A teacher friend of mine tells me that kids in the classroom aren’t responding to quiet voices.
In teachers’ college, student teachers are taught that to get the attention of a class, the key is to lower your voice, not raise it. But apparently, it isn’t working anymore. Kids today are just too used to screaming.
Now, you might blame TV or movies, I suppose. Or ipods or video games or any of the usual suspects. The volume is going up, and perhaps kids’ hearing isn’t as acute as it might be.
But as a parent, I wonder if it isn’t our fault. Are we yelling at our kids too much? Are kids getting too used to loud and angry voices and fail to feel the shock factor in a teacher’s dramatically hushed tones?
Confession time: I do yell. At and with my kids. I justify it by saying I need to get their attention when they are already making so much noise. Bad logic. That’s like hitting them to make them stop hitting each other. Or chewing on them to make them stop chewing each other. Or… Anyways, it happens. I shouldn’t, but sometimes I do.
The drive back across the country wasn’t the slog I predicted. There was much less yelling all around. Blue, for one, has acquired a much-expanded vocabulary over the past few months, and he can now make his feelings and requests known very specifically. But now that we are back in Ottawa with my parents, it seems that there is a deficit of mellow. Maybe it’s the Ontario humidity, maybe the continuing changes we’re putting our family through. We are only here in town for a couple of weeks before the next stage (and more on that move to come) and all these transitions are hard. Tempers are a little thin at times, and the yelling seems to have started a bit again. It seems that Blue wants whatever Beangirl has, and Beangirl wants to be independent. And I’d like to read my novel in the shade, please. The fruits of the spirit might include self-control, but some fruits seem to grow mighty high on the branches some days.
I was talking about all of this with my sister the other day. Her kids are older—just entering the teen years. She assures me that the yelling doesn’t stop as the kids get more rational—it just changes. But she says that there are more creative solutions possible. Her kids, for example, get to run laps in the neighbourhood when the yelling gets too thick. But she didn’t say if she also runs those laps when needed.
There was an article in the Chicago Tribune this past week about a Muslim mum who writes the blog screamfreemuslims.com. The holy month of Ramadan has just begun, and Olivia Kompier blogs about abstaining from yelling as well as food.
I love the idea of framing this effort to be calm around Ramadan. Like Lent, Ramadan is a time of fasting and contemplation. During this fast, Muslims refrain from eating and drinking during daylight hours, and also conscientiously avoid vices, including bad temper. We people of faith are blessed with these holidays that provide opportunities in the seasons of our lives to live our principles in deliberate and experimental ways. But it’s also bold to take up an experiment like this. It’s hard to be focused when you are hungry. It’s definitely harder to be mellow. Kompier writes: “Ramadan is an especially hard time to not get emotionally reactive. Personally, I have experienced some extreme flashes of temper during Ramadan, some of which I succumbed to. Let’s face facts, when you’re hungry, you’re crabby.” It’s a bit like working at being mellow when you are moving house.
Kompier started her blog after attending a parenting workshop with the Scream Free Institute, a non-profit organization that helps parents and families discover calm in their lives and relationships. In the first post on her blog, Kompier outlines the 12 principles of Scream Free parenting. My favorite is to “Put On Your Own Oxygen Mask First.” Our parenting instincts tell us to look after our kids first, but if we parents are out of breath, we can’t help anyone. We need to be peaceful people first, then we can help our kids become peaceful.
Good thought, that. And I think that this just might involve finding those sneakers that I stashed in my parents’ basement.
