“I find myself yelling at my daughter for little things, and then I feel horrible afterwards.”

Sometimes moms catch themselves reacting in anger to their young child, getting super frustrated with seemingly small things. Then the mom feels guilty because she was overreacting to something so small. Sound familiar?

There’s definitely something more productive a mom can do than feel guilty and continue to regularly enact the same scenario. Instead of rushing to guilt trip herself for overreacting, a mom needs to instead look at the dynamics of the situation. What is her child doing that she is regularly getting upset about? Are there certain circumstances surrounding incidents that may be a factor? For example, are you tired, hungry, in a rush, or feeling pressured by the presence of certain people? My personal worst trigger is when I feel time pressure, and one day I realized that was the real problem, not my kids or whatever they happened to be doing when I got upset. I would overreact when I felt too rushed (and when combined with exhaustion, things weren’t pretty). So I learned to leave myself bigger chunks of time to get things done, leave earlier than I think I need to in order to get places on time, and try to avoid putting myself in time pressured situations if I can avoid it (planning ahead can eliminate many pressures connected with time based situations).

It’s also important to realize that our kids our tuned into our emotions, and when we are feeling pressured and tense, their behavior is always going to be worse. When the situation is being initiated by your bad mood/exhaustion/depression, you need to realize that they are just reacting to you. When you change your attitude for the better, their behavior will seem to miraculously improve.

Once you check for the above, and that’s not the root of the issue, look objectively at your child’s behavior. Lots of times we think that a behavior is minor and tell ourselves it shouldn’t bug us, so we ignore it. The child does it again and again, and each time, it’s bugging us more and more. And eventually, we explode over (seemingly) one little provocation. The mistake here is that you aren’t respecting your feelings about the action in question in the very beginning. That little feeling of irritation is a warning sign for you that something needs to be responded to, not ignored. It’s like your personal geiger counter that senses something that needs correction.

There are things that you won’t be bothered by that other moms would be, and you wouldn’t put any effort into correction, because it’s not a problem for you. And then there are other things that are important to you that other moms would shrug about, but you will want to insist on them, even if for other people it wouldn’t be a big enough to make an issue of. I’m not talking about giving yourself license to be nitpicky and a perfectionist with your child, which is damaging. Rather, I’m referring to the many times that kids act inappropriately, and we think we are being good mothers by continuing to smile and act like they are acting fine, that if we are bothered, it’s our problem, not theirs. (There are also things that every parent should respond to, even if it doesn’t bother them, because to ignore them gives the wrong message, but that’s a post for another time.)

I’ve seen this happen many times. An example that comes to mind is a child who repeatedly interrupts her mother’s conversation, climbs all over her, and makes demands, while the mother is obviously feeling stressed and continues to say loving words even while she’s getting increasingly tense. She felt that it was normal behavior for a four year old. I said something to the mother about it, to the effect that she seemed to be feeling really resentful and uptight about her child’s presence. She told me she honestly finds it very hard to be around her child. Instead of responding to the many things her child did that were legitimately cause for irritation, her solution was to let her child do whatever she wanted without providing appropriate limitations on her behavior. In a case like this, both the mother and child would benefit by the mother being honest with herself about what she wanted to see; her child was picking up on her negative emotions in spite of her nice sounding words.

Behaviors that are problematic should be nipped in the bud. It doesn’t matter how small they are, because if you don’t address them, they are guaranteed to get bigger. That’s the problem with the theory of choosing your battles, and not wanting to make an issue of little things. When we don’t deal with the small things in the beginning, they escalate to become big things. Then we explode over seemingly superficial incidents, and don’t understand where the anger is coming from.

This is a really important point, because by dealing with this before we are feeling strong negative emotions, we can calmly respond to our child, they can adjust their behavior, and virtually no time needs to be spent in a negative space. Notice, respond, and get back to spending time doing the good stuff with him or her.

Avivah