I was reading through a forum today and you know how it is, one post links to another and before you know it, you've gone from looking up the easiest way to clean the inside of your car windscreen (What? I have short arms, ok?!) to 15 things you never knew about shoe polish (ok, maybe not).

Anyway, I currently have fluid behind my eardrum and was looking at posts about alternative ways to clear it (I don't fancy having surgery like my doctor threatend!) and ended up idly clicking onto different posts and eventually landed on a post from a woman going through IVF.
The post was all about her experiance with other parents and how the yelled at their kids. The poster was talking about how dreadful it was that people did this and there she was struggling to have a child at all. She has decided that she will never shout at her kids if she is ever able to have them, she will 'use her words' to 'calmly discuss' the matter and come to an agreement with her child.
She then went on to say that yelling at your kids is a sign of bad parenting, it's lazy, and that people who do it shouldn't be allowed to have kids.

Now, I didn't respond to that post as I can't be bothered with the inevitable fall out when people decide I'm a troll but it's played on my mind all afternoon and the more I think about it, the more pissed off I get.

First off, it's awful that some people can't have kids naturally. It is. I'm lucky that I fell pregnant naturally and I understand from seeing friends who've had fertility issues that it's heartbreaking to not be able to do the most natural thing in the world.
But...don't ever assume to know what my parenting skills are like. Don't judge me by your standards. I SHOUT AT MY KIDS!
Look, I'm sure that there are parents out there who have a l mood, and scream abuse at their children just because they can. Now THAT is bad parenting. You don't have kids so that you have someone to yell at because your boss is an arse but you can't bollock him because you need your job. Fair enough if you want to hold those people up as an example of being a shitty parental unit.
However, most of us don't jump into screaming at our offspring because we spilled our cuppa and tripped over the dog. We shout because they're doing something dangerous and we need them to stop. Obviously you want to remove the danger by moving the child or taking away whatever it is they're trying to stick in a plug socket or whatever but sometimes, when you have 1 second to stop them but 5 seconds to reach them, a shout is the thing that stops them long enough for you to get to them.

There are times when you shout at your kids because of their behaviour. Yes it would be lovely to be able to sit down and rationally explain to them that what they did was wrong and not acceptable and you don't want them to grow up to be some socially deficient, self-entitled little arsehole but that doesn't work when your 4 year old has just told your mother that he doesn't want to play with that particular toy becaise it's "fuckin' knackered, gran" or your 9 year old has burst into tears because he lost at Mario cart after driving the wrong way around the track three times but it's because 'the game is cheating'.

Then there are the times that you've just. Had. Enough. The times when you lose your temper because after calmly explaining for the 27th time why your kid can't use the oven to bake a cake unsupervised he's managed to cover the kitchen floor, worktop, dog, and himself in raw egg and the gas ring is on without being lit.


Basically there's a ton of reasons why you yell at your kids. Not all of them may be strictly necessary, sometimes there probably was a better alternative but the majority of the time there's a damn good reason for it and it's nobody else's damn business.

And lastly, I know EXACTLY how lucky I am to have my kids. Between the two of them I have spent 14 weeks sat beside an incubator wondering if this is the last time I'll see them. I've held them wondering if I'll ever get to take them home, I've had phonecalls when I'd nipped home for a shower and a nap telling me to come back as the doctors think they're losing the fight. Yelling at your kids has nothing to do with being ungrateful or being a bad parent. It's a gut reaction to a situation that needs to be stopped and nobody has the right to judge anybody else for doing the best they can!

Sometime