Logging on to MSN the other day, I couldn’t help but noticing the headline blaring across the top of the page: “Is Yelling Worse Than Hitting?” My response was immediate and visceral: God, I hope so– there’s no way I could hit as hard as I can yell. It was with a bit of trepidation, therefore, that I finally clicked onto the link; once there I saw, to my immense relief, that I needn’t have worried at all: the article did indeed go on to say that, yes, yelling was much worse than spanking. It then, for reasons I can’t quite fathom, went on to suggest several ways that parents could avoid yelling, my favorite two being 1) Try not to be around stressful people and situations (like, perhaps, your children?), and 2) Retreat to a quiet room and light a soothing candle whenever the urge to yell overtakes you. ( Since the urge to yell usually overtakes me when one of my children is chasing the other one around the living room with a steak knife, suggestion #2 would probably not be the wisest move in my household, and in fact would undoubtably lead to a spate of articles with headlines like: “Are Puncture Wounds Worse Than Mental Scars?”)
When did yelling get such a bad rap, anyway? As far as I’m concerned, yelling has it all over spanking. For one thing, with yelling you don’t even have to be within arm’s reach to be effective; on the contrary, the farther away the yell-ee is from the yell-or, the more effective it seems to be. (Nothing says I’m serious like a reprimand delivered from two houses away.) And then there’s the fact that yelling gives you a much broader range of nuances to choose from: from the casual stop riding on the dog yell, to the more strident stop peeing on the dog yell, all the way up to the frantic don’t put that in your mouth–it came out of the dog yell.
In fact, one of the best things about yelling is that you don’t even have to raise your voice to do it: every child knows that the most frightening yell is the silent one, the one your mother mouths to you as she is on the phone, the one you can’t quite make out but looks something like just you wait.
Of course, to give the authors of the MSN article credit, I’m sure that there are plenty of houses where the parents don’t really yell, just like I am sure that there are plenty of houses where they never watch anything but educational TV, never eat any food that is not triple-certified organic, and never make any decisions without first holding a family meeting. And I’m sure that these families are very, very happy; even if it is in a Stepford kind of way. My question for them, though, is this: what happens when all those poor un-yelled at children finally go and live in the real world? How do they deal with their first boss, their first room-mate–even their first spouse? Do they just dissolve into a puddle at the first raised decibel, or what?
At least with my children, I know that whatever unreasonable boss, psycho room-mate, or Jerry Springer spouse the world throws at them, they’ll be O.K. Even now, at the tender ages of four and eight, they could probably already go to a PETA convention wearing full-length fur coats and emerge completely unscathed. Heck, they could probably wear a PETA t-shirts to a cockfight and be none the worse for wear. Now, if only I could find a way to make them immune to siblings and steak knives, they’d be set for life.