? Let them drop. Are you clenching your fists? Open your hands. Sometimes just that simple body awareness is enough to create a little bit of space between your automatic reaction and your chosen response. Another powerful grounding technique is to touch something with an interesting texture. That might be a soft piece of fabric, a smooth stone.

Even just rubbing your fingertips together, feeling the ridges on your skin. This brings you back to the present moment and out of the story your mind is telling you about how awful this situation is. These techniques work because they activate your parasympathetic nervous system, the part of your nervous system that conserves energy and promotes calm. When you focus on your breath or your physical sensations, you're telling your body, I'm safe. I can handle this. What we're really doing with these techniques is buying ourselves some time. Time for the stress hormones to start clearing from our system. Time for our rational brain to come back online. Time to remember that we want to respond to our child from a place of connection rather than control.

And remember, you're not doing this in the moment that you're exploding. You're seeing the kinds of circumstances that are often hard for you to navigate and noticing the physical signs you're getting dysregulated. And you're working to pause then, not in the moment when you're already yelling. Once you've created that moment of space, then you have the opportunity to reappraise what is happening. And this can be one of the most important strategies for emotion regulation, the ability to reframe a situation before you get overwhelmed by it. So instead of suppressing your emotions or letting them take over, you can acknowledge them and work with them.

So you might say out loud, Wow, I'm feeling really angry right now. I'm going to take a breath. And this models for your child that intense emotions are part of life, but we don't have to be controlled by them. Or you might reframe the situation. I can see that you're having a hard time right now. What's going on for you? Let me give you an example. Let's say you've asked your child to tidy up their toys multiple times and they're still scattered all over the living room. So instead of either exploding with, “You never listen!” or gritting your teeth and saying you're fine while angrily cleaning up yourself, you might say something like, “I'm feeling frustrated right now because I've asked you to clean up a few times and the toys are still out. I'm going to take a breath. I'm trying to figure out what's going on for you.

I'm wondering if maybe you're having a hard time knowing where to start or if you want to be with me and you know that I'll be somewhere else while you're tidying. Would it help if we did this together?” So, you're acknowledging your real emotions here. You're taking a moment to experience them instead of stuffing them down. You're also assuming positive intent from your child. There's a reason behind their behavior and you're moving toward a solution together. You are not requiring an immediate apology or compliance. They might need connection first. They might be genuinely overwhelmed by the task and that's okay.

This kind of emotion regulation strategy takes practice, but it gets easier over time. You're essentially training your brain to look for alternative explanations for your child's behavior. So instead of thinking my child is being defiant and disrespectful, you might think my child might have executive function challenges that make it hard to break down this task or my child might need some connection with me before they can help or maybe there's something going on at preschool or school that's hard and that's coming out in this interaction with me. That last part is especially important. It seems so obvious to us when we're feeling overwhelmed that it's because we haven't had enough sleep and we had a fight with our partner and our boss is being unreasonable. And we love that the kids are interested in so many things, but it's so much work to drive them around to all the places. It might seem in the moment that it's all about your child's behavior, but actually it's at least partly because of all the other stuff that you're carrying. And the same is true for our kids. Their actions in the difficult moments with us aren't always about that moment.

They're about everything else that's going on in their lives and our lives as well. So now let's talk about what we're really modeling for our children with our emotional responses. Your child's developing brain is watching and learning from how you navigate these moments. And they're not just learning from what you say, they're learning from what your body is telling them. Children learn about their own emotional responses in three main ways. The first is through our direct teaching, when we tell them things like, you're okay after they fall over, when they're clearly not okay because they're in tears. The second is through the emotional climate of our family and how we all relate to each other. And the third, which is what we're focusing on today is through watching how we regulate our own responses. So, when you suppress your anger and say, I'm not mad through gritted teeth, your child gets really conflicting information.

Your words are saying one thing, but your body language is telling a completely different story. And this teaches kids that emotions are dangerous things that need to be hidden. And this is one of the emotional dysregulation examples we see play out in families, when parents model that intense emotions must be hidden rather than acknowledged and managed. Emotional suppression causes a person to experience themselves as inauthentic. And it can actually increase physiological stress, not only in the parent who's suppressing, but also in the child. When we consistently suppress our emotions, we're more likely to experience depressive symptoms and other health issues.

An emotionally dysregulated parent who suppresses their feelings often creates a household where everyone feels like they're walking on eggshells. Children of parents who suppress their emotions are less likely to develop healthy ways to reappraise difficult situations. They've watched their parents’ stuff down difficult experiences instead of working through them so they don't learn the skills that they need to manage their own intense experiences. There's another cost to emotional suppression that many parents don't realize. It's actually exhausting. When you suppress emotions, your body burns calories to maintain that suppression. You're working against your own nervous system all day long. When we allow ourselves to experience authentic reactions and own them, not making them the child's fault, and show how we can recover from them in ourselves and in our relationships, we feel better.

And our child learns how to do this as well. This does get more complicated when your child's also having a hard time. When they're melting down, their nervous system is also flooded. They're not capable of rational thought any more than you are when you're triggered. And this is when your regulation becomes even more important. If you can stay connected to your body and breathe through your own stress response, you become a calming presence for your child. Your nervous system can actually help to regulate theirs, just like it did when they were a baby. But if you get flooded too, you have two dysregulated nervous systems trying to figure things out together, and that often doesn't go well. A two-year-old who's having a meltdown is not being manipulative.

Their brain literally doesn't have the capacity for manipulation yet. A four-year-old who seems to be pushing your buttons might actually be testing whether you're a safe person who could handle their big feelings without falling apart yourself. So seeing your own challenges coming first and regulating yourself can help you to be more present and available for their challenges. There will still be times when you react before you can catch yourself, but when that happens, you can repair. You can come back later and say, I got really overwhelmed earlier and I raised my voice. I didn't know how to handle my own big feelings in that moment.

Often our strongest reactions to our children's behavior are not really about what they're doing right now, they're about how parenting triggers past hurts. Maybe your child's defiance reminds you of being criticized as a child, and suddenly you're reliving the shame that you experienced when your own parents yelled at you. Maybe your child's emotional meltdown triggers memories of chaos in your childhood home. When you notice you're having an outsized reaction to your child's behavior, you can ask yourself, what is this reminding me of? What am I really reacting to right now? Sometimes just that awareness is enough to help you respond to what's happening right now. Other times it helps to process your experiences with others who can help you understand what happened to you in a new way. And that's where you can move beyond just managing the triggers today to actually healing yourself so you don't pass on the hurts you've experienced.

Like any skill, emotion regulation for adults gets easier with practice. You can even practice when you're not triggered. Notice throughout the day what's happening in your body. When you're stuck in traffic, when you're reading a stressful email, what does your body do with that stress? Here are some other ways to practice emotion regulation in daily life. Practice a body scan several times a day. Notice what's happening in your body from head to toe. You might try looking around for five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can touch, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste when you notice stress building, even in situations that don't involve your kids. This is a simple but really powerful emotion regulation exercise that grounds you in the present moment.

You can practice reappraisal with low stakes situations. So when someone cuts you off in traffic, you might try thinking, oh, maybe they're having an emergency instead of what a jerk. Research consistently shows that when parents improve their own emotion regulation skills, their children's behavior problems decrease significantly. Children who grow up with parents who model healthy emotion regulation are more likely to have better relationships with their peers, perform better in school, and have fewer mental health challenges as they grow up. When you yell less, your child experiences less stress. When you repair more consistently, your child learns that relationships can survive conflict.

When you acknowledge your emotions instead of suppressing them, your child learns that all parts of their experience are acceptable. So I want to end with this. Developing the capacity to stay connected to yourself and your child during difficult moments takes practice. Your body's responses make complete sense given how your nervous system evolved to protect you. Learning to work with these responses becomes easier over time. Most of us yell because we never learned other ways to handle overwhelming moments.

But you can learn these skills at any point in your life. Some parents notice changes within weeks of starting to practice them. Others find it takes months to really retrain their nervous system. The work you do on your own emotion regulation models for your child what it looks like to be a whole complex human being who can go through life's challenges with grace and resilience. And that is one of the greatest gifts you can give them.

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