"It's always the same three times of day"

If you did the exercise in chapter 1, your list has times on it, and I'd expect the times to cluster. Before school. The hour before tea. Bedtime. Perhaps the moment a screen has to go off, at whichever of those it falls. Almost nothing at other hours. The habit looks like a temper. It behaves like a timetable.

That's the most useful thing on the list, because a timetable can be planned for. What follows is my own suggestion.

Each flashpoint has the same structure. There's a transition, from one activity to another, which children of all ages find hard. There's a deadline, the school bus, the tea, the bedtime, which is real and which you can feel. There's a depleted child, tired or hungry or overexcited. And there's a depleted parent, doing two things at once, with the deadline in their chest. The ladder runs fast under those conditions because each ask is made while doing something else, from across a room, with the clock going.

Now think about what changes if you treat the three flashpoints as fixed features of the day rather than as ambushes. Mornings will be hard. So bags are packed and clothes are out the night before, breakfast has no screen in it, and you leave ten minutes earlier than you need to, because the ten minutes are where the shout lives. Six o'clock will be hard. So there's a snack at half past four for everyone, the screen goes off by a timer at a quarter to six rather than by a voice, and tea is at ten past six sharp because the table was laid at half past five, by a child who was asked once, close, before they were absorbed. Bedtime will be hard. So it starts fifteen minutes earlier than the target, there's one instruction at a time, and the last screen went off an hour ago.

None of that is clever, and all of it is boring, which is why it works. Most shouting comes from a few predictable collisions, and the collisions can be moved apart. You'll still have evenings when the pasta boils over. There'll be fewer of them, and you'll be less depleted when they come.

There's one more thing about the timetable. If you know the shout is likely at ten past six, you can decide at five past what you're going to do instead. Chapter 19 calls that catching it early, and it's far easier with a clock than with a feeling.