"They shout at me too"

Some readers have a child who gives as good as they get. You ask, they ignore, you ask louder, they shout "I SAID IN A MINUTE," and now there are two people shouting in a kitchen and one of them is eight. It seems to you that the child is the aggressive one, and that your shout is a response.

It is a response. It's also, in most homes, a lesson coming back. What follows is my reasoning, with the coercion research from chapter 3 behind it.

A child who shouts back has learned two things. That shouting is what people in this house do when they're not getting what they want, and that volume is how a disagreement is settled. Both were taught by demonstration, over years, at ten past six. The child isn't being aggressive out of nowhere. They're using the tool they've watched work. Smith and colleagues' finding, that coercive back-and-forth between parent and child amplifies the child's non-compliance over time, is a description of exactly this exchange, observed in hundreds of families. Each side escalates to make the other give way, and each side gets better at escalating.

So the child's shout is the ladder, learned. And the worst thing you can do with it is climb it. If they shout and you shout louder, you've confirmed that louder wins, and next time they'll start higher. If they shout and you go quiet, walk to them, and say the instruction once in a low voice, you've demonstrated something they haven't seen before, which is that shouting doesn't move you. The first few times, they'll shout more, to check. Hold the low voice. It takes a few weeks, in my expectation, for a child to stop reaching for a tool that's stopped working.

There's a second part, and it's the follow-through. A child who shouts at you needs to learn that shouting at a parent has a consequence, and it needs to be a small, calm one, delivered without a matching shout. "You don't shout at me. Tablet's on the fridge." Then nothing more. Not a speech about respect, which is a speech delivered at volume about the wrongness of volume, and children hear the contradiction perfectly.

And a third part, which is the one people skip. When you've stopped shouting for a few weeks, the child's shouting usually falls away on its own, because its model has gone. If it doesn't, and your child is routinely shouting, hitting or losing control in a way that's out of step with other children their age, at school as well as at home, that's the last caution in the preface. It may be nothing. It's worth a conversation with the school.

Your child learned to shout from somewhere. The good news is that the same place can teach them something else, and you're already standing in it.