From this New York Times article:
Many in today’s pregnancy-flaunting, soccer-cheering, organic-snack-proffering generation of parents would never spank their children. We congratulate our toddlers for blowing their nose (“Good job!”), we friend our teenagers (literally and virtually), we spend hours teaching our elementary-school offspring how to understand their feelings. But, incongruously and with regularity, this is a generation that yells. …
“My name is Francesca Castagnoli and I am a screamer,” began a post on Motherblogger.net earlier this year. “Admitting I’m a mom that screams, shouts and loses it in front her kids feels like I’m revealing a dark family secret.”
“It’s not kind,” said Ms. Klein in Oregon. “When I’m done I feel awful.”
To research their book “Mommy Guilt: Learn to Worry Less, Focus on What Matters Most, and Raise Happier Kids,” the three authors, Devra Renner, Aviva Pflock and Julie Bort, commissioned a survey of 1,300 parents across the country to determine sources of parental guilt. Two-thirds of respondents named yelling — not working or spanking or missing a school event — as their biggest guilt inducer.
I have to confess that I’m no different: at least once a week I snap at my kids out of my own frustration. It usually happens when outside pressures have piled up and I feel like I can’t take the stress brought on by whining kids. It happens when I open my mouth without taking half a second to think about what I’m going to say and how I’ll say it.
Ted Tripp rebuked me in Instructing a Child’s Heart:
Ecclesiastes 9:17 reminds us, “The quiet words of the wise are more to be heeded than the shouts of a ruler of fools.” There is a power to quiet words that is not present in shouts or screams. I know that is counter-intuitive. You may think that you are heard and your words have more weight if they are shouted, but the opposite is the case.
Shouting trivializes words. Shouting puts emotion in the foreground and meaning in the background.
I once had the charge to counsel a mother who was a screamer. Her red-faced shouting spewed out demands and threats to her children. The more she used screaming as her mode of communication, the less her words had weight and authority with her children. In time the children did not even notice that she was speaking to them.
“The heart of the righteous ponders how to answer, but the mouth of the wicked pours out evil things.” (Prov. 15:28)