I want to stop screaming. Based on the results from a recent survey in my Experiences With the Motherhood Survey Group (hereafter referred to as EIM), many other mothers want to stop screaming. But, Lord, it’s easier said than done!
Read here and find out some tips that have worked for me and some other moms to reduce our yelling.
Define “shout”
Before we talk about yelling, I want to define it.
Jessica said she “spoke with power” because her two toddlers and the TV and her husband and everything around the house were loud. He also said, “but yelling has feelings behind it.”
In ReNata’s family, “loudness comes with feelings and is often a defiant behavior as well. Yelling is to get their attention for safety reasons. My kids know the difference.”
Emily wrote “I’m pretty quiet, so anytime I have to raise my voice it’s like screaming. Shouting feels emotional to me, no matter what. If I have to scream, it’s because it comes from an emotion . If I yell, I get emotional because I yell.” Doubly emotional!
In the Army, we call it a voice of commandwhere you scream from your gut without screaming or removing eardrums (thanks for the reminder, Erica)
do you want to know how Google identified the cry? “demand a loud, sharp cry.” Some of the Google synonyms for scream are: yell, yell, yell, growl, howl, wail, scream, screech, squeal, screech, screech; rumble, howl; or, my favorite, holler!
Merriam Webster refers to the cry as “1. utter a loud shout, shout, or scream. 2: to give a cheer usually at once.
Dictionary.com explains scream as “cry or speak with a loud, loud, clear sound” (I wish I could make a clear sound when I scream!).
Finally, The Cambridge Dictionary gives this definition of shout: “to shout words or make a loud noise, often when you want to get someone’s attention or because you are angry, excited, or hurt.”
👆☝️👏🙌
It’s stuck!! I honestly hadn’t read the definitions above until just now as I sat down to write this article, but I have to tell you, I dig the Cambridge definition. It covers everything we talked about in the EIM group, to include our own definition of shouting.
In the EIM group, I asked how we define yelling. 90% decided that we would define yelling as “raising my voice with an emotion such as anger or frustration.” We conclude that the main difference between “being loud” and “shouting” is the presence of an emotion. I know, I know, it’s a bit of a slippery slope here (maybe you’ve tried to “get their attention” a few times and now you’re frustrated that you haven’t really succeeded in “getting their attention” so now you’re using the same volume but there is little “mother’s voice” involved).
Why do some mothers scream?
If we’re going to try to yell less, we need to understand why we yell in the first place.
There are many reasons why and times when mothers cry. Sometimes it’s just natural to us. For some, that’s how they were raised. Others may have physiological considerations that affect the need to scream. Usually, it depends on the situation. And other times, we literally have no idea why we just said what we said in the way we said it (I’ll blame the moon for that!). But, we can generally categorize our yelling into a few different categories and reasons to help understand why it happens.
I asked the EIM group to review their yelling in the past week and pick out all the reasons they believed they yelled at their child(ren):
