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Listen Up!
Why We Shouldn't Yell at Our Children By Kelly Burgess
You would think that a parenting expert like Dr. Marilyn Heins 
wouldn't be the type of person to just wing it when it came to her own children. And yet it took a bird with a gift for mimicry to teach her a valuable lesson.
Like many of us, Dr. Heins often came home from work tired, hungry and with her energy at a low ebb. As a result, finding that the kids had left backpacks, jackets and the other detritus of school life strewn around the house made her crazy. Her first reaction was to yell. Then the family acquired a parrot. One day shortly after that, she came home and discovered their possessions were once again piled in the front hall.
"I was very stressed out, and of course I'd told them a million times to put their stuff away when they came home from school," says Dr. Heins. "I started yelling something like, 'Rachel, Jeb, come here this minute and pick up this mess!' Then the parrot started squawking, not using words, but uncannily mimicking the tone of my voice. Believe me, I didn't like what I heard. From then on, I started working on more positive communication with my children."
Dr. Heins, a pediatrician, parenting columnist and author of ParenTips for Effective, Enjoyable Parenting (Development Publications, 1999), says that often parents don't realize that what they are saying is verbally abusive. She calls this "verbal spankings," because it's just as damaging to a child's self-esteem as physical violence.