I started reading this parenting book one time--I'm not going to say what it's called because I didn't appreciate it much, and in fact, I say "I started reading" rather than "I read" it because I couldn't bring myself to finish the book. But the point of the book was to help parents stop yelling at their kids. A quick google search turns up this quote from a website that I'm wholly unfamiliar with called todaysparent.com:
The Journal of Marriage and Family study revealed that almost 90 percent of the nearly 1,000 parents surveyed said they'd yelled, screamed or shouted at their kids in the previous year. Of families with children older than seven, nearly 100 percentof parents said they could count themselves as confirmed yellers.
I didn't read the study and I don't know anything about the composition of the survey sample, but I think it's also considered common knowledge that most parents yell at their kids. (Correct me if I'm wrong, okay y'all?) And I also think the majority of yelling parents also know it's not good to yell at your kids too much (the same google search from above also turns up many results such as "Why Losing Your Temper and Yelling At Your Kids Isn't Cool" and "Yelling at your kids may be more harmful than you think"). Well, I'm also guilty of yelling at my kids too much, so I was pretty happy to have a book to guide me out of it.
The problem was that as I read the book, I saw it discuss more and more reasons why it's harmful to yell at your kids, which did nothing but make me feel more guilty than I already did, and it talked about some alternative responses. Well, the alternative responses were supposed to be your method to stop yelling, but to me it seemed like the book was saying, "Just use your willpower and don't yell!" I'm oversimplifying by a lot; I'm sure there actually is plenty of helpful content in the book. But it didn't speak to me at all, and it didn't help me stop yelling at all.
Why do we yell at our kids? I don't know about you, but for me it's usually because I'm angry that they're not listening to me, or because I'm frustrated that I can't get them to do what I need them to do. Sometimes it seems as though they are purposely misbehaving in order to drive me crazy. I see things one way, through my own perspective.
But one day, my kid was doing something infuriating, and I looked at her, and I saw me. (I saw that she was being animated by the same "voice actor" as I was.) And instead of yelling, I put myself in her place and I saw the situation through her perspective.
I saw that she was refusing to cooperate because she was scared...or she was having a meltdown because she was tired and hungry...or she was misbehaving because she didn't understand. That was all. Never was she misbehaving on purpose because she wanted to drive me crazy. The urge to yell dissipated. There was no need for willpower. There was only love and understanding.
Instead of needing to muster up an enormous amount of willpower to hold back the yelling, I just knew what to do to help my child behave appropriately in a way that made everyone happy.
I can't tell you what a relief it was to experience this.
I don't always see it this way. Many times I still yell. Sometimes it still looks to me like the kids misbehave on purpose in order to drive me crazy, even though I know that's not true. But I know I'll be seeing this less, and yelling less, without having to force it. And I think that's a real gift.