The Story That Plays Out Too Often
It was a typical evening as my client hustled around her kitchen, trying to get dinner finished on time while both of her kids bickered over who gets the exciting new toy, as kids so often do.
"I promised myself that this night, things would be different," she told me later.
She chugged along, reminding herself that she wasn't going to lose it. She wanted a peaceful end to the day. She didn't want to engage in her nightly guilt-spiral ritual.
As the noise grew, the pressure mounted...and her patience began to unravel.
Her husband, absorbed by his phone, appeared unaware that his family needed his support. She mentally noted his lack of presence, which only deepened the resentment she had already been carrying toward him.
And she’s not alone in this. So many women describe men in their lives disappearing into their devices or work while they hold everything else together.
She juggled the dirty dishes, the boiling pot, and the kids’ bickering.
But then her young son started screaming and crying, most likely responding to the tension he sensed in the moment.
And then...she snapped. She just couldn't take it anymore.
She screamed back. She called him a big cry baby. She told him nobody likes you when you're acting like this.
The very words and actions she endured as a child now spilled out of her, automatic and unstoppable. She knew what was happening, and still couldn’t hold back the flood of fury, anger, and shame.
Her son, overwhelmed and scared in the sudden chaos, hit her.
Stunned by his reaction to her, she fled to her bedroom and cried for hours.
The little girl within her longed for someone to notice her pain and come close. But when no one did, the silence cut just as sharply as the yelling.
Without a supportive network of people to lift you up when you're at your lowest, the nervous system has nowhere to settle.
"Why couldn't I just have been calm?" she later asked me.
"Calm doesn’t come from sheer willpower," I told her. "It comes from knowing you don’t have to hold everything on your own."
Scenes like this don’t just “happen.” They’re the product of overloaded nervous systems, emotional histories, and societal norms that expect women and mothers to carry more than any one person can hold — all while appearing grateful and unbothered.
It's no wonder so many moms feel exactly like my client: overworked, overreactive, and full of anger.
And yet beneath the anger, what’s really present is fear, overwhelm, and a desperate need for support.
This kind of moment leaves so many parents feeling raw and alone. It feels unbearable and impossible to change.
But you don’t have to stay stuck in this cycle.
By learning how to work with your nervous system, interrupt anger before it turns into control, and move toward connection instead of the familiar rupture, you can restore peace at home. No shame required.
⭐️This is what my brand new workshop, Calm Parent, Peaceful Home, aims to help you master. In this workshop, I share the science behind yelling, the hidden costs of over-controlling, and simple in-the-moment strategies that actually help you discover the calm, peaceful parent within.
If you’ve ever doubted whether calm parenting is possible for you, this class will give you the tools and the hope to see that it is.
My client's story, while often painfully familiar, is not because of a parent's lack of love or discipline. Parents yell when their overloaded systems collide with impossible expectations.
Let's dive in a little deeper. 👇🏼
Why Do Parents Yell at Their Kids?
Yelling is often misunderstood as a character flaw, as if parents who yell are simply “angry people.” In reality, yelling is a nervous system response.
Can yelling cross into abuse? Yes. Any one of us can be pushed past our brink and unleash words that are harmful and wounding.
But in my work as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist specializing in parenting, I see that the vast majority of parents are not yelling abusively. Most are yelling out of alarm, not cruelty.
When your stress builds beyond what your body can tolerate, your brain shifts into survival mode: fight, flight, freeze, or appease. Yelling is part of the fight response. It’s your body’s way of saying, “I feel threatened, and I need this chaos to stop now.”
Research on the autonomic nervous system shows that when you’re triggered, your thinking brain (the prefrontal cortex) goes offline. The survival brain takes over, and words come out sharper, louder, and harsher than you intend.
By understanding this science, you can finally stop blaming yourself for your reactivity.
Yelling is not proof you’re a bad parent. It’s proof you’re human...and overloaded.
What Anger Is Really Covering
Anger is often the body’s shield. It shows up on the surface, but underneath there’s usually something more tender that anger wants to protect you from fully feeling:
- Helplessness: “I don’t know what else to do.”
- Fear: “What if my child never listens?”
- Sadness or grief: “I’m carrying this all alone.”
For many parents, anger isn’t just about the current moment — it echoes past wounds. If your emotional needs as a child were dismissed or punished, yelling may feel like the only language you know when you’re overwhelmed or afraid.
On top of your childhood history, today's parents are stretched far beyond their max. Most are doing the invisible work of managing meals, appointments, emotions, and household logistics.
They’re working on healing themselves while staying conscious of their impact on their kids. At the same time, they’re juggling work demands, family needs, and unrealistic expectations from nearly every direction, all while living through multiple societal and global crises since childhood.
Millennial parents came into parenting believing that perfection was the key to doing it ‘right’ ...only to be humbled by the reality that our nervous systems have been running on overdrive for as long as we can remember.
The load is unsustainable, yet we’re expected to parent in isolation, without rest, hobbies, or pleasure — as if that were normal.
It's no wonder that anger rises when there’s no relief valve. Screaming gives us the momentary release our bodies desperately crave.
Why Screaming Doesn’t Work
Some parents believe yelling will finally make their child listen. But decades of developmental research confirm the opposite: the more you shout, the more they tune you out.
Yelling doesn’t create cooperation. It erodes the warmth and connection we all want with our kids.
When yelling becomes the rule instead of the exception, kids often show signs such as:
- Heightened anxiety and fear
- Increased aggression
- Lower self-esteem
- Weakened parent-child trust
When kids feel attacked, their nervous systems go into defense mode. For children, this is especially confusing: you are both their source of safety and their source of fear. They instinctually want to draw closer to you and pull away from you, creating a disorganizing feeling in their brains and bodies.
Children react to this inner turmoil by either shutting down (freeze) or fighting back (argue, scream, hit). They aren't willfully disobedient. They're in survival mode, just like you.
This is why yelling almost always spirals into power struggles instead of peace.
And why parents who yell and scream are usually the most exhausted parents on the block.
When Anger Turns Into Control
Yelling isn’t the only way anger shows up. Sometimes it slips into controlling behaviors:
- Demanding instant obedience
- Micromanaging
- Threatening
- Bribing
- Overcorrecting tone and facial expressions
- Criticizing
- Dismissing
Many parents tell me they feel justified in becoming a drill sergeant if their child's behaviors are annoying or problematic enough. "If my kid would have just listened the first time I asked, then I wouldn't have to scream at him," they say.
Far too often, we expect that children change their behaviors first before we're willing to change ours.
Unfortunately, we’ll quickly find ourselves miserable in parenting if this is our perspective. Why? Because parents are the change-makers in the home. Research consistently shows that when parents adjust their behaviors and emotional reactions, the children follow suit.
Addressing your role in the chaos at home begins with an understanding of the fears and anxieties that keep you on high alert.
You may fear judgment from others, or losing your sense of authority, or just not being a strong enough parent. It's issues like these that we must examine head-on to get to the root of our anger and unlearn the inner control freak that lives within all of us. I support you with cycle breaking and becoming the parent you wish you'd had in my book, Parent Yourself First.
While controlling your children may momentarily give you some ease and peace, it's not an effective long-term strategy.
Children resist being controlled. Your children are discovering their own autonomy and identity, and part of that process means they push back.
Then, when your efforts to control them backfire, your sense of powerlessness deepens.
And that’s when anger shifts into something far more corrosive: rage.
Unprocessed rage is costly to the nervous system, depleting your resources—and your relationships.
You deserve something better.
Feminine Rage: A Signal, Not a Secret
There’s another layer often hidden under parental yelling: rage. Particularly maternal rage.
Maternal rage is amplified by systemic pressures: the unequal distribution of labor, the expectation to stay endlessly calm, and the silencing of their own needs. What starts as fear and anxiety in the daily grind can transform into a tidal wave of fury when there’s no outlet, no support, and no relief.
Rage becomes the voice of unmet needs, silenced desires, and relentless pressure. It erupts when the load of parenting, work, and societal expectations collides.
Rage makes sense in the context of all that you're holding. Yet too often, our rage gets misdirected at our children—not for a lack of love, but because there's no safe place for it to go.
Many mothers feel immense shame for the rage they feel. Some ruminate and replay, convincing themselves that they are terrible mothers and unworthy of their children. Some stuff it down and pretend it isn't there, only to explode at inopportune times and then feel awful about it.
These responses take us nowhere.
Yet rage is a thunderous, inner call to move—toward calm, self-compassion, and the here-and-now.
Your task is to learn how to respond to its message in the moment, with tools that bring us back to yourself.
So what does responding look like in the thick of parenting, when tensions are high and your body is on edge? Keep reading to find out.
In-the-Moment Tools to Stop Yelling
To go from a yelling home to a collaborative one, start by evaluating your expectations. Big changes don’t happen overnight, but with small, everyday efforts, you’ll begin to see real progress.
Consider trying these strategies to reduce yelling:
- Whisper instead of shout. It lowers your nervous system and disarms your child’s.
- Get down to their level. Eye contact at eye level signals safety—for both of you.
- Slow your body. Quick, jerky movements cue danger; slow, gentle movements signal safety.
- Stay curious. Ask, “What does my child need right now?” instead of “Why won’t they listen?”
Try one of these in conjunction with addressing your individual support needs, and you may likely see a noticeable difference within a week.
Remember: your anger will not reduce in isolation. You need communal support to lift you out of the heaviness. Let's no longer normalize chronic irritability in parenthood. You work too hard to not live the life that lights you up.
Support looks different from person-to-person. For you, it might look like:
- A text chain with friends where you can vent honestly—bonus if it's a Marco Polo or a voice note
- Asking your partner to step in before you reach your limit
- Scheduling a minimum of 15 minutes of solo recovery time each day (newly postpartum) and 45 minutes for (minimum) for the rest
These strategies and support suggestions are small but powerful, necessary ways to interrupt escalation. In my workshop, Calm Parent, Peaceful Home, I show you how they connect to a larger framework — Pause, Connect, Collaborate — that helps you shift from reactivity into true collaboration with your child.
Repair After Yelling
Even the most gentle Mary Poppins of parents yell.
You're human. Not superhuman.
Give yourself the grace to rupture—and the courage to repair.
Rupture without repair leads to resentful relationships.
Rupture with repair leads to connected relationships.
Repairing with your kids may feel foreign or uncomfortable. This may be especially true for parents who have no clear memories of their parents apologizing for the hurt they've caused.
And yet, this discomfort is part of the conscious parent's work. So often we're providing for our children what we never received in childhood.
Apologizing to our children teaches them that accountability matters. We want to raise kind humans who care about their impact and know when to course-correct.
That vision comes to life the more willing we are to repair with our kiddos.
One simple way to repair:
“I yelled. I'm sorry I scared you. That's on me. You didn’t deserve that. I’m going to keep practicing calmer ways to respond.”
It's important that kids learn that mistakes aren't fatal to relationships—if an authentic repair occurs.
Which often leads to the bigger question parents carry in their hearts: have I already done too much damage?
Is It Too Late to Stop Yelling?
Many parents ask: Have I already damaged my child? Is it too late to change?
The answer is no.
It’s natural to feel burdened by guilt after yelling. That guilt comes from love—from wanting better for your child than what you just gave. And while the shame can feel heavy, it’s important to remember:
Yelling does not define you, and it does not doom your child.
In fact, the very fact that you're asking this question—Is it too late?—shows your desire to grow. That desire is the seed of change.
For many parents, yelling feels especially painful because it echoes the past. If your own childhood was marked by criticism, shame, or harsh discipline, you may hear your parents’ words tumble out of your mouth in moments of stress. That can leave you devastated, as if you’re reliving what hurt you most, and now passing it on.
But stopping the cycle doesn’t require perfection. It requires noticing, repairing, and trying again. Each step you take toward change breaks a thread in that old pattern and weaves something new for your child.
The science of neuroplasticity makes this hope tangible. Both adult and child brains are capable of rewiring through repeated new experiences. Every time you whisper instead of yell, pause instead of explode, or repair instead of retreat, you lay down new neural pathways.
At first, the old grooves may feel stronger—the yelling may slip out before you can catch it. But over time, with practice, the new grooves deepen. Your nervous system learns to calm. Your child’s system learns safety.
This process is not overnight. Peaceful parenting is not a single decision but a series of small, persistent choices. Yes, there will still be ruptures. But every repair, every pause, every softer word accumulates. As we say in infant mental health, you have to trust in the process.
So if you’ve ever cried after yelling, convinced you’ve failed, know this: you haven’t ruined anything. The story is still unfolding. Your love, your willingness to reflect, and your capacity to begin again are the very things that nurture resilience in your child.
It is never too late to stop yelling. Each new attempt, no matter how small, is evidence that you and your child can grow, heal, and build a relationship anchored in safety and connection.
Relevant Resources:
🔗 Calm Parent, Peaceful Home Exclusive Access inside the Conscious Mommy Community
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