Over the past year, I have found myself losing my patience with my kids more and more frequently. I can’t control them. They won’t listen. And then I lose my shit and scream.

I know a lot of moms who also scream at their children. At first, this was reassuring – Oh hey, I’m not a total monster, because half the moms I know are also losing their shit with their kids. But as the months went on, and I kept screaming, my intuition told me something had to change.

It’s one thing to yell if my kids do something dangerous like run away from me in a parking lot. But that’s not the yelling I was doing. I was just yelling if my kids refused to eat their breakfast or left out too many toys. And I would not shout. I would scream until my body shook and Pippa started to cry.

That never felt good.

In fact, it felt effing awful.

Screaming changes my physiology. As soon as I start, I feel all sorts of chemicals flooding my body. Because when I scream, my body assumes, Holy hell, here comes a lion!

And once I’m done screaming, the chemicals linger for hours and hours. I can’t just take a few deep breaths and flush the bad feelings out of my body. I’m stuck with them until I go to bed and hit the reboot button. So if I scream at my kids during the morning routine, I spend the rest of the day feeling miserable.

I’ve been working on the Yelling Problem since the beginning of 2018. First, I had to recognize that I had a problem. Then, I got curious and started journaling about it. Just those two things — getting curious and journaling — helped me reduce the screaming bouts drastically. I went from screaming every two or three days to only every couple of weeks. Progress!

But after a few months of progress, I felt myself sliding back into old habits and patterns. I was once again screaming more frequently, and it seemed like the smallest infraction would trigger me.

So I did what I do whenever I need a little help: I hopped on Amazon and started searching for a book.

I combed through reviews and chose Setting Limits With Your Strong-Willed Child: Eliminating Conflict by Establishing CLEAR, Firm and Respectful Boundaries by Robert Mackenzie. I figured I had to start somewhere, and I would probably have to read several parenting books in order to kick my screaming problem.

I started reading Setting Limits about three weeks ago, and it has changed my life. I have not screamed at my kids ONCE since diving into the first chapter. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to write some posts about the things I have learned from Setting Limits to help me internalize and really absorb the things I have learned. But if the title of the book sounds at all like something you might need, let me assure: you do. This book has transformed me into the parent I want to be!