DADWAGON

Copyright © Brad Burnham Photography (via Flickr)

Over the weekend I hurt my 3-year-old daughter’s feelings. The first thing she did afterward was rat me out: “Daddy called me ‘bad Dalia,’” she told her mother before proceeding, in a very deliberate way that she must have picked up in school, to describe how this had hurt her feelings and she didn’t think she was really a bad person. When she finished, she said she would tell her teacher the same thing.

Yes, I felt bad. I regretted the word choice almost as soon as I said it. The girl had been provoking me, with twenty minutes of full-throated insurrection, but every dad who lives on the Upper Breast Side knows that there are no bad kids, only bad decisions.

But the thing that really struck me was that the offending words were probably the calmest thing I had said all day. I bring this up because, according to the Times’ recent trend piece, Shouting Is the New Spanking. (For a rebuttal, read Michelle Cottle’s excellent takedown at the New Republic.)

As someone who grew up on a healthy dose of the Old Spanking, I sometimes give myself a gold star simply for not beating my kids. It’s a low bar, perhaps, but setting impossibly high bars is also problematic. Kids just make you want to scream from time to time. And as my Bad Dalia incident shows, sometimes the calm and cutting word can be even more bruising than shouting.

So, given that you are going to shout at your kid from time to time, a few modest tips to make it a better experience for all involved:

Use a foreign language: This can help prevent your kids from repeating, in school or on playdates, poorly chosen words. I like to mix it up, so the kids don’t grow up thinking that Spanish is the language of angry people, or German is only spoken by people who can’t stand girls who won’t brush their teeth (though it may well be). If you don’t know another language, try Pig Latin or Glossolalia. Silly, yes, but it may even make you realize how ridiculous it is to be yelling over untied shoes anyway.

Loud mouth, quiet body: Physically intimidating a child is, contrary to what this evangelical paddle-maker thinks, something that will leave even parents who don’t read the Times with feelings of guilt. So while you’re flapping your jaws, keep your hands at your sides. Don’t yank the kid by the arm. Don’t even lean in too much. You’ve already lost verbal control, but there’s no reason to lose physical control.

Avert your eyes: This may seem strange, but to paraphrase Bush in Ljubljana (or McCain for that matter), the eyes say a lot about a person. In this case, your eyes are telling your child all sorts of fiery things that you probably wouldn’t even say aloud in a rage. Maybe this makes you look shifty, I don’t know. But I feel like it helps blunt the already considerable angerstorm headed my kid’s way.

Talk about it after: The only way there could be any redeeming quality to a heavy shoutdown is if it was actually related to some offense, instead of a reflection of the bad day dad had. And even then, it could use a calmer dissection after the fact. Walk the kid through why you yelled. It may help them avoid taking you there in the future. And it will probably make you feel better, whether you deserve it or not.

Oh, and the final piece of advice: disregard everything I just wrote. Here’s the real problem with stories like the Times anti-shouting fatwah: the readers. Parents are too eager to consume dubious parenting advice, too ready to feel inadequate. I include myself in that. Better perhaps to tune out the chorus of nagging pseudo-educational voices. Shout however you want. Your kid will survive.