How to stop yelling at your kids and do something more effective instead

I used to yell at my kids all the time. I’m not proud of this fact — it’s one of my deepest regrets as a mother. But the truth is that I had no idea how to effectively discipline my kids, and this helplessness regularly left me feeling frustrated, overwhelmed, and angry. So I yelled. And yelled. And it never accomplished a single thing.

Instead, yelling at my kids upset them — and me. They would get scared and start crying, and I would immediately feel guilty and remorseful. I apologized over and over before I finally managed to get hold of my emotions and stop yelling at them … which is not to say I’m perfect. I still have bad days where I yell before I can stop myself, but these episodes are fewer and far between now.

As I started to scale back the yelling, though, I noticed something interesting. While yelling about something never once prevented my kids from repeating that same behavior (sometimes minutes later), praising and thanking them for doing something right universally guaranteed that they would do it again.

It turns out that my kids aren’t trying to drive me crazy by breaking rules and furniture — they actually want to please me. Moreover, they want to do good things. It’s just hard for them to learn how to build those habits, in the same way it was so hard for me to learn to break my habit of yelling at them.

The New York Times highlighted this connection between positive reinforcement and positive behavior in a recent article about why yelling at our kids is counterproductive and potentially damaging. But they went a step further and asked Dr. Alan Kazdin, professor of psychology and child psychiatry at Yale, to outline the simple, effective strategy he designed to build good habits by literally changing children’s brains:

“If the goal of the parent is catharsis, I want to get this out of my system and show you how mad I am, well, yelling is probably perfect,” Dr. Kazdin said. “If the goal here is to change something in the child or develop a positive habit in the child, yelling is not the way to do that.” There are other strategies, and they don’t involve screaming like a maniac.

Many think of positivity as a form of laziness, as if parents who are positive aren’t disciplining their children. But not yelling requires advance planning and discipline for the parents, which yelling doesn’t. Dr. Kazdin promotes a program called the ABCs, which stands for antecedents, behaviors and consequences. The antecedent is the setup, telling a child, specifically, what you want them to do before you want them to do it. Behaviors are where the behavior is defined and shaped, modeled by the parent. And the consequence involves an expression of approval when that behavior is performed, an over-the top Broadway-style belt-it-to-the-back-row expression of praise with an accompanying physical gesture of approval.