Currently they are studying the association between harsh parenting and children’s exposure to interpersonal violence and how children respond to threatening stimuli. Grasso and colleague Margaret Briggs-Gowan have found that verbal forms of harsh parenting partially explain the relationship between children’s exposure to parental conflict and mental health problems. “And children in homes where parents regularly raise their voices tend to have lower self-esteem and higher rates of depression.” “Yelling, screaming, and threatening children to get them to start or stop a behavior is ineffective and increases risk that children will develop emotional or behavioral problems,” Grasso says. Increasingly, parental experts are emphasizing the concept that yelling at our kids causes more problems than we intend for it to solve. What if, rather than being a tool for teaching our kids how to make good choices, yelling fuels our desire as parents to feel like we’re in control?Ĭould we be unintentionally conveying the message that we in fact are not in control?Īre we actually preventing our kids from making good choices on their own because they’re just waiting for our next reaction to decide what to do? What if the reason we raise our voice with our children has more do with releasing our own frustration than it does with constructively influencing how our kids behave? Damion Grasso, assistant professor of psychiatry (Photo by Janine Gelineau) “But when it comes to correcting behavior or compelling children to do something… maybe not so much,” says UConn Health assistant professor of psychiatry Damion Grasso. When our kid starts chasing the ball into the street, raising our voice can be very effective. When it comes to our children, yelling surely has its place. It’s an evolutionary alarm system for when seconds count to preserve life and limb. There’s a good chance that you (a) were yelled at by your parents as a child (b) have yelled at your own children, or (c) all of the above.Īs humans, yelling is in our wiring.
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