Parent corrective #3: Yelling

My two academically and intellectually brightest teens, a boy and a girl, both 17, have parents who yell at them “all the time.” There’s a second girl, almost 16, whose mother yells at her regularly. I believe them. When you are characterologically sedate, with some depression, good engaged clients, do no drugs, are about to take your AP Calculus, Government and English Literature exams even during the pandemic shut-in, you should be believed.

Parents: Stop yelling. You shouldn’t need a therapist to tell you this, but each yell bespeaks your inner historical miserableness, nothing else. You became frustrated in your childhood, you were burned inside it. Now as a grown-up you still feel, in a very foggy way, a child’s inferiority. And because of that, your own child is now bigger than you. This refers to Thomas Gordon’s concept of the “greater psychological size” of parents:

WHAT IS AUTHORITY?

One of the basic characteristics of the parent-child relationship is this: parents have greater ‘psychological size’ than the child. [Illustration with different size circles.]

As the child sees it, the parent does not have equal ‘size,’ no matter what the age of the child. I am not referring to physical size (though a physical size differential is present until children reach adolescence), but rather to ‘psychological size.’ [Illustration with different size circles.]

As seen by a child, the parent almost always has greater ‘psychological size’ than she, which helps to explain such expressions as ‘Big Daddy,’ ‘the big boss,’ ‘my mother loomed large in my life,’ ‘he was a big man to me,’ or ‘I didn’t miss an opportunity to cut my parents down to size.’*

This is a quirk of human nature that I suspect has rarely been studied: that an adult can feel, in her chest, like an unready child when she faces her offspring. That feeling is accompanied by other more recondite ones: ‘This child is making demands that I was never allowed to make, never felt I could make. He is taking up the importance that I should have had. She is replacing me.’

When parents yell – parents whose childhoods were injured and never healed – each yell is their impotence that is trying to deny itself. It is their cry to the past, and their cry to the present that has had the gall to replace it.

If you stop yelling, you will be suppressing your proper feeling, or so it will seem. That’s another quirk of human nature: The stillborn never lives or dies.

Come to therapy (and not just because eventually your children may emotionally “fire” you, to use another Dr. Gordon idea).

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* Parent Effectiveness Training, the proven program for raising responsible children, Thomas Gordon, PhD, Harmony Books, 1970, p. 189.