“A lot of parents told me, ‘I don’t know why I’m yelling so much, I don’t know how to stop,'” says Berkeley, CA-based nurse and temperament specialist Rona Renner. “There really are consequences to yelling. It leads to more aggressive children and children who are more depressed. If we can reduce that, our children will be so much better off.”
Indeed, even the most serene soul can be pushed to the limit when raising kids, working and/or taking care of a household. Renner confessess to making the same mistake of losing her cool raising her own four children. “I didn’t want my kids to learn that from me,” she says. “I wanted to learn more how to manage my feelings.”
Now that Renner’s children are out of the house and she’s become a grandmother of two, she’s written Is That Me Yelling?, to teach parents how to better manage their fury. “Anger is useful, it’s what we do with our anger,” she says. “The idea is that we can discover what it is that is making us reactive, and then have the ability to do something about it.”
Renner’s methodology is based on a simple formula, ABCDE. “It’s really about parents learning to be the experts on their child,” she says. “It’s not about me telling parents what to do, but to discover more about what triggers them…This book invites you to become more familiar with yourself—the way you react, the things that you feel, and the needs of everyone in the family.”
