My kids are screamers! They have no control when they are angry and immediately react by screaming at each other. We have tried using our “inside” voice, a whisper voice, a singing voice, but nothing seems to work. What can we do to lower the volume level in our home?
It sounds as though, when your children experience anger or frustration, their dysregulation activates their sympathetic nervous system. This is the Fight Flight and Freeze pathway, and when children’s behaviors are being driven by this pathway we can see screaming and yelling. When the sympathetic nervous system is activated your child’s “thinking brain” can temporarily go offline which means all the practice of “inside voices”, singing voices, or whisper voices can’t be accessed. In that moment, your children simply cannot remember to use their quieter voice. One of the first things I would recommend is supporting your children to find their way back to calm before trying to do anything else. As children become calmer, we can remind them of the need to use quieter voices to get their ideas across, and we can continue to practice these skills when our children are calm.
When siblings disagree or fight, it can be helpful to recognize that disagreements usually involve both parties. As parents we want to ty to validate both children’s experience (taking sides can lead to resentment and rivalry). We then want to support the children to agree on a mutually acceptable solution. When we do this, we develop our children’s problem-solving skills. We grow the areas of their brain involved in conflict resolution and this leads to fewer disagreements in the future.
When these incidents take place, take some time to allow each child to calm down and regulate. Once both children are calm, support them to have a conversation where each has an opportunity to voice their grievances before they work together to come up with a mutually agreeable solution.
And, of course, we won’t be able to do this every time our children argue, but we can be reassured that, when we do, we are building mature conflict resolution skills that will ultimately lead to less screaming in the future.
