My Attempt to Stop Yelling My Way Through Motherhood
The rage that parenting has awakened in me caught me completely off guard. I work with highly behavioral kids as a licensed behavior analyst. Kids who throw chairs, scream, bolt out of rooms, and sometimes hurt themselves and others. I absorb it all, redirecting and staying calm. I rarely feel triggered or dysregulated when I’m working. In fact, calmness comes easy. I use positive-reinforcement systems and give gentle reminders. I say things like, “I see that you’re frustrated, let’s go take a walk.”
At home though, I’m yelling at my 6-year-old son about kindness and the importance of following directions. And I’m doing this while lifting all 47 pounds of him off the ground, evacuating him from the living room to his bedroom after he’s shoved his 18-month-old sister despite my several calm requests to give her some space.
“You are not to use your hands in a rough way!” I say loudly, carrying him out of one room and into the other. “If you can’t be safe, you can’t be in the living room with everyone. I don’t know why I have to tell you the same thing every day.” He grunts in frustration then adds an “I don’t care!”
For a minute, the yelling feels good. The moment I open my mouth it’s an emotional release disguised as a lecture. It feels as though yelling is the only way to control the situation and keep both of them safe. Like the anger that has accumulated in my body has somewhere to go. Once I get him onto his bunk bed to take a break, I realize a time-out would also be beneficial to me. Here I am, demanding respect, gentleness, and emotional control while not exuding any of it. That’s when my post-rage hangover hits: the guilt that I have felt more anger toward this tiny person I love than toward those who have actually harmed me. The people who deserved my anger got understanding, grace, and even empathy. Probably as some sort of coping mechanism, but still.
Before motherhood, anger was a feeling I shoved down. As a child, I specialized in swallowing my rage like it was medicine. I wanted to always appear unbothered and low-maintenance like a succulent house plant who only needed water once a month. I grew up in a socially conservative suburb outside of Richmond, Virginia. In the early aughts, it was a place that valued high-achieving students and upwardly mobile, happy families. My family fit this mold, and everyone in my house kept their emotions close to their chest. We were encouraged to make the honor roll in lieu of learning the art of emotional disclosure; discussing problems, particularly ones with a negative heft, never occurred. It didn’t help that for girls growing up in the South, any vocal expression of frustration or anger was viewed as backtalk and disrespect. It was a culture where being polite and compliant were rewarded. Being a good girl meant shutting up.
When I felt mad as a kid, I’d pinch my arms to redirect the sensation. Once in a middle-school tap-dance class, a hot-headed teacher lined us up to shout at us about an out-of-time routine. I felt the urge to both cry and scream, but I wouldn’t dare let even a tear drop from my eye. The expectation was to stand still and listen. I crossed my arms behind my back and pinched the skin of my upper arm, focusing on the sting and my sharp nail. Before I knew it, the music was starting and we tried again. It worked like a magic trick, making the feeling disappear. Later I developed a mantra to go along with it (“This won’t matter in two weeks. This won’t matter in one year. This won’t matter in five years”), which sounds like a mature coping strategy, but I wasn’t actually coping with any of the anger (or disappointment or sadness or anything negative, really). I was avoiding — some experts might say dissociating. The older I got, the more extreme my strategies became: The pinching turned into self-harm. The mantras turned into excessive drinking disguised as social partying.
As I entered my late 20s, the drinking and occasional cutting were losing their social acceptability and I was fatigued. I knew it wasn’t fair to keep acting in a way that worried those closest to me, particularly my then soon-to-be wife. I started the work of therapy to shed my more extreme coping techniques, and over time I did, but I kept avoiding. I built a life where I didn’t have to get angry. I curated my spaces, my friends, my routines, and even my social media was designed to shield me from feeling negativity. My apartment was tidy and quiet and soothing. I organized my external life so well that my internal world rarely got loud.
Then, at 30, I began having children. And it turns out children do not go out of their way to ensure that your emotional needs, or any needs for that matter, are met or that your triggers are avoided. Suddenly, the coping mechanism of circumvention was not available. With my “flight” strategy deemed useless, I inevitably turned to “fight,” or in this case yelling.
Based on how I grew up, I knew I wanted to parent differently when it came to emotions. It was important to me to create a space at home where all feelings were welcome to be discussed out in the open. But in these moments it felt like I was creating old, unwanted patterns by demanding quiet and order, even though I was yelling. It isn’t my children’s fault that we live in a small city apartment instead of a sprawling suburban home, leaving them little room to roam about unnoticed and disorderly. It isn’t their fault that their frontal lobes haven’t developed. The dysregulating chaos of everyday life can feel like an emergency when it just isn’t one (well, most of the time). I knew I needed to come up with a plan — urgently — to improve things.
After heaving my son into a time-out and cooling down a bit myself, I decided I had to move forward differently. I already knew what would happen next: a restorative conversation to help him understand the importance of his own actions followed by an apology from me for not acting as my best parent self — it was important, but it also felt redundant. How much does an apology mean if you’re not doing anything to make the problem better? How many apologies will he take from me before they are meaningless? I decided to do what I do best at work; I made a behavior chart — for both of us. His chart read, “Following Directions and Safe Body! 30 checks = Amazon shopping!” Mine read, “No Yelling 30 checks = facial!” One check per day.
On day one, when my son threw his toothbrush across the bathroom, I realized there’s no yellow light in my brain, just green to red. He wasn’t mad or frustrated, apparently the brush just needed to be thrown. The toothbrush zoomed across the bathroom, knocking over various toiletries, which all fell to the ground with a bang. Sticky toothpaste splattered on the wall. The last ten minutes of the night are notoriously challenging for most parents. Kids are fighting the transition to bedtime and parents just want some time alone. Naturally, I levitated out of my body. But I forced myself to stay quiet: I’d decided that the first phase of this experiment would be simply shutting up. Instead of allowing myself to even open my trap to start spewing useless expectations — “How many times do I have to tell you to stop throwing!” — I said nothing. I felt the tightening of my chest and muscles, the racing of my breath, and my clenched jaw, but I kept my mouth shut. While my silence resulted in a twitchy left eye, it also allowed me the time to observe the reality of the situations, which proved dissimilar to my physiological response.
In my body, it felt like he had hurled a Molotov cocktail, but there was no actual emergency happening. Everyone was safe. Maybe the moment was loud, messy, and chaotic, but everybody and everything was fine. It was clear that my response did not match reality. Without speaking, I handed him a paper towel and he cleaned up the mess and carried on with the rest of his bedtime routine. He didn’t get his check, but I didn’t yell or lecture him. By not reacting to my anger, I felt empowered.
Over those four weeks, there was no specific technique for not yelling aside from practicing the skill of doing nothing. I’ve since mostly been white-knuckling it and holding strong to the knowledge that I don’t want to be yelling. Like a muscle being worked out, it’s gotten easier to not react with more practice. Throughout the month, I noticed that on the days where I struggled the most, he had more difficulty managing his emotions too. When I yelled, he pushed back with his own yelling, or stomping, or throwing. But when I could force myself to slow down, take a deep breath, and count to ten, I could be more relaxed, externally at least, and there was a higher likelihood he would make a better choice on his own.
Toward the end of those 30 days, the thought occurred to me to add in wrestling time. I saw a TikTok from an unlicensed parent coach talking about the importance of physicality in relationships for little boys. While I wasn’t sure she was qualified or even correct, I knew I lived with a rambunctious boy who would be thrilled if I told him he had permission to karate chop me. It didn’t seem right that I was asking so much of him to remain regulated without offering more physical outlets that he clearly craved. Now for ten minutes a night we create somewhat structured havoc. He pushes me, jumps on my back, and we roll around on the floor. I even let him hurl himself off the couch with Olympic-level flair. His favorite part is when I grab him by the shoulders and throw him onto the cushions. This time when I have all 47 pounds of his body in the air and we’re eye to eye, we’re both laughing.
It’s likely, I realize now, that motherhood didn’t ruin my peace but revealed it to be overly conditional and unsustainable. I wasn’t immune to anger, to feeling dysregulated, to reacting aggressively — I was just hiding from it. And while the chart didn’t give me a perfect month — I snapped twice, but both times, I came back down within seconds instead of minutes — it did give me a better starting place to slow down when I feel the heat and agitation building. While blowing up in a rage isn’t ideal, I know avoiding the feeling altogether also isn’t healthy.
Keeping my goal of not yelling top of mind throughout the day has helped me react more thoughtfully and feel more in control of both my emotions and my parenting. Surprisingly, it has given me space to see the humor in the everyday annoyances of raising small children. Laughing at the chaos feels better for us all. Still, I haven’t quite figured out the step between not suppressing versus wildly unleashing it. I know I don’t want my kids to think mothers are saints who float above authentic feelings. I want them to know conflict is normal, anger is no more than one of a thousand feelings, and apologies are human, not evidence of failure. If the goal isn’t to eliminate anger, then maybe it’s to carry it more responsibly.