How To Change Yelling and Punishing Into Teaching Opportunities

More and more parents are becoming aware that yelling and punishing damage their relationship with their child. This leads to low self-esteem in all involved.  Low self-esteem is the number one culprit of an unfulfilled person with its many manifestations.   What happens when a parent knows what they are doing isn’t right and they do it anyway? When we are unable to regulate our emotions we cannot teach it to our children.  This week I am going to help you to understand your emotions so that they can support both you and your children.  I also share the steps needed so that instead of yelling and punishing you create teaching opportunity with your child.

The Structure of Our Brains

Learning about how our brain works is very helpful in regulating our emotions.  We can divide our brain into three main sections to understand what happens when you and your child are faced with challenging situations.

1) We are born with a fully developed reptilian brain. This part sustains life and movement instinctually. It is our survival centre where our vital functions such as breathing, digestion, sleep and hunger are regulated.  It is also responsible for our ‘fight, flight or freeze response’ when faced with stressful situations perceived as danger.  Infants can only operate from the survival centre, the reptilian brain.

2) Our emotional brain is our feeling centre that is also called limbic system.  This area evolves between ages of 0 to 5.  Limbic system deals with memory, emotions and stress reactions and is responsible for eliciting different emotions such as anger, fears, anxieties and attachment.  Toddlers operate primarily from this part of their brain as they use their emotions to express themselves, their needs and their reactions to the world.  Sometimes these emotions can be overwhelming for them as well as for those around them.

0 to 7 years, according to developmental psychologists, since Jean Piaget first published his ideas in 1936, are when children develop their senses of self identity. Toward the end of this time they even, in their thoughts and feelings, take responsibility for family misfortunes, such as losing money, divorce, or tragic accidents. They believe their thoughts, or actions have indirectly caused them.

3) The part of the brain that continues to develop at least until the mid 20’s is the prefrontal cortex.  This is our executive centre we call our thinking brain.  It goes through growth spurts at 5-6, 11-12 and around 15.  It is responsible of our self-awareness, interpretations of emotions, problem-solving, creativity, attention and thinking.

Children have varying abilities to access their thinking brains depending on their emotional and physical experiences, as well as their respective ages. It is to be expected that they cannot always react appropriately, act responsibly, plan or predict, in the same ways as adults. Their brain and their ability to access their brain prevents them from doing so.  In order to increase your child’s ability to use their thinking brain you need to help them by seizing teaching opportunities starting from when they are toddlers and continue until they are adults.

Punishing versus Teaching Opportunity

I will take you through the stages step by step of recognising, regulating emotions and seizing the appropriate teaching opportunity with your child.

A teaching opportunity arises when there is chaos. Perhaps your kids are fighting. When extreme emotions such as anger, stubbornness, sadness, impatience or jealousy are activated either in you or in your child you must take a step backwards.  Only then will you appreciate that your emotions are caused by the reptilian part of your brain. Your limbic system is preparing you to take action by ordering powerful neuro-transmitting chemicals into your blood stream for use by your body and thinking brain.  From now onwards, make strong emotions your cue to access your thinking brain rather than letting your reptilian brain take over.

Let’s say your 5 year old son is having a temper tantrum in order to get one more sweet instead of his dinner.  Many parents get worn out when they are faced with such forceful feelings associated with unhealthy desires of their child.  They either let them have a candy in an emotionally down way or they start reprimanding, yelling; they may even hit their child out of despair.  This state of intimidation activates your child’s reptilian brain, meaning ‘fight, flight or freeze response’ which makes them unreceptive to any learning activity. But their ‘thinking brain’ is neither fully evolved nor is, what there is, hard-wired as healthy habits. It is up to parents with fully evolved adult brains to fill in the gaps by modelling appropriate behaviour.

The following stages can only work when you can first regulate your own emotions.

Step 1. You need to emotionally bring yourself to a neutral state.  This means you will be calming the reactions of your limbic system using your thinking brain.

You do this, by taking a step backwards, before saying or doing anything. If you’re on your feet I encourage you to literally take a step backwards, even though this seems counter intuitive.  You can changed your focus; for example, by focusing your attention on your breathing, making it deeper. Or you can focus on putting aside any negative emotions and memories that come up by imagining how you and your child will be closer as a result of using this situation as a teaching opportunity.

Step 2.  Connect with your child emotionally to understand their experience and empathise.  You can do this by adopting an attitude of curiosity, lowering yourself to their height and making eye contact.  Your conversation might go like this:

– What is happening with you, can you tell me? I am ready to listen to you.

– I want a candy not soup (sobbing and shouting)

– It must be difficult to want candy when mummy offers you soup!

This empathic comment coming from your thinking brain creates a shared understanding, reflecting to your child what they experience and helps them to detach emotionally from their state.  This in turn will help your child to calm and be receptive to your input.  Notice that you have not judged nor attempted to offer a solution.

Step 3. Acknowledge your child’s feeling and needs.  You help your child to be more aware of what is going on with them and validate their experiences. You do this by helping them to clarify in their minds what is hidden behind their temper tantrum.  Over time these well handled crises is how they learn to regulate their emotions.  Here is how you could handle our 5 year old boy who cries for a sweet:

– ‘You are upsetting yourself.  Maybe you want to be able to choose what you eat.‘ This acknowledges their possible need for more autonomy.

– ‘Maybe the taste of sweet is so attractive that you really want to eat one and you don’t fancy soup right now.’  This sentence is validating their desire for sweet over the soup.

This validation and reflection of their own processes will allow your child to access their own thinking brain, activate their creativity and find their own solutions.

Step 4. is where you make sure the regulation is successful; your child is feeling understood, calmed and receptive.  You need to give them space to recompose themselves or hold their hands lovingly or give them a cuddle; whatever they need to feel reconnected.  Once emotional safety is established for everyone you can invite them to look from a different perspective:

–  You know you have limited space in your tummy.  Although soup has the nutrients your body needs sweet does not and moreover it damages your teeth.  How do you think we both will feel if I have to take you to the dentist for fillings?

In the comfort of being valued, safely reconnected they can hear you and come up with their own suggestions.

– Maybe I can have a little bit after my soup just for the taste.

Step 5. Re-evaluate how you and your child might be feeling following these exchanges.  If your child does not feel loved and understood, you do not feel empowered it means you have not yet managed to turn such trying situations into teaching opportunities.  Take responsibility without blame.  We are humans, independent of our age we are evolving all the time.  It is better to be authentic and accepting of yourself.  After all if you can’t do that how can you expect children to accept themselves? Apologise and talk about how you would have liked to approach the situation differently.

– I am sorry I shouted at you for insisting upon the sweet and being so upset.  I would have preferred to stay calm and talk to you in order to understand more about why you wanted it so much.

Before I finish I would like to summarize these 5 steps with another common situation where siblings argue over a toy:

Step 1: Regulate your own emotions by taking a step backwards, or breathing deeply and calming yourself.  Relax your facial expression.

Step 2: Listen by making eye contact at your child’s height, without judging or criticising but with genuine curiosity: ‘Tell me what has happened.’

Step 3: Acknowledge and validate their experience: ‘You wanted to play with that toy by yourself‘ or ‘You felt your sister might break your toy.’

Step 4: Make sure your children feel valued and accepted; allow them to calm down and reconnect to be receptive before you invite them to consider a different perspective.  ‘How might you feel if the toy you were playing was taken away like that?’  ‘How might you feel if you saw that a toy you shared with a friend was treated in a way they can break?’ ‘How might your sister / brother have felt?’ Allow and encourage them to find their own solutions.  ‘Who do you know who knows how to play together sharing their toys?’ ‘How can you find a way to play and respect each other’s toys and shared space?’

Step 5: Check if they are both feeling understood and whether you feel empowered. You really can  teach your kids how to better approach conflict, how to regulate their emotions, how to be empathic and how to solve problems.

I hope this post helps you to turn more of crisis moments into teaching opportunities by helping you and your child to learn emotional regulation, empathy as well as conflict resolution and problem solving skills. I would love to hear your experiences and what you think, please share them down in the comments section.