Vindication

After years and years of Laura telling me I yell at the kids too much it is a special kind of vindication that she came up to me this evening and said “It amazes me that you don’t yell at the kids more.” Part of that is that I have learned how to yell less than I used to – there are things that still frustrate me which I have learned to deal with more calmly – but I think the bigger part of it is that she is engaging more with the kids and being stripped of the notion that a parent can consistently deal with children as rowdy and brazenly disobedient as ours too often are without plainly and emotionally expressing their frustration. I’m not trying to argue that yelling is desirable, just that it is very understandable in the circumstances. The goal, of course, is to train the children to be more compliant to parental requests and more engaged in serving the family so that the frustration levels rarely if ever give rise to yelling. She had tried correcting me as if my yelling was the cause of the chaos rather than usually an outgrowth of it.