Ask the parent coach: Post holiday query: How can I stop yelling at my kids?

Question: I did what you suggested in December, postponing and cancelling engagements, feeding myself and my family healthy foods in addition to allowing all the cookies, etc, and still … I feel depleted and short tempered. If I’m being honest, I felt that way long before the holidays. Nothing is particularly wrong with my kids; I have a supportive spouse; I feel bad for even complaining! How can I stop yelling at my kids?

Answer: First, Happy New Year! And thanks for being so open to new ideas. That’s the mindset from which change happens. One of Albert Einstein’s famous gems of wisdom is, “We cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it,” and to me that means that we have to shift the way we see things, to change our minds, before we are able to approach any problem with hope of success.

Before we get to that, I just want to say that your question resonates deeply for me. As a parent, I too struggled with feeling frustrated at baseline, even when things were objectively okay, and I felt much worse when things were not okay. I have managed to shift things, and my long journey toward this change is part of the reason I became a parent coach.

I’ll be honest, though: this change was not easy, and it’s hard to maintain. It’s also completely worth the work.

We all have certain default settings and by the time we become parents, these are pretty deeply ingrained. Some of us run hot (quick to anger, prone to “flipping our lids” as Tina Payne Bryson and Dr. Dan Seigel put it in their excellent parenting book “The Power of Showing Up”). Some of us shut down (avoiding problems, wanting to hide from the world in bed). Some of us people-please and over-function at the expense of our own priorities and well-being (like baking cookies for two parties and teacher appreciation when an extra few hours of sleep would have served our mental health much better).

Overriding our default settings is hard work, but it’s crucial to the success of our other parenting endeavors. Look at it this way: it’s hard to keep your child from melting down every time you go to Target if you yourself are melting down every night at bedtime because you’re at the end of your tether. We have to be the change we want to see in our families.

The first step toward change is recognizing the pattern we are in. The next step is figuring out how to break out of it.

The good news is that there are tons of answers out there. The bad news is that every person’s answer is going to be different, so it’s very hard to answer in a tidy column.

Allow me to illustrate.

When I faced the truth that I was flipping my lid too much, initially I felt so much shame and regret that I only made the problem worse; I was very much stuck in the mind that created the problem, and so it was impossible for me to change using any strategy I read about.

So I started learning.

I’ve been in therapy my entire adult life, so I kept that up and used my sessions to explore underlying reasons for my actions. I also took an anger management class that taught me what my nervous system was doing when I got upset, and offered some much-needed destigmatizing in the form of other very good parents who had the same default setting. I tried an antidepressant, and because I was in my late 40s at the time, I also tried HRT; balancing the chemicals in my body turned out to have a huge positive effect. I journaled. I changed my exercise routine. I used the mindfulness app on my phone. I read books on parenting and emotional regulation. I got some coaching.

Slowly, I began to implement solutions that made a positive impact on how I felt and parented. It took a few years. And, as you know I’m fond of saying here, there’s no such thing as a perfect parent! So I still slip into the old patterns. One of the most crucial skills I’ve learned along the way is self-compassion, so that when I find myself flipping my lid, I try not to chastise myself; instead, I look at the situation and say to myself, “Of course that happened. What can you learn from it so you can do it differently next time?”

Putting all of this together was such an adventure! I’m excited for you to begin your own. In this first month of the new year, when people are in search of quick fixes in the form of resolutions, I hope you’ll embrace this long-term style of change instead.

There is no correct starting place. Follow your instincts, and do the next right thing, and the next, and the next, and pretty soon you’ll start seeing the changes you’ve been seeking.

I believe in you.