Most parents who would never dream of spanking their child think nothing of raising their voice. Rav Shlomo Wolbe suggests we have that backwards.
“There is something equivalent to a spanking,” Rav Wolbe writes, “and it may even be worse — screaming at a child.” After presenting research and reasoning on why physical punishment damages children, he applies the same warning to something far more common: yelling.
His evidence is something every parent has actually seen. When a father screams at his son, the child visibly recoils — you can see terror and trembling on his face. Rav Wolbe asks the question most of us never pause to ask: why is the child shaking? His answer is that the screaming affects the child’s nervous system directly, in a way words alone, spoken calmly, never would. The volume itself — not just the message — is what wounds.
This lands hard because screaming often feels harmless to the parent doing it. We tell ourselves: I didn’t hit him, I didn’t even say anything so terrible, I just raised my voice because I was frustrated. But the child’s body doesn’t experience it that way. The nervous system responds to a scream the way it responds to a threat, regardless of the words inside it.
So what do you do with normal, human frustration — the moment when your child ignores you for the fifth time and something in you wants to explode? Rav Wolbe’s answer, elsewhere in his approach, is almost absurdly simple: you say it again, calmly, at the same volume, and you wait. Not because you’re endlessly patient by nature, but because you’ve decided in advance that volume is not a tool you use.
A practical exercise: the next time you feel your voice rising, physically lower it instead — speak more quietly than you normally would. It sounds strange, but a quieter, firmer tone often gets more attention than a louder one, because it signals control rather than panic. Children read tone before they process words.
Give yourself permission to walk away for ten seconds if you need to reset before responding. That pause is not weakness. It’s exactly the kind of “eyes in the head” long-term thinking Rav Wolbe asks of parents — protecting tomorrow’s relationship over today’s instant compliance.
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This blog was co-written with Artificial Intelligence.