Is there ever a good reason to yell at your kids?

James: Is there ever a good reason to yell at your kids?

Catherine: Maybe if they're actively running into traffic.

James: That's exactly what I thought. If a child is about to run in front of a car, yelling can get their attention. In that case, the goal is safety, not manipulating behavior with shame or fear.

Catherine: Right. You might need to raise the volume of your voice in an urgent safety situation, but you don't need to berate anyone or bring judgment, shame, or harshness to it. It can just be urgency. And if someone is right next to you, yelling may not even be the best response.

In general, though, I'm not a fan of yelling at kids. I think it causes a lot of harm and has no real redeeming benefit. I had a client bring this up recently. He doesn't like the yelling in his home, especially when his partner yells at him, and he sincerely asked whether it was actually bad to yell at their kids. I do think it's bad, and I have a long list of reasons.

One place I start is by asking why we yell at kids in the first place. Most adults can handle all kinds of interpersonal situations without yelling in every other area of life, and then in parenting we act like we have to do it this way. I don't buy that. If you can handle an emergency at work or a conflict with friends without yelling, why are you yelling at your kids?

James: I think we yell at kids because we can get away with it.

Catherine: Often, yes. I think you're naming entitlement, and I do think there's a lot of entitlement in parenting. I also think many people haven't thought much about their decision to yell at kids.

One situation where I've certainly been tempted is with my teenager, who always has headphones on. If I want his attention, I could yell, but that's a line I don't cross with my kids. So instead I walk over and tap his shoulder, or sometimes I call his phone because that's what he's listening to music on anyway. It's easy as a parent to justify not doing the harder thing. Why walk over? Why not just yell up the stairs?

What I object to is the harshness of it. Younger, smaller people need more gentleness, not more harshness. But culturally, there's a lot of conditioning that it's okay to be harsh with kids in ways you would never tolerate from another adult, or even from your child toward you.

James: You've brought that up before, how hypocritical we are about allowing ourselves to do things to our children that we would never allow our children to do to us because we'd call it wrong or disrespectful.

Catherine: Yes. I see that all the time. Parents will not tolerate their kids talking to them the way they talk to their kids. In general, I hold adults to higher standards than children, and I hold parents to higher standards than their own children.

When you're dealing with young, developing brains, it's not realistic or fair to expect them to regulate themselves better than you do. What you're modeling is, "This is how we handle frustration around here. This is how we handle impatience around here." Then the whole household starts following that pattern, and everyone's frustration and anger build on each other.

James: My favorite way to think about this is that we often talk about yelling as if it's just a response. You did something, I felt something, and then I yelled, as though I had no say in the matter.

I think a more accurate way to describe it is this: my behavior is designed to create an emotional response in you. If I yell at you, I'm trying to make you feel bad so I can manipulate your behavior. I really think that's what's happening most of the time.

Catherine: Yes, and one of the reasons I think yelling doesn't work is that it conditions the wrong thing. A lot of parents yell because they want their kids to do chores. But if the kid learns, "I jump up and do chores when someone is angry and yelling at me," then the child isn't developing self-regulation or any real sense of responsibility. The trigger for action becomes aggression.

That always backfires, because then you have to keep reaching for that same trigger over and over. No parent actually wants that. They want the child to do the thing without that level of intervention, but yelling teaches dependence on harshness.

James: I also think a lot of us grew up with physical punishment, and most of us are trying not to raise our kids that way. That gives kids more freedom.

My kids don't have to clean their rooms the way I did. I cleaned my room to avoid physical punishment. My kids don't have that threat hanging over them, so I think it's fair to say they won't be as obedient as I was. There's no threat of physical punishment driving that obedience.

Catherine: Right. You're running into the limits of how much control you get over another person when you're not going to use aggression, verbal or physical. Aggression can force compliance in the short term. But what it doesn't do is help kids develop a genuine sense of responsibility that isn't tied to fear and resentment.

James: It's delicate, because people are naturally wired to seek autonomy, even very young children. When I was growing up, there was a constant threat of physical punishment, so one path to autonomy was doing what I was told in order to avoid something worse.

My children aren't in that situation. If I don't handle myself well and there's no threat of physical punishment, then disobeying me can actually feel like the path to more autonomy for them. I think it's pretty normal for kids not to do what their parents want if they don't gain any autonomy by doing it.

Catherine: That makes sense to me. I've been running a not entirely conclusive experiment with my own kids for years, which is basically: will kids do housework if you don't make them?

I really don't impose many chores. What I've found is that they will help if I'm sick. They will help if I'm genuinely overwhelmed. They will help if we're trying to leave for a trip and I calmly explain, "We can leave as soon as these things are done, and I'd love your help." They do some things most days if I simply ask in a calm way. They'll walk the dog, pick up dishes, things like that.

And as they've gotten older, more and more they just spontaneously clean their rooms. I never made them do that. My theory is that the main thing I'm offering them is a model of non-resentful housework. I don't stomp around the house acting like a martyr and saying people treat me like a maid. I just take care of my stuff and my space as best I can. I think the main thing I'm offering them is the absence of negative emotional intensity around it.

We'll see how it plays out when they're living on their own, but so far that seems to matter.

James: I've had the same experience. I stopped trying to get my kids to clean their rooms several years ago, and all three of the ones still at home eventually started cleaning them on their own.

The longest gap between when I stopped trying to force it and when it started happening on its own was about two years. The others were shorter. They all eventually figured out that they actually wanted a clean room. I don't think I could have accelerated that, definitely not by yelling and probably not by consequences either.

The only thing that seems useful is what you're talking about: modeling what it looks like to maintain a clean, orderly space and making it clear by your behavior that life is better that way, without shaming them. I think most young children don't want a clean room enough to do the work of making one. Some do, but most don't. And it's actually pretty hard for young children to put things in order.

Catherine: I remember being extremely overwhelmed by cleaning my room as a kid. It felt like I didn't know how to do it. I remember being five or six, sitting there surrounded by stuff, and not knowing how to get it from the state it was in to an acceptable state.

That seems developmentally realistic to me. If you've grown up in a very structured environment or a Montessori environment, maybe you've got more skills than I had. But I think we sometimes read kids as lazy or disrespectful when they're actually just struggling with something that is genuinely hard for their young brains.

James: I think we teach kids ten times more through our example than through our words. If I want my child to be kinder, more courageous, or more considerate, talking to them about that will do very little compared to me behaving that way.

That puts me in a hard position because if I want my kids to be more respectful, the best thing I can do is be more respectful to them and to my partner. That's hard for me. And it's useful for me to notice that, because if it's hard for me, it's going to be even harder for my kids.

Catherine: As a rough metric, if your child is a third of your age, it's probably realistic to expect them to be maybe a third as good at emotional regulation. If they have a third of your capacity and they're a third your age, they're probably doing fine.

What doesn't feel good is that parenting puts your own struggles right in front of you. It's a lot easier to externalize that and blame the kids and say they're being disrespectful.

James: Parenting really does demand that I grow myself up. To be a good parent, I have to ask, "What is my impact on my children? What is it like for them to be on the other side of the energy I'm bringing?"

That's the same question I ask in my marriage. But my wife is more capable of giving me collaborative, constructive feedback than my kids are, because there isn't the same power differential. With my kids, I have to do even more work to figure out what it's like to be on the other side of me.

One of my four kids is especially good at telling me. From his early teen years, he'd stop me and say, "No, wait a second, Dad," and point out where I wasn't living up to what I was saying. That was a real gift. Sometimes I had enough presence of mind to say, "You're right," even though it felt terrible. My other three kids couldn't really do that, at least not until they were adults.

Catherine: What you're highlighting is how hard it is to get real feedback from your family about how you're actually showing up, and yet parents often feel entitled to go around giving feedback constantly.

We don't watch our own delivery enough. Am I being respectful to my kid here? If a child says something clumsily and the delivery is off, we might immediately say, "That's disrespectful. You can't talk to me that way." But receiving feedback is hard. We could use more compassion for how hard that is, especially given how much feedback we give kids about their behavior.

James: I run into this with couples. They'll complain that their kids are disrespectful, but I'm sitting there watching the parents be disrespectful to each other. From my point of view, it's obvious their kids will also be disrespectful.

Children's brains are looking for an operating system, and they're going to download whatever operating system is available. If the parents are disrespectful to each other, and probably to the children too, then the children are going to learn disrespect. There's no magic switch where I can treat my child and my partner with disrespect and then somehow expect my child to know how to be respectful to me. That's not possible. Where would they have learned it?

Catherine: I have seen parents who treat the kids a lot better than they treat their partner, and they seem to think that's enough. But it's still a parenting problem if you're treating your partner badly in front of your kids.

James: If my kids are used to dealing with my dysregulation, then they're learning that this is what it's like to be with someone who's supposed to love you. In their future relationships, they may end up on either side of that pattern, either "You need to help me handle my dysregulation" or "I'm going to help you handle yours." In neither case is anyone really responsible for managing their own emotions.

Catherine: Exactly. With yelling, kids wire that into attachment. They're at risk of growing up and either yelling at their partners or being with partners who yell at them, or just treating each other with hostility in general, because their brains have mapped that as a normal part of love and attachment.

James: And the way our brains develop is so hard to change in adulthood. I can give my kids this huge gift by showing them how this is supposed to work so they don't have to spend their thirties and forties rewiring it. It's much easier to learn it straight from a parent than to untangle it decades later.

Catherine: The first time I read Brain Talk, I felt a real urgency to clean up a lot of my parenting and not just my parenting, but my own brain.

It's not that you lose influence when kids reach adulthood. You've talked about how your continued growth has still had a huge impact on your adult kids. When I work with clients who wonder if it's too late to repair the damage they did as parents, I always ask whether it would matter to them now, today, if their own parents really looked at themselves and changed. And people always say yes, it would matter so much.

So no, it's not too late. But there is a special window when kids are living at home and their brains are still developing, and during that time your influence is enormous. More warmth and kindness are like the best inheritance you could give them. It's a gift that can pay dividends for generations.

James: I like calling that emotional wealth. You build emotional wealth in your family and pass it on to your kids.

Catherine: I really like that way of thinking about it too.

James: It accumulates and compounds just like financial wealth. If I save and invest beyond what I need to live on, that money compounds. Emotional wealth works the same way. If I build extra kindness and respect into my family, it compounds over time and across generations. You get people who are more courageous and more kind because the family got set on a path of growth instead of stagnation.

Catherine: I agree. Each of these changes is hard, especially if you're the first generation trying to make them.

If you're the first generation saying, "I don't want to use physical discipline," that's a hard shift. But once you've made it, your kids won't have to struggle not to repeat something that was never done to them. Then they can focus on something else, maybe how they talk to their kids. And the next generation after that might focus on adding even more positive interaction. It really does compound.

James: I like to think of the brain as having a kind of safety mechanism. When I feel under threat, my brain locks down and stops adjusting and growing.

If I yell at my child, I'm putting that child's brain on safety lock. That's the whole point of yelling. I want them to go into survival mode and react to me as if I'm a threat. But a brain in survival mode is not growing. It's reacting. If I put my child there over and over, their development gets pushed behind what it could have been. A lot of that can be recovered later, but it's so much better not to put them there in the first place.

Catherine: Yes. Neuroplasticity is incredibly exciting to me. The fact that we can change our brains in adulthood has changed my life. Even so, it's a lot of work.

I've thrown all kinds of things at my own brain trying to help it outgrow patterns that didn't have to be there in the first place. I wouldn't want that for my kids. As grateful as I am for neuroplasticity in adulthood, I hope they won't need it to the same extent I did.

James: I hope so too. I think you're on a good path.

Catherine: I hope so. It would be nice if they could use their brain's plasticity for creativity and growth instead of needing so much of it just to retrain themselves not to yell at their kids.

James: Exactly. We're always going to be growing. The question is: what rung on the ladder do you want your kids to start on when they're twenty? Do you want them starting at the bottom, or already halfway up?

Parenting is such an unusual responsibility. I can't think of many other situations where someone holds this much influence over another human being. With a young child, it almost feels like accepting an infinite quota of responsibility. Everything I say and do has an immense impact on this little person, and there often isn't anyone there to hold me accountable except me, or maybe my partner if I have one.

I have a friend who's a single dad with a very young daughter, and when he's parenting her, all of that responsibility is on his shoulders. He's the only one there to hold himself accountable. That's a profound responsibility.

Catherine: When I work with people in their seventies, we're still looking at the impact of their early life, especially the impact of their parents. Their parents may be long gone, but that's not the point. Their brains are still shaped around who their parents were and how they were treated. In that sense, the impact of parenting is never really over.

James: It really is a huge responsibility. When I first came into contact with my impact on other people, I felt a lot of distress about it. I don't feel that way as much now. I'm more focused on this: it's okay for me to be who I am right now, and it's okay for me to have been who I was. Going forward, I want to pay a lot of attention to my impact on the people I care about most.

Catherine: And your kids will be mapping that too. They'll map that you care about continuing to grow. The direction matters. You don't have to be perfect. They can tell whether you're moving toward treating them better, and that matters.

James: Yeah. All right, I think we should end there. Thank you so much.

Catherine: All right. Thanks, James.

James: Okay.