Stop yelling...will you?

It always ends the same. "Mom, it's hard for me to listen to you when you're squawking and yelling at me." Every argument I have with my daughter is the same: I ask her to do something, sometimes there's an eyeroll, I get annoyed because I don't feel like she's taking whatever I ask her to do seriously, then I begin with the lecture. It usually starts something like, "I'm feeling frustrated..." and then we progress from there. I end the argument with, "I'm not yelling; I am talking to you with hopes that something will change."

"But, mom, you ARE yelling."

And...this is the point where we agree to disagree.

But the truth is that I never see myself as yelling. I see myself as lecturing, yes, but yelling? Not so much.

I teach students who struggle with writing and every Friday I go to another teacher's room to do team building. We play games and then we talk about what happened during the game. Man, was I schooled last week.

One of the students pointed out that his team was successful because no one was yelling, people were giving directions, but not yelling. So I asked him the difference. This began a discussion about the way kids view yelling.

Apparently, and I did not know this, yelling is not necessarily just a raising of the voice any more. You see, when I was growing up, yelling was simply raising one's voice. This is no longer the case. Yelling now seems to be telling a person to do something where the person being told does not play a part in the decision-making process. They are simply told to do whatever it is.

Whereas, giving directions implies all of the stakeholders are involved in the decision-making process...or, at least, they feel like they are involved in the process.

This realization I made with this group of students last week has opened my eyes. It has helped me understand my daughter. It has helped me think of her words very differently. All because I took the time to listen.