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Stages of Ineffective Single Parenting Yelling and Threatening Print E-mail


Yelling

Yelling is a form of nagging done at a louder volume, in the false hope that nowbecause the noise is louderchildren will now pay attention to the whining and complaining of the afflicted parent.

This fact explains in part the popularity of the ubiquitous iPod. No wonder children run around with earphones in their ears, or talking on their cell phones all the time. The atmosphere in their home is being polluted by noise. Someone is yelling at them again. Wowthis is unpleasantbut hey, I can plug in my headphones and listen to some tunes.

Few attempts at discipline cause a greater loss of respect for the parent than yelling. When a parent adds high volume and angry emotions to nagging and complaining, the child realizes what everyone else can clearly see: The parent is "losing it"meaning, among other things, losing the battle for effective control of the household. A parent who resorts to yelling is more or less telling everyone, at a very high volume, "Hey, everybody look! I'm a complete failure at this!"

This may be sad, but most children don't begin complying with rules out of pity for or sympathy with the failing parent. Instead, they choose to retreat further into whatever forms of escape are available to them. Who wants to spend any time around "Old Yeller"?

Threatening

When yelling fails, as it usually does, the next unhealthy step tends to be threatening punishment. Ineffective single parents frequently threaten their children with dire consequences and disastrous types of punishment. But as the children quickly realize and everyone else can plainly see, none of these sad outcomes will occur anytime soon.

"If you don't stop that right now, you're grounded!" a frustrated parent may yell at an errant child. But grounded from what? And for how long? And when, exactly, is the grounding going to begin?

Idle threats, voiced in anger and frustration, not only fail in gaining control and compliance, they actually achieve just the opposite. Threats of doom and gloom, yelled at a child across a crowded minivan or from one room of the house to another, confirm to the child thatin reality nothing bad at all is actually going to happen. The child merely learns that Dad is angry right now. Where's the surprise in that? By the time a child's parents have gotten divorced, a child is used to seeing Mom, Dad, or both get angry and stay angry. From the child's viewpoint, anger may be the normal emotional state of one or both parents.

Threats voiced in frustration do little or nothing to effectively change bad behavior. Every time an empty threat is yelled across the room, the child simply learns that the parent is in a bad mood and should be avoided for a while. If possible, the child will withdraw to another room or another activity, or into an inner world of dreams, fantasy, and make-believe.

More to the point, threats fail to communicate love. There's a huge difference between a loving parent carefully enforcing a clearly defined ruleand an angry parent making loud threats and fruitless vocal attacks.


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