Doctors Reveal Yelling At Your Kids Can Cause Depression And Low Self-Esteem

Parenting can be frustrating sometimes because children can get wild. While parenting isn’t easy, you shouldn’t constantly scream at them because it can cause permanent damage.

As humans, of course we all have tempers at times. The Journal of Child Development published a study that regular yelling can have the same effects as hitting on your children.

Children that are yelled at regularly have more depressed and anxious feelings. If you scream at your children, your setting them up to yell at people or to expect that they will get yelled at when they get older, according to Positive Outlook, and that is just how they are psychologically impacted.

Parents have power over their children because they provide everything for them like providing food, shelter and love. Being implicitly frightened affects their sense of security, according to Dr. Laura Markham. She founded of Aha! Parenting and is the author of Peaceful Parenting.

Yelling can change the neurological pathways in a child’s brain to thinking they are in danger, making them fight, flight or freeze. Then, these types of responses get etched into the child’s brain and affects their personality.
Yelling is usually ineffective. It makes children not want to listen to you. Yelling is how parents that are too weak or tired to healthily emote treat children.
If they are trying to be cathartic, that works for the parent but it’s not the way to change the habits of the child, Dr. Alan Kazdin (a professor of psychology and child psychiatry at Yale) shared with the New York Times.

Calm conversation is how a parent should instead approach their children. Using a sense of humor while being authoritative and still connecting with them can also help, but they need to know what they’ve done wrong.
This is where positive and negative reinforcement happen. Praise them if they’ve done what they are supposed to do. If not, they must be given consequences without you yelling at them or being too aggressive. Yelling once in a while is fine like when things like hitting of siblings happens. They need to get shocked so that the potentially dangerous situation will not occur. There is a risk so creating a neural pathway for the fight, flight or freeze response is justified.
However, after getting their attention, you should calm your voice as you remedy the situation.
What did you think about this article – do you agree? How do you handle your anger when your child is frustrating you? Let us know if you have any tips, you might be helping another parent!
Our content is created to the best of our knowledge, yet it is of general nature and cannot in any way substitute an individual consultation with your doctor. Your health is important to us!