How To Stop Feeling Angry And Yelling At Your Kids

Welcome to Mom On Purpose, where it’s all about helping moms overcome challenges and live their best lives. My hope is by being here, you are more inspired to become the mom you are made to be. I’m Natalie, your host, a wife, boy, mom, dog, mama, Chicagoan, and former lawyer turned professionally certified coach. If you’re here to grow, I can help. Let’s go.

Hello, my beautiful friends. Welcome to the podcast. So happy to be here with you. We are going to talk about how to stop feeling angry and yelling at your kids. I’m going to play a message from a member of this community who is feeling overwhelmed, feeling quick to anger, and wanting to know how she can get a handle on yelling at her kids. She sort of alludes to wanting to do the work on this but not doing it and what to do when you’re in that sort of situation, but you still want the result of not yelling. So I have lots, to go over. In this episode, I’m going to talk with you about the tools that you can use to stop yelling at your kids. I’m going to talk about how to process feeling anger. I’m going to talk about the difference between being interested and committed to something. I’m going to talk about what to do in the moment versus out of the moment and a few other things that I want to share with you with respect to my story. So let’s dive in.

Hi Natalie. I’m struggling with yelling at my kids lately. I’ve even noticed that sometimes I get really angry really fast. I notice that I think I want to work on this, but then I don’t. Is this me being interested versus committed? If so, what do you suggest? I find it hardest for me not to yell when I’m feeling overwhelmed. Any tips for this? Thank you so much.

Yes, my friend. I have so many tips that I think are going to be really helpful to you and everyone listening who wants to make some progress with respect to snapping or yelling or feeling angry or overwhelmed. I have been there, my friend. I used to be a yeller. I would say I would even identify as that. I grew up in a home of yellers, and so that’s really where I learned it. I identify as pretty extroverted and passionate, and I love those parts of me. And with that just naturally came being quick to yell and where I’m at now, I can very proudly say that I rarely yell, and I don’t think the goal is to get to a place of perfection. But instead, the goal is to go from someone who is quick to yell and yells often to someone who rarely yells. And that’s really one of the transformations that I’ve done that I’m so proud of.

I got to keep the parts of me that I love, that extroversion, that passion. You know, the the parts that I used to attribute to being quick to being angry or yelling and at the same time add in my capacity and skillset to ground myself, to get to calm, to regulate my nervous system so that I don’t react to feeling angry and so I don’t yell. I really never thought this would be possible for me. So I share that with you because if you are thinking, you know, I’ve just yelled for so long, my parents yelled, I just don’t see how this is possible for me. I want you to know that 100000% it is available to you. You can stop yelling if you want to. And that dovetails nicely into answering the question, are you interested in this or are you committed?

So one of the tools that I teach inside the Mom On Purpose Membership is being interested versus committed. When you are interested in something, it sounds nice, like you kinda like the idea of it, but that’s very different than being committed to it. When you’re committed to it, you anticipate obstacles, you know, there will be challenges and you’re still all in. You’re going to keep trying. One of the best examples I have for this is when you get married, when you get married, you are thinking, I’m going all in. I’m committing, this is my person. We’re going to do this. I’m going to put all my, you know, effort in. This is my person. You’re committed, right? It’s a decision. You don’t go into it thinking, yeah, I’m going to try with this guy and, and see if it works out , right? Like the energy is completely different if you are interested versus if you are committed.

So ask yourself with respect to wanting to stop yelling. Are you interested in this? Like, yeah, that would be nice too, or are you committed to it? Commitment is simply a decision plus the actions. And it doesn’t mean that because you’re committed, all of a sudden you stop yelling tomorrow. It just means that you are working on it. So if you’re not working on it, again, no shame in this. We’re not going to beat ourselves up or make it mean you’re a bad mom or you’re doing something wrong. It’s just interesting to notice. And then instead of kind of being so passive about it, what you want to do is decide intentionally whether or not you’re going to do this. So if you do want to be committed and you haven’t been committed in the past, like you said, you haven’t been working on this, what I suggest then is creating a plan to work on it.

So I would say to myself, okay, I am going to put forth 10 minutes every single day, and I would pick a consistent time. So maybe it’s like, I don’t know, 9:00 PM or noon, whatever time that you know, you can commit to every single day for 10 minutes, I am going to work on my skillset of not yelling, because then at least you have something to measure. It sounds like to me, and I don’t know this for sure, but just guessing here, that if you are familiar with some of the tools that I teach, you kind of know intellectually what it might be like to stop yelling. And you know that thoughts create feelings and taking the action of yelling is an action. And so, you know, it’s available to you to work on, but all of that is just in your head and you haven’t actually done it.

So it’s like watching a video of someone doing a handstand in yoga and thinking, okay, I want to do that. I want to get strong enough, I want to do a handstand. I believe it’s, it’s possible that I could be someone who does a handstand and you sort of think about it and that would be nice, but weeks and months go by and you haven’t actually, you know, gotten on the floor and tried to get up in a handstand at all. And the reason that this is important is because your body has to practice getting in that handstand for it to land. It’s not enough to just watch a video of someone else doing it. You actually have to do it. And so that’s why creating a plan after you’ve committed to it is so important because then all you have to do is follow your plan. And this is, I want to say one of the most important things that you can teach yourself to do is have the discipline to do what you say you’re going to do.

Discipline is just the ability to give yourself a command and follow through with it. And if you don’t want to do that right now, then I would just be honest with yourself. I would say yelling is a skill that I want to work on. I want to work on the skill of staying calm and not yelling at my kids, and I’m going to table that for six months and reevaluate then. So you know your life, you know your circumstances, you know what’s going on, you know what’s important to you and what your purpose is and what your priorities are. And if this is important to you, then I would encourage you to make the decision to commit to it now and create a plan. Like I said, I could just start with 10 minutes a day. I, I’m going to work on this and by work on it, I mean practice and we’ll get into what that actually looks like.

But if you kind of intellectually already have the idea that you want to work on this, but you’re not, it’s because you actually haven’t committed and created a plan to do it. And this goes for anything that you are working on. I love thinking of motherhood as this, opportunity to increase tools in my tool belt. Same thing with marriage, same thing with career, same thing with, kinda any growth journey that you are on. So in this situation as a mom, you have this tool belt of all these different tools that you can utilize and you can always add more tools to your tool belt. But the point is just not to be, be a tool collector, right? The point is to get out the hammer and build something with it, right? If we’re following the tool metaphor. So the point is not just to watch the video about how to stop yelling, but to actually do it.

So it makes an impact on you in your own growth and your skillset and in your life. So we’re not collecting tools to make you the best mom that there ever was, as if that’s even possible. We’re collecting tools as a way to increase our skills in a particular area. This is different than your goodness. So your goodness is complete. You are 100% worthy, you are a good mom, and there are skills, there are things that you’re better at and there are things that you could work on. And it sounds like feeling angry, feeling overwhelmed and yelling are three areas that you want to work on or that you care about. And I would just make a decision to commit to it or just let it go for now, because indecision is a decision and it’s draining because it, it like creates this sense of working on something, but you’re not actually working on something and you’re going back and forth in your mind and it’s really just a waste of time, right?

Because you’re not actually making progress. And so I would much rather see you trying different ways to work on processing your feelings and not yelling and getting results and seeing what works and what doesn’t. And then testing and finding out so you can try something else than, you know, spending three months just thinking about, oh, I should be working on this and I’m not. So there’s nothing you have to do to make yourself better, to prove your goodness. These are all just tools that you can use to make your life better if you want to, to increase different skillsets in different areas, but your goodness is complete. So now let’s assume for purposes of this podcast episode on how to stop yelling. That you do want to move forward with being more committed to stopping yelling, and you want to work on that. So now I want to talk with you about how to do just that.

The first thing that you want to do is get curious about yourself. So out of the moment you want to do thought work to understand why you are yelling. You are not yelling because of your circumstance. Thoughts create feelings and feelings, drive actions. So the circumstance might be, your kids are fighting, let’s say they’re fighting at bedtime and that continues to happen. And the only way that you’ve found for it to work for them to stop fighting and get to bed is for you to yell. So what’s actually happening here is kids are fighting and you have a thought and that thought creates anger and then you yell. So anger is the feeling, yelling is the action. And then there’s a thought that’s creating that anger that’s driving you to yell. This is really important because we often want to change our circumstance. Like how can I create the perfect bedtime routine with my children so that they don’t fight, right?

We’re obsessed with fixing circumstances or changing them so that we don’t feel so triggered. Sometimes that works. Like if it’s easy to change a circumstance, I’m all for it. But, as you know, already with children, we can’t control them. So we can’t often, create the perfect circumstances where we’re just never going to feel angry. But what we can do is focus inward and do this inner work to figure out, okay, what is the thought that I’m thinking right before I get angry? And then yell. Because if you think of like yelling as an iceberg that we can see underneath, there’s so much going on underneath the water. So for you internally, that’s what’s happening. There’s so much going on in your mindset and in your body, and that’s what causes you to yell. Yelling is really just a way of expressing your negative emotion.

It’s a way that most of us don’t prefer, but it is a way, right? Your body just can’t take the, fight flight in this case, fight response anymore, that activated nervous system. And so to release that negative emotion, you yell, okay? So knowing the root cause of yelling is extraordinarily important. ’cause you have to know what you’re solving for. It’s like you have to know that we’re solving for x and X is your thoughts and feelings. This gets at the root cause of why you yell. You yell because of what you’re thinking and feeling right before you yell. So just write this out as a math equation, okay? It’s like kids were fighting at bedtime, right? Before I felt angry, my thought was okay, and then you want to write down what your thought was, and that’s what created the anger. And then whatever you said to yell is the action that you took. So let’s say that in this case, the thought that you had, was something like, my kids always fight at bedtime and they shouldn’t. Or it might be something like, my kids never listen to me unless I yell. So now I have to, whatever the thought is, it will be the direct cause of why you feel angry. And this is not an invitation to shame yourself. We all have thoughts that create anger. In fact, all feelings are welcome. That’s what I teach. Anger isn’t even bad, it’s not even a problem, but the work out of the moment is to create better feeling thoughts so that you don’t even get to anger so that it’s just easier for yourself. And we’ll talk about what to do when you don’t do this and you’re in the moment so you can process the anger to calm down, but 90% of the way that you solve how to stop yelling at your kids is by changing your thoughts.

So you don’t even feel that anger in the moment at all. And so you have to start by looking at where you’re starting from. So if you just think of a GPS, where am I starting from and where am I going, right? The starting point and the end destination beginning and end. The beginning is what you’re thinking now. The end destination is what you would need to think in the same exact circumstance to create a different feeling. The feeling you might want to create is calm, but there are other feelings that you might want to create in this situation. You might want to create, connection. You might want to create strength. I like self-confidence here as well. So if I’m thinking of my kids fighting at bedtime, you know, I’m just imagining right, it’s a long day, there’s a lot going on. I’m probably tired as well.

They’re tired, I don’t want to yell. But what do I want to do and how do I want to think and feel to create that action? This is the work that you’re doing out of the moment. It’s self-coaching. It’s taking a look at your thoughts and feelings and actions, getting really curious about all of it, and then deciding, okay, who do I want to be when my kids act this way, when they have the exact same circumstance, but I want to show up differently, then I need to think, feel, and act differently. That is the work, my friend. So let’s say in this situation, the thought that you were thinking is, my kids always fight at bedtime and they shouldn’t. And you feel angry and then you yell to come up with a better feeling thought it needs to be a thought that you still believe that is closely related to the circumstance.

So something like this, my kids are supposed to fight at bedtime, and this is my opportunity to help them navigate a challenge with another human being. If you think this thought and you feel calm and self-confident, then when your kids are fighting at bedtime, there is no expectation that they shouldn’t be fighting at bedtime. You have the thought, of course, they’re fighting at bedtime. My kids are supposed to fight at bedtime, and I love thinking about my kids and them fighting and how much it’s a metaphor for the rest of their lives and learning how to navigate challenges with relationships and what a beautiful opportunity it is that they get to start to do that with siblings at home, with me as their mom there to help them and mentor them and guide them. And really, I’m just there to hold boundaries, keep everyone safe, validate feelings.

And so going into bedtime, expecting your kids to fight will keep you out of anger. You’ll feel confident. You won’t be thinking something’s gone wrong, you won’t go to frustration.Because anger, frustration, those feelings come up when something isn’t working and by something isn’t working. It’s our thought that something isn’t working. So if your kids are fighting at bedtime and you’re feeling angry, it’s because you, you’re thinking something like they shouldn’t be fighting or they don’t listen to me like they’re doing something wrong. And that thought, that interpretation, that perception is so disempowering for you because you can’t control that. And the more you try to control that, IE the more you try to control your kids, the more you disempower yourself. Now, this does not mean you go to the other end of the spectrum and just, you know, are apathetic and, do what we call permissive parenting.

So there’s kind of two ends of the spectrum here. There’s the one end where it could be very authoritative parenting. Listen to me, you know, focused on control. If you don’t listen to me, you’re punished, right? That’s shame-based parenting. And then the other end of the spectrum is just permissive parenting. Well, I would like it if you guys didn’t fight so much, would you please stop fighting? All right, please stop. And you’re not really doing anything about it, you’re just kind of making requests without holding boundaries, without validating feelings, without kind of using your leadership skills. So in the middle is where you show up. I like to think of as like a, a leader, like a leadership coach, where you are going to help your kids and you’re going to do it from a really respectful place. You’re not going to do it from shaming them, from trying to control them, from trying to yell at them, but you’re also not going to step back and just expect them to lead themselves at their ages.

And so what this might look like is you first regulating yourself, which comes from you thinking, of course my kids are fighting, they often fight at bedtime. Nothing has gone wrong. I can help them through this. With this mindset, you will feel so much more confident and empowered to hold boundaries and to validate feelings. And I don’t really know exactly what your specific triggers are based on the call that you left, but I do know that whatever it is, there’s something going on with you thinking it shouldn’t be that way. And when you shift into expecting it to be that way, it’s so much more freeing because then you focus on what you can control, which is you. And then you can use your skills like holding boundaries and validating feelings and helping your kids, you know, get to bed without ever yelling at them.

It is so possible. My friends, I first experienced this with, tantrums and being able to just navigate tantrums without yelling. Like 95% of that work was me practicing better feeling thoughts out of the moment. And that’s why in the beginning of this episode I talked about setting aside 10 minutes today to do this work. So in this podcast so far, I’m going through an example of doing the work and doing it with you, but this is what you would do on your own. Or you would come inside Mom On Purpose Membership to ask a coach or come to one of the coaching calls and I can walk you through it as well so that you can see what your current thought is and what you want your next best thought to be to practice that next believable thought. And then you gotta practice it just like that handstand, it doesn’t happen to you.

Practice, practice, practice feeling and thinking the way that you want to think and feel so that in the moment it’s so much easier. The bulk of this work is done out of the moment. It’s not done in the moment. And that’s I think one of the biggest mistake that I see parents make is kind of just trying to put out the fire and be very reactive to whatever happened. You know, if it’s getting ready for bed and, the kids are fighting, it’s like, okay, we made it through, they’re asleep and, maybe you yelled but it’s over. And then kind of like hoping and praying that tomorrow that just doesn’t happen. And sort of like covering your eyes and putting your head in the sand and thinking like, okay, well you know, because like tomorrow’s new day it’s probably going to be different or something like that.

Instead of taking a look at what’s really going on, slowing it way down and working on this and taking it seriously so that you can build a completely different skillset, that is the power of doing this work. And it’ll change your life forever because it’s not just yelling at your kids, it’s changing your thoughts and feelings so that you can show up how you want to show up in any situation. So instead of snapping at your spouse, now you have the tools in your tool belt to slow it way down. Take a look at what you’re thinking and feeling that made you snap, do the inner work on yourself and show up completely different in your marriage. It is definitely a skill that I think that is worth working on. I think it’s so common to expect too much from our kids with respect to their emotions. They are born with the full range of emotions and zero skills. And so, so much of what we’re doing in the early years especially, but even through adolescence, is helping them learn how to regulate. So in the very beginning it’s so much co-regulation and it’s a beautiful gift we can give our kids, we can help them co-regulate and eventually the hope is that they’re able to regulate themselves.

And I think if you expect more of yourself with respect to regulation and expect less of your kids, it actually is a much more empowering place to be. I’ve done this myself and instead of thinking, you know, my kids shouldn’t overreact, my kids shouldn’t be so dramatic, my kids shouldn’t fight, my kids shouldn’t fill in the blank, I just remind myself, of course they’re acting like this, their brains aren’t fully developed and I want to expect more of myself instead of expecting more of them. As you’re doing this work of how to stop yelling at your kids and practicing, there will be times where your humanness takes over and you do yell. And again, as I mentioned in the beginning, the goal isn’t even to never yell again, it’s not to turn you into a robot. The goal though, is to get you to a place where you’re mostly calm. You’re mostly sturdy and confident and you rarely yell for the times that you do yell. I really want to encourage you to get good at the skill of repair. Repair is an open-ended apology. It’s an invitation for you to give to your child to have a conversation about what happened. And it includes you apologizing and owning the actions that you took that created that disconnection.

So you might say to them, I’m so sorry I yelled, that was my fault. It was nothing you did. I’m going to continue to work on stopping yelling. I’m so sorry. I love you so much. That’s very different than, I’m so sorry I yelled. I didn’t mean to. My boss called me right before I, you know, saw you guys fighting and I just got really upset. It’s like an apology light. It doesn’t really land because it’s sort of abdicating responsibility for your actions and attributing them to a phone call that you got from your boss. And this just goes for, you know, apologizing in general. You really want to take ownership of everything. And this is hard to do if you have shame. If you have shame, you are so much more likely to get defensive and kind of blame anything because you’re making your actions mean something about your goodness.

I also think with respect to repair and apologies with your kids, don’t expect a specific response from your child. I think this is really important because a lot of times, on default what we can do as moms is try to apologize, looking for validation that our kids still think we’re good and that is not an apology, my friends, that is asking your kid for something. So if you apologize, let it just be. Your child might say, can I have a snack? And then you go get a snack, drop it after that. You’re not like fishing for validation that you are still a good mom. They definitely heard it, it landed. It’s just not helpful or healthy to look for that validation from your kids because it creates this sense that they’re responsible for your feelings, which we never want to do from our kids.

The last thing I want to mention here is that I would encourage you to work on this by itself without working on anything else. So many of my clients want to work on one goal a month or one habit every two weeks or, start and stop different areas to work on or have multiple goals at once. And it just creates so much clutter and confusion in your mind and it’s so much harder to get results. So I would just go all in with working on how to stop yelling at your kids for however long it takes. Reevaluate after one month, after 60 days, after 90 days of going all in because then you have data, then you have results. Okay, this worked, this didn’t. And you’re evaluating yourself along the way. You’re taking a look at, okay, the last time that I yelled, what was I thinking and feeling?

Let’s really explore this and see what was going on. For me, it takes effort my friends, but it is worth it because then you can change. I really encourage you to come inside the Mom On Purpose Membership to get more help on this. It is a superpower of mine and we have classes and tools and coaching and podcasts and all the things in there you could ever imagine that you need to help you and get that added accountability for how to stop yelling at your kids. One last little tip that I will leave you with is if you do it this way and you kind of go all in to work on this one area, start your day off with a mantra or an intention that helps you focus on this, right? A lot of times we just wake up and we focus on our to-do list. We look at the calendar first we might scroll, and then we’re off to the races. And before you know it, it’s 9:00 PM and you’ve already yelled at your kids. You’re supposed to be working on not yelling, you forgot about it. And it’s like, okay, what happened? Well, it starts with how you start your day. So just start with an intention. Start with a mantra. Like, every day I’m staying more calm during overwhelming moments, or I, every day I’m becoming someone who doesn’t yell. Or if you don’t like that negative in there, it’s every day I’m becoming someone who can hold boundaries and validate feelings without feeling angry. Or every day I’m becoming someone who yells less. Or every day I’m becoming a more confident mom who doesn’t feel so triggered in those challenging moments. Come up with a mantra that works for you. I know some people really don’t like to put a negative in what you’re focusing on because then it focuses on that even more.

So if that is you then come up with a mantra that,focuses more on who you do want to be. Like someone who is calm, someone who’s self-confident, someone who can hold boundaries and validate feelings. But just come up with one or two mantras that you can repeat in the morning so that you set the intention that this is the area of growth I’m working on for myself. And I promise you my friend, it will make a difference. Because what you focus on expands and if you want to change, you have to create that intentionality. You have to have a plan and you have to work on it. And my friends, it is work worth doing. My life is completely different because I continue to do this work from my future and from who I want to be. So it’s my invitation to you to do hard things, to work on yourself, not because it just, you know, makes you better, but because that’s kind of person you want to be in this life. Alright, my friends, I’ll talk with you next week. Take care.

Thank you for being here and listening. Now, head on over to momonpurpose.com/coaching to learn more about the Mom On Purpose Membership, where we take all of this work to the next level.