Is shouting the new spanking?

The span style=”font-style:italic;”New York Times/span a href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/fashion/22yell.html?_r=2ref=instapundit”has an article/a about shouting being the new spanking (via a href=”http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/87144/”Instapundit/a):br /br /blockquoteOne study that did take a look at the topic — a paper on the “psychological aggression by American parents” published in the Journal of Marriage and Family in 2003 — found that parental yelling was a near-universal occurrence. Of 991 families interviewed, in 88 percent of them a parent acknowledged shouting, screaming or yelling at the kids at least once (though it didn’t specify how many did it more often) in the previous year.br /br /“We are so accustomed to this that we just think parents get carried away and that it’s not harmful,” said one of the study’s lead authors, Murray A. Straus, a sociologist who is a director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire. “But it affects a child. If someone yelled at you at work, you’d find that pretty jarring. We don’t apply that standard to children.”br //blockquotebr /br /Call in the troops, 88% of parents in a study dared to shout or yell at a kid at least span style=”font-style:italic;”once/span in a previous year. Does anyone out there find the extreme concern over this behavior by parents concerning itself? While yelling or shouting in an inconsistent manner is not a good way to discipline, yelling to show displeasure once in a while is hardly a sin. Screaming just to scream is not helpful but asking in an angry tone why a child did something wrong seems, well…normal. A parent’s displeasure can sometimes teach little Jane or Johnnie how to act–and sometimes, gasp! that might call for a displeased tone. br /br /Spanking is considered child abuse, now shouting is frowned upon. Is there anything parents can do to correct their child that places like the span style=”font-style:italic;”New York Times /spandon’t despise, besides timeout which merely teaches a child that hitting his or her sibling gets the same lame punishment as making a mess on the floor?br /br /Update: The Last Psychiatrist a href=”http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/10/shouting_vs_spanking.html”has more on Shouting vs. Spanking./a