Yell less, love more

I am on a mission to make my house a yell-free zone. I’m sick and tired of shouting and roaring at the kids like a fishwife and then battering myself over the head with the guilty stick for the rest of the day.

 

I’m also worried that one of these days, the next door neighbours will report me to child protection services or worse, the Gardaí.

 

How has it come to this? I can’t remember ever yelling at anyone before I had kids, apart from my own siblings when I was younger and God knows, they deserved it. But these small people just know how to push buttons I never knew I had and suck the little bit of patience I had to start with out of me.

 

I know I’m not alone here, far from it. Lots of mums yell at their kids – the little monkeys drive us to it – but I never wanted to be a yelling mum and now, I have yelling kids too. We have become a yelling household, oh the shame, the shame!

 

I’ve seen the shock on people’s faces when quiet, well behaved Princess Firstborn lets loose a foundation-shaking roar at her younger brother or sister. “Where the hell did that come from?” they wonder. It came from the bad example of her calm-on-the-outside mum’s inner fishwife. And all this yelling achieves diddly-squat, apart from making the kids feel angry and resentful and me guilty and regretful.

 

Well, I’ve had enough of it. I’ve made the decision to become a nicer, calmer, more peaceful kind of mum and to transform our home into a yell-free zone and I intend to do it without having to resort to ‘Mammy’s Little Helpers’ or smoking weed. A good start would be going to sleep on time at night instead of reading into the early hours and then getting up earlier in the morning so I’m not racing like a lunatic from the get-go.

 

I also need to learn how to be more patient, not just with the kids but in general. I have inherited my dad’s utter lack of patience and tendency to fly off the handle. Just like him, I calm down quite quickly afterwards and try to make up for it by being extra nice but the same thing can happen again ten minutes later when one of the kids pushes my yelling button. I also start to lose the plot if I’m stuck in traffic or in a queue for more than a few seconds.

 

So I decided to google how to be more patient with kids (close to midnight last night when I should have been going off to sleep) and got loads of useful advice. Lots of advice from the experts and the real experts (ie: mums) recommended counting to 10 (or 100), taking deep breaths, walking away from the situation or whispering instead of yelling. We need to accept that children are not adults and should not be expected to act like adults and that they will be totally unreasonable at times.

 

I ordered a book called Calm Parents, Happy Kids — How to Stop Yelling and Start Connecting by Dr Laura Markham, the creator of Aha! Parenting. (If it’s any good, I’ll share the best bits in a future post.)

 

Then I came across a great site called The Orange Rhino run by a US mum of four boys aged between 21 months and six-and-a-half. One day she too realised she was yelling at her kids far more than she liked and she made a commitment to go 365 days without yelling. She ended up writing a book about it and setting up a public blog to keep her on track.

 

I have no intention of taking on the Orange Rhino Challenge to go 365 days without yelling but I am certainly going to use some of the free tips, advice and resources on this site like trigger tracking sheets, stop signs to stick up in ‘high yelling zones’ and her 100 alternatives to yelling (some of which are hilarious). She has even developed a Yelling Meter which goes from 0 (everyday voice) to 7 (raging scream) — your voice should remain in the 0-4 levels unless in the case of an emergency.

 

My mission to become a non-yelling mum begins today!

 

Michelle McDonagh is a freelance journalist working from Blarney, Co Cork. She’s a mum of three children aged 2, 4 and 5, and a firm believer in 'good enough' parenting, bribery and the healing powers of chocolate.