Not the worst...

I yelled at my son and he cried. I yelled at my two year old son and he cried. Once more for good measure, I yelled at my son who has only been alive on this planet for 28 months, has only been speaking and understanding language for half or less of those months and is in a perpetual state of learning and growing and responding to largely novel stimuli on a day to day basis, and he cried. He cried the real tears, not the fake ones. He cried the real tears with the real look on his face of genuinely not understanding how he disappointed me so severely and my heart shattered. 

I picked him up and I hugged him. He asked me, "Mama why you scream at Jack?" Scream. He used the word scream. I didn't even know he knew the word scream. In my head I launched into my reason. His sister (4 months old at the time and solidly in the 4 month sleep regression window) needed a nap. We were outside and I needed to get her inside to her crib before I lost my window for said nap. The longer my son took to respond to me asking him to come inside the further she drifted away from peaceful and drowsy to fussy and irritable. The further she slipped into fussy and irritable the further away drifted my shot at a break (a break is when I only have one awake child instead of two.) In my mania of attempting to get Jack in from outside she began to wail and as I came to the realization that I missed my nap window I yelled. Screamed. Whatever you want to call it. 

Recalling all of this and actively trying to justify my behavior to myself, I looked at my toddler and his recent grasp of the English language and the only excuse I had was that there was no excuse. "Mommy messed up, it wasn't your fault and I'm sorry," I said as I tried to rock the baby (unsuccessfully) to sleep while consoling the toddler. This happened about a few weeks ago and he hasn't brought it up since but I know the moment made an imprint somewhere in his developing brain. The memory was filed away somewhere with a sad face and a big question mark. 

The honest truth is that yelling has become increasingly more prevalent in my parenting since we brought our daughter home from the hospital 5 months ago. The only difference in this incident was the magnitude of the behavior not the behavior itself. The yelling, I believe, is a symptom of an underlying frustration fueled by exhaustion, an ongoing discomfort in my postpartum body and never ever feeling at the end of the day like I did a good job. Essentially it is a symptom of all of the things I signed up for when we decided the time was right to welcome another soul into our lives. 

I am living a truly beautiful life.  I am a mom completely by choice (we wanted babies and we were blessed with babies), I have an absolute angel from above for a husband, I have deep meaningful friendships, and family that have done nothing but love, support and encourage me my entire life.  Despite all of that, following the incident I felt absolutely awful and completely honestly, sorry for myself. I spent an entire Saturday in bed alone with my feelings of inadequacy, emerging only to nurse the baby and eat cold slices of pizza while staring into the open refrigerator. I live in Florida, the pizza is passable at best when it's hot and fresh. An entire dark day was as low as I allowed myself to go. I am one person woven into the fabric of other people's lives, the choices I make and the actions I take affect everybody that I love and for them I have to pull up, I have to be better, I have to find a solution and it can’t be hiding in a dark room eating bogus snacks. Now, the only truly humorous piece of this entire equation is that this, what I have just described, the being better, the finding a solution, is what I help other parents do professionally. 

I am a Board Certified Behavior Analyst. I professionally listen to other parents describe their problems, I observe their family dynamics, I analyze data that they and myself collect on target behaviors, I help them frame their problems as puzzles and together we solve them. Throughout my career I have had a very high success rate in helping the families I set out to help and in teaching the behaviors I set out to teach and I believe in my heart that I am good at my job. So why is it that just the other day I jokingly told a close friend as I was recapping the latest insanity in my parenting life that, "you can't behavior analyze your own life." I said that exact thing. 

After the above discussed incident and the consequent emotional fallout I kept hearing that line over and over again in my own head, "you can't behavior analyze your own life." It isn't true. Of course it isn't true. It isn't EASY to behavior analyze (I promise to only use this as a verb maybe one more time in this piece) your own life, it's uncomfortable, it's sticky and it's damn hard, to say the absolute least.  It involves accepting the fact that your problems don't just happen to you (for the most part) and identifying the ways that you are actually facilitating them. It involves being brave and honest and vulnerable and it involves signing yourself up to feel a whole lot worse before you can start to feel better because you have to go back and peel off all of the band-aids you put where there should have been stitches. 

Now if you are a parent looking just to commiserate, a parent looking only to see that there are other parents struggling out there and you are not alone in feeling like it’s hard and sometimes downright impossible you can stop reading here and know that you are not alone. If you are a parent who is not perfect as I am not perfect and would like to know more about how I used the principles of applied behavior analysis to begin creating the space in my life to live more joyfully I invite you to continue on reading.

For those of you that are still with me, I identified that yelling, for me, is a problem. So how do I change it? Well, yelling is a behavior and because it is happening with some regularity I can assume it is serving some function or purpose in my life. The goal is to figure out what that purpose is and to replace the behavior with something that serves the same purpose in a less traumatic way. The process looks like this: collect data on the behavior, analyze that information (identify patterns in the data,) use that analysis to determine functions of the behavior and ultimately identify and introduce replacement behaviors. 

Let’s get into the data and analysis portion of the process. Typically BCBA’s collect data on the behavior of others. As a person on the outside looking in it is a fairly straightforward process. Unfortunately not too many parents have an extra guy hanging around that can collect data on their behavior (and if you did have an extra guy I feel like this would not be the best use of his time) so you have to be the guy. In the ABA world we use the word reactivity to describe the way a person will modify their behavior when they realize they are being observed and thus result in observations that are not particularly helpful going forward with the analysis. Collecting data on yourself is essentially the definition of reactivity so it is absolutely critical you try to be as honest as possible with yourself during this part of the process. The best way to collect data with maximum integrity in a highly reactive set of circumstances is to go into the situation without an idea of what you think you are going to find or how you think you are going to solve it. Let the data surprise you. And keep in mind if collecting data on your own behavior isn’t at least a little bit uncomfortable you’re probably doing it wrong.

I included pictures below of the ABC data I collected on myself for 5 days following the incident. ABC data creates a snapshot of the event by offering descriptions of what happened before the behavior occurred (antecedents) and what happened immediately following the behavior (consequences). To clarify, consequence in this context is not synonymous with punishment. Consequences are the events that occur immediately following the behavior. An example scenario: (Antecedent) checking out in the grocery line a child sees candy, (Behavior) child wines for candy, (Consequence) parent buys the child candy in hopes of making the whining stop. Examples of my self-collected ABC data are pictured below if you want to get a better idea of what information may be helpful if you choose to collect data on your own behaviors. 

I quickly identified a few patterns in my behavior and as uncomfortable as it was to see them in writing, the patterns themselves were actually great news. Patterns meant that the behavior was not occurring at total random, meaning the behavior was not intrinsically motivating, that is to say, I was not yelling at my children because I enjoyed yelling at my children. High five for me. 

1. The behavior occurred 11 times over the course of 5 days and was occurring between 1 and 3 times each day. Some moms may feel this is a horrifying number of times to be yelling each day, other moms may yell 3 times before breakfast. On a scale of moms from DJ Tanner to Joan Crawford I felt like this landed me somewhere around a Kate McAllister, not the worst but also not winning mother of the year anytime soon. My goal as a parent is not to be “not the worst,” so we continue.

2. Antecedent pattern 1: 6 of 11 instances occurred when I was either holding my daughter to feed her, rock her or calm her for a nap and in 9 of 11 instances I used my words calmly prior to yelling, sometimes multiple times. I was almost always yelling as a last resort and when I was physically incapable of intervening due to tending to an infant. Another high five for me, I’m not a total momster.

3. Antecedent pattern 2: In 7 of the 11 instances I used my words to say what NOT to do but I did not redirect to a clear alternative (as a professional this observation of my own behavior was super cringey). Go directly to educator jail. Do not pass the break room. Do not collect high fives. 

4. Consequence pattern: My behavior was being intermittently (7 of 11 instances) reinforced via negative reinforcement (aversive situation (A), yell (B), removal or discontinuation of said aversive (C)), meaning that my behavior was functional (at least some of the time). This was the piece that was maintaining my behavior. To further break that down, Jack and Rudy listening to me when I yelled was reinforcing my behavior (increasing the future likelihood of the behavior) because yelling was effective.

Now remember, our plan was to use patterns in the data to identify how the behavior was working for me (the function of the behavior) and to then replace that behavior with something else that is just as functional but way less cringey. Typically when developing an intervention for someone else I would consider both antecedent patterns (setting events) to a behavior as well as consequence patterns (what is immediately following the behavior/how is the behavior being reinforced) however in this situation where I am trying to modify my own behavior I am unable to do much with consequence patterns because I cannot exactly explain to a dog and a toddler that they are reinforcing (increasing future likelihood) of my yelling behavior and that going forward they should only do what I ask them to do when I use my words calmly and they should ignore me when I yell. Can you imagine?! lol) Based on the information I collected on myself and specifically the antecedent patterns identified above the replacement skills I identified for myself were as follows: 

1. In the presence of an aversive stimuli (ie dog eating a throw pillow, Jack practicing his dinosaur roars in the face of his sleeping infant sister etc.) take a deep breath and ask myself if the situation is a life threatening emergency. If it is in fact a life threatening emergency and I am not capable of intervening quick enough due to holding an infant, or the fact that I am literally on the toilet or whatever other #momlife hindrance is happening at the time, then using yelling is warranted as a last resort because it is effective (at least 63% of the time (seriously though, I did the math.)) 

2. If it is not a life threatening emergency the skill to be implemented — and I can not even believe I had to tell myself this because I give this advice to parents like 800,000 times a week — was to give a clear redirection to an actual, tangible toy or activity, for example, “you can play with Magnatiles or dinosaurs, make a choice please!” Simply saying “don’t do that” or “go play with your toys,” is ineffective and lazy and ultimately saving a few words results in losing both patience and time. 

To complement the second replacement behavior above we purchased a super ugly but super functional toy shelf for our living room. Do not misunderstand me, we have an entire play room full of shelves and bins and boxes that contain endless toys. Many are broken, mismatched or incomplete and many more absolutely positively REQUIRE adult assistance. That room is a project for another day. Each bin on THIS shelf was  filled with complete sets of toys that Jack was able to access and play with completely independently. Now, with minimal effort I was able to glance at the shelf, see which toys hadn’t had much play that day and offer Jack a choice between two activities rather than sending him out to the island of broken toys and expecting him to magically come back with something constructive to do. 

While it is completely within our son’s current cognitive ability to make a choice between two presented options, our furbaby has not yet mastered language as complex as, “Rudy would you like to play with your tennis ball or your nylabone while I feed the baby?” For this reason, I added an additional strategy of always keeping a preferred dog toy handy whenever I knew I would be physically incapable of intervening that I could redirect him to in place of his inappropriate largely attention seeking behaviors of destruction. The behavior analysts in the room will say, “the antecedent strategy in question will inadvertently reinforce the inappropriate attention seeking behavior by chaining it in to the preferred response of accessing your attention by accepting and playing with the alternative dog toy.” For the non BCBA’s in the room, this translates to the following: my attention is unavailable (A), dog engages in inappropriate attention seeking behavior (B), I grab a toy he loves and play with him (C) and consequently I increase the future likelihood that Rudy will engage in inappropriate behavior to access my attention. And to that I say you are 100% correct because being a mom means picking your battles and that, my friends, is a battle for another day. This intervention was not put in place to change Rudy’s behavior, it was put in place to address my own. Rudy’s attention seeking behaviors may increase as a result of this strategy, however I’ve observed that when I have a toy handy to redirect him to I am not becoming frustrated as a result of my inability to physically intervene, I am not feeling the need to engage in yelling behavior and that yelling behavior is not wreaking unknowable havoc on the emotional well being of the loves of my life. So is this essentially another band-aid? Yes. Do I still need to work on a long-term solution for Rudy’s behaviors? Abso-friggin-lutely. But as I already mentioned, that is a battle for another day (Rudy clicker training series coming soon, so stay tuned y’all!)

The graph below represents the daily frequency of my yelling behavior. It demonstrates that when the intervention was in place my yelling was nearly non-existent, when the intervention was briefly withdrawn my behavior returned in all of its glory. Now to be clear children (both skin and fur varieties) possess a never ending repertoire of behaviors with the sole purpose of flipping their parents’ lids. Truly, the creativity and great lengths they will take to blow your mind is extraordinary and the adjustments I made do not even begin to account for every possible scenario. What I am saying is that taking that initial deep breath to slow down my own response and redirecting to a clear, tangible activity went a long way in addressing setting events to the majority of my own behavioral episodes.

Many of you may feel that you just read through a lot of information to hear two or three (quite frankly) underwhelming mom hacks that don’t even apply to your own life. When I use behavior analysis professionally (the majority of my professional career has been working with children and families of children with autism) it often involves teaching new behaviors where there are clear skill deficits. These behaviors are often incredibly complex and require many training trials and dense schedules of reinforcement to acquire. For me, a neurotypical adult mother of 2, using behavior analysis in this situation was not about learning entirely new skills, it was about remembering to use skills that I already possessed.  Not glamorous, I know, but effective. My intention in writing this is not for my readers to make the same adjustments I made. The minor adjustments that I made will almost definitely not help anyone else in the significant (and I mean SIGNIFICANT, did you see the graph?!)  way that they helped me because even if the topography of someone else’s behavior matches mine the function may not and the solution almost definitely does not. However, with a skill as basic as collecting some descriptive data on your own behavior you can learn to identify what needs to shift in your own life and shift it yourself. Be your own superhero. Remember, solutions don’t have to be fancy or complicated. You don’t always need to learn how to fish, sometimes you just need directions to the grocery store. 

-Carrie-Anne McQuade

If you enjoyed this piece continue along with me on my journey to behavior analyze (there it is, last time) my own life. I truly do not know how this story ends but I am going to be brave and honest and vulnerable and I am going to try my absolute hardest to continue to identify and shift my own patterns because life, especially one as blessed and beautiful as mine, should feel like living, not surviving.