This is how my mother raised me my whole life, and I haven’t given it much thought until now.
What it boils down to is that whenever I didn’t listen, my mother would get angry in order to get me to do what she wanted. It’s sort of the Jack Bauer method of parenting: you say something in a normal tone of voice, and if the person doesn’t listen, you say the same thing only louder and with more anger.
When I brought up this issue with her, she defends her anger in two ways:
She tells me that I should stop being a pussy and just deal with it.
She tells me that if she didn’t get angry, neither me or my brother would have listened to her.
Her second point gives me pause. I believe that anything that can be achieved with anger can be much more effectively without anger. However, achieving results without anger takes a lot more effort and intelligence. What if you just don’t know how to get kids to behave without anger? How are you supposed to learn? And if you don’t know, is it acceptable to use anger to achieve compliance?
As a parent you get really, really tired of having to say the same damned things over and over to little people who you know are intelligent enough to understand what you’re asking of them, but who choose to ignore you anyway.
There’s only so much effort I should put into asking you to clean your damned room, and the fifth time I come in you’re still sitting on your bed texting a friend, instead of cleaning your damned room like I’ve politely asked 5 times already.
About all I know is that it doesn’t work with my kids. It has the opposite affect.
There have been times when I would sort of feign anger, raise my voice, etc. with my 6 yo son to get him to obey and yelling at him just shuts him down.
When I’m in that situation where I’ve already told him several times, or when he’s getting himself in a dangerous situation, that’s when I need to slow down, lower my voice (while getting right in his face) and very calmly talk to him. Learned this through trial and error.
Not sure why it works that way, it just does - with my kid anyway.
Parent of three kids, under the age of 5 here. I’ll use an angry tone rarely, but usually when time is a factor, e.g. getting them ready to go to the sitter’s in the morning, or when it’s 10pm and they’re sneaking out of bed to play with toys. Usually it just involves a loud “HEY!” followed by a message in a normal tone. This is only after gently reminding them several times by making them look at me and repeating the message with a “please” at the end. If I find myself shouting too often, I’ve stepped away into a different room to give myself a “timeout”.
I had always considered myself a very relaxed just-go-with-it kind of guy, but I have noticed my temper shortening little by little after my wife and I had a new child. I’m sure that’s a fairly common occurence, but I wouldn’t consider it as raising my children with anger.
A certain amount of anger is appropriate in certain circumstances. When my 2YO granddaughter decides to find out what happens if she smacks someone’s face, you better believe the result is anger, especially after the first gentle reproach. Now, I’m not advocating a violent response, but a sharp and angry one is certainly called for.
When I caught my 7YO daughter having shoplifted from the grocery store, you bet I was angry at her. (We went right back to the store and she had to personally return the item and apologize.) I was also pretty angry when she pushed her 2 year old sister into the creek.
ETA: The “in-your-face” stern talking-to also counts as “angry” in my book.
My kid isn’t even three months, so I am basing my opinion more on what I’ve learned as a teacher. Obviously, out-of-control rage is not a sound parenting tool. On the other hand, I think that under certain circumstances, letting kids see that their actions have some sort of emotional impact on their family can also be legitimate. Sometimes I think that parents who have it together a little too well–always consistent, always controlled, always rational–basically end up with kids who feel frustrated and powerless. They can’t actually have any sort of impact on anyone, no one really cares. The perfect, consistent application of “consequences” to every infraction sends some odd messages: one, it can seem arbitrary because there doesn’t seem to be any REASON for not yelling in the house or whatever, since there’s no evidence it actually does any harm, just a rule and a consequence. It comes across as needlessly controlling, as if the rule were put in place out of a desire to control. Second, avoiding consequences is kind of selfish. At some point, you need to not do bad things to avoid hurting other people, not just because it’s the rule and you don’t want the consequence.
Obviously, this sort of blatant emotional manipulation needs to be used sparingly, and it’s important, I think, that the parent never appear to lose control. But, for example, I had a student I rather liked do something horribly douchey–basically humiliate a less popular kid in front of a group. I sure as shit let him see that I was furious almost beyond words. He needed to see that this was a real issue and really happened, not just a matter of breaking a rule.
Acting angry has its place, but you should use the minimum amount of fake-angriness required to get their attention. If you’re actually angry, it’s hard to impart empathy and actually teach a lesson.
That said, it’s hard not to get angry, and some people are weaker than others. I never thought I had a temper until my kids got old enough to push my buttons. Now I find myself actively working to stay calm more than I ever thought I would. Kids can be real assholes.
I agree with this, but I think that “out-of-control rage” or anger is what happens more often than not.
Not every person has a reasonable fuse, or reasonable expectations for their child’s behavior. Venting your frustration and anger onto a child and then thinking that you’re just ‘parenting’ can be damaging.
I’ve seen too many young children who never learned how to be disciplined, polite, or compassionate, because their parents didn’t ever parent, they just yelled when their kid did something that irked them.
‘Making someone angry is a reason to not behave a certain way (or, more likely, is a reason to hide certain behaviors),’ is, IMHO, not a lesson that is a useful one.
I think a judicious amount of anger every now and again is warranted, especially if your kid has done something dangerous to himself or others.
I’m normally very controlled around my kids. But yesterday when my five year old took off running in a parking lot, without looking for cars at all even after I yelled for him to stop (was also carrying a two year old), you can bet I lost my shit and felt no remorse. No hitting or cursing, but yelling was involved.
It takes a lot for me to lose it with either of my kids, but they find it very memorable when I do.
Many parents use anger to signal seriousness and that the request should be done now. Since the children come to know that requests that do not use anger are not serious they ignore the requests till the anger comes. This has many bad repurcussions. If punishment comes it is done in anger and may be out of proportion to the infraction. The parent spends much of the time being mad and that is stressful. The child learns to associate interacting with the parent with anger and fear. All of this is very damaging to the relationship which should be the principal source of joy in life.
It is not necessary since all that needs to be done is to find an alternate signal of seriousness. When I was working in childcare, I used counting. My class knew that once I started counting if I reached 5 then the punishment would be used. The result of this was that I almost never got to 5 and I never had to yell, scream, or threaten. I still got angry but that anger was rare and I never had to get angry over something trivial.
My brother gets angry when his son “doesn’t listen”.
The immense majority of the time, the problem is that my brother hasn’t explained properly; for example, he’ll give the kid four orders simultaneously, with no prioritization, and when the kid starts by whichever one he thinks best, there’s only a 25% chance he’ll start by the one his father wanted done first.
I think it’s completely stupid and have been using my influence with the bro to curb things as much as I can - while tamping down on an impulse to ask “dude, where did you learn to explain things so badly? It sure wasn’t at home!”
It’s normal to get angry occasionally, but it’s not something which should be part of a child’s daily life. The kid will learn how to deal with anger from watching the parent, a parent whose response to a pin dropping is a window-rattling yelling session isn’t teaching the kid very well, is he?
I thought this (Punishment Helps Kids Learn To Lie | HuffPost Life) article on Huffingtonpost today might be of interest to you based on the headline, but it introduces the concept of physical punishment as well, which isn’t something you were asking about.
In the article they describe doing an experiment at one private school that imposes physical punishment and one that doesn’t, but elsewhere in the article they refer to it as
harsh verbal and physical punishment vs. non-harsh. The actual study might be more clear about whether the harsh verbal punishment is close enough to your idea of using anger to be relevant.
But the finding was that children raised in a harsh environment with extensive verbal and physical punishment were significantly more likely to lie and to be better at lying.
There’s also a link to an earlier study in Child Development that appears to be much more on point. Here’s the abstract: (it’s ok to post entire abstracts, right? That’s the point of an abstract isn’t it?
[QUOTE=http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8624.00065/abstract]
This study examined relations among mothers’ hostile attribution tendencies regarding their children’s ambiguous problem behaviors, mothers’ harsh discipline practices, and children’s externalizing behavior problems. A community sample of 277 families (19% minority representation) living in three geographic regions of the United States was followed for over 4 years. Mothers’ hostile attribution tendencies were assessed during the summer prior to children’s entry into kindergarten through their responses to written vignettes. Mothers’ harsh discipline practices were assessed concurrently through ratings by interviewers and reports by spouses. Children’s externalizing behavior problems were assessed concurrently through written questionnaires by mothers and fathers and in the spring of kindergarten and first, second, and third grades through reports by teachers and peer sociometric nominations. Results of structural equations models demonstrated that mothers’ hostile attribution tendencies predicted children’s future externalizing behavior problems at school and that a large proportion of this relation was mediated by mothers’ harsh discipline practices. These results remained virtually unchanged when controlling for initial levels of children’s prekindergarten externalizing behavior problems at home.
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! Is your brother my mom? (uh, I guess not ) Added to which, I didn’t even realize this until their last visit, but my mom tends to give instructions with only half of it defined precisely and the other half with abstract placeholders (e.g., “Could you bring me the thing that does things …in the kitchen?”) and will get mad when you don’t follow the instructions.
(When I was a kid, I’d sort of stand there dumbly and get yelled at, or try to follow directions to the best of my ability and get it wrong and then get yelled at. An embarrassingly recent development was realizing that I could actually ask her to clarify the instructions, and she generally will, though if she’s in a bad mood the clarification may go something like “Any idiot should know that I mean the spatula, what else would I mean?”)
I think she has childhood issues that may involve not being heard, which brought on frustration and finally anger which got her heard. She has not learned to move past this and no inflicts this on her children in a different way.
I think suggestion #1 is very damaging to children, tends to make them submissive and accepting of absue.
#2 as I point out is her issue, why she never learned to effectively communicate should be looked into. So not the children fault.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with expressing the fact that you are angry. Everybody will feel angry at some points in their life and it is important to show children a good way to deal with that anger. A bad way to deal with that anger is shouting and raging. I once gave myself a time-out along with a girl I was working with. It worked as it made it really clear to her that the rules are the same for everyone: if you feel so angry that you can’t communicate effectively you need minute to calm down before you start a conversation.
So I would say yes, you can use anger to raise children. Only not in most of the ways discussed above.
It’s common - and a very bad idea - for parents to set up this sort of situation with their kids.
All kids understand that there are words and actions that mean little or nothing, and then those to which attention really should be paid. Many parents unwittingly set things up so that anything spoken in a normal voice is ignored, and only rage has any effect. This is about as bad as it could be for both parent and child.
It’s not especially difficult to manage things so that kids pays close attention to words spoken slowly in a low, calm voice - because they’ve learned this is the sign that continued misbehavior brings undesirable consequences. Most kids are very smart about this - for example, they quickly grasp the idea that the limits may be very different with different adults, even in the same room at the same time.
The OP’s mother exhibited an anger that was premeditated, deliberate and well-thought-out (not that I’m condoning it). My father’s anger was something else entirely. Anything, no matter how small, could trigger his anger. And it was totally out of his control. He’d start cursing, slamming doors, throwing things . . . and being physically and emotionally abusive to whoever was around. He would just fly off the handle at a moment’s notice, and the anger would continue for hours. Even when he was in a good mood, you never knew if some little thing would set him off.
I still have a problem with people exhibiting anger. I expect them to become the kind of monster my father was . . . though they rarely, if ever, do.
) Added to which, I didn’t even realize this until their last visit, but my mom tends to give instructions with only half of it defined precisely and the other half with abstract placeholders (e.g., “Could you bring me the thing that does things …in the kitchen?”) and will get mad when you don’t follow the instructions.