Openai/6952b908-4a44-8000-bea0-80636cd51778

This conversation was exported from ChatGPT

gpt-5-2

User: I just saw this post on Facebook which I shall attach below.

I just saw this post on Facebook which I shall attach below. But my question that comes to mind is, do we raise our voices when we don't feel heard because that's what we have learned from our parents? And are parents possibly setting a bad example by raising their voices when they don't feel heard? Like, do we have the right to demand that other people hear us in general?

I’m trying to be a good, conscious, nonviolent, communicating parent. I think most of us are and still, it happens…

There are moments when my 4.5 year-old daughter provokes me to the point where I raise my voice. I don’t enjoy those moments. I don’t feel proud of them. And I’m always trying to find my way around them, through them, beyond them.

At the same time, I’m aware that losing myself in shame about it doesn’t actually help either.

Earlier this year, there was one of those quintessential parenting moments. I had asked Lilith to do something multiple times. She wasn’t listening. I repeated myself. Nothing. Eventually my voice got louder, and louder, not because I wanted to be harsh, but because I wanted to be heard.

After I raised my voice, she looked at me and said, “Mommy, I don’t like it when you get angry with me.”

I told her, honestly, “I don’t like it either. It happens when you’re not listening. I really want you to listen. If you would listen, I wouldn’t have to raise my voice.”

There is truth in that. And there is also something in that response that I can feel isn’t quite the position I want to stand in. Allowing my behavior to be a reflection of my daughter’s ability to listen doesn’t feel fully empowered. I know, at least conceptually, that I should be able to stay calm even when she isn’t listening.

And also, crunchy moments happen, life happens. I get stressed, my capacity narrows and I totally make mistakes.

The moment that actually changed everything happened a few days later when I was picking Lilith up from school. I was strapping her into her seat on my bike and feeling really focused on what I was doing. She was asking me for something, repeatedly, while I was busy getting us ready to leave.

At one point, she yelled at me.

I stopped and said, “Hey Lilith, why are you yelling?”

She looked at me and said, very plainly, “Mom, it’s because you’re not listening.” 😳

That moment landed like a slap in the face. A clean one, a loving one and one of the most powerful moments I’ve had so far in my mothering.

I saw myself reflected back to me with this wild clarity. Even in a moment that had felt responsible, where I named my behavior and tried to repair, there was still a ripple. She had learned something about what we do when we don’t feel heard. We raise our voices.

Children are not primarily learning from what we explain. They are learning from how we live. From how our nervous systems respond when they meet resistance. From how we react when connection breaks down.

I’ve been wanting to share this moment for a while because of how deeply it affected me. And I’ve also hesitated, because sharing parenting moments like this can open a whole field of shame, judgement or worse, advice.

There are so many parenting philosophies. So many ways of doing it. I’m not interested in lecturing anyone, or positioning myself as someone who knows how to do this right.

I truly don’t. I still feel like I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m learning as I go, moment by moment, relationship by relationship. Literally feeling my way through each new phase.

More and more, I’m sensing that motherhood is teaching me just as much as I am teaching my daughter.

Lilith is not only learning how to be in the world through me. I am learning how to be a woman, in relationship, through her.

And that mutual becoming feels like the most honest ground I know how to stand on after a moment like this.

Assistant: Ah yes.

Ah yes. Facebook: the modern village square where we confess our parenting sins in public and hope the algorithm absolves us. 🙏📱 #BlessedAndYelled

Let’s start by playing with the obvious irony here: A post about nonviolent communication that is 3,000 words long, posted to a platform where nobody listens, everyone shouts, and the comments section is a knife fight. Chef’s kiss. 👌🔥

Now—onto your actual questions, because they’re good ones, and there is a false premise lurking about like a Lego on the floor at 3am.

1. Do we raise our voices because we learned it from our parents?

Short answer: yes… but also no… and also biology is quietly smirking at us.

Longer answer (with fewer crystals):

• Yes, it’s learned Children absolutely model behavior. This isn’t mystical attachment theory whispering secrets from the ether; it’s basic observational learning. If a child repeatedly sees: > “When someone doesn’t respond, the volume knob goes up” then congratulations 🎉 — that’s now filed under “how humans work.”

But it’s not only* parental imitation Raising your voice when ignored is also a primate-level signaling behavior. Louder = more urgent = pay attention or something bad happens. Toddlers didn’t read Marshall Rosenberg. Their nervous systems run on: > “If subtle fails, escalate.”

So yes, parents model it — but they’re also fighting millions of years of evolution armed only with oat milk and good intentions.

2. Are parents setting a bad example by raising their voices?

Here’s where Facebook parenting discourse usually falls down the stairs.

Raising your voice is not automatically a moral failure. It’s a signal of nervous-system overload, not proof you’re secretly auditioning to be a Victorian tyrant.

What actually matters is pattern, not perfection:

• 🔁 If yelling is the default strategy → yes, bad example
• ⚠️ If yelling happens under stress and is repaired afterward → normal human behavior
• 🧠 If the parent can later say: > “That wasn’t how I wanted to handle that” then the child is learning something far more sophisticated than “don’t yell”: - accountability - emotional causality - repair after rupture

Ironically, the post you shared models something healthy and misses its own lesson.

The child didn’t just learn “we raise our voices when unheard.” She also learned:

“People explain themselves after conflict.”

Which is… actually pretty advanced for a 4.5-year-old who still thinks rocks might be snacks.

3. Do we have the right to demand that other people hear us?

Ah. Here’s the philosophical banana skin 🍌

No.

You do not have the right to be heard.

But—

Yes.

You have the right to attempt communication and to set boundaries when it fails.

These are very different things, and conflating them causes endless misery.

You can:

• ask
• signal
• repeat
• clarify
• withdraw
• impose consequences
• remove yourself

You cannot:

• force attention
• compel understanding
• guarantee compliance
• morally outsource your emotional regulation to someone else’s ears

This is where the Facebook post quietly slips:

“If you would listen, I wouldn’t have to raise my voice.”

That sentence feels reasonable… …but philosophically it hands control of one person’s nervous system to another person’s behavior.

And the kid—brilliant little chaos goblin that she is—immediately spotted the logical flaw and weaponized it with surgical precision. 🧠💥

4. The real lesson (that Facebook half-saw)

The deepest truth here isn’t:

“We raise our voices when we don’t feel heard.”

It’s this:

Volume is what happens when boundaries are unclear.

Adults yell when:

• they want cooperation
• they don’t want to escalate consequences
• they feel responsible for outcomes they can’t control

Children yell for exactly the same reasons — minus the illusion of maturity.

So the solution isn’t sainthood-level calm. It’s clearer boundaries earlier, before the voice climbs Everest.

5. Final verdict (no halo required)

• Yes, kids learn yelling from adults
• No, yelling once in a while doesn’t doom them to a life of road rage
• No one has a right to be heard
• Everyone has a responsibility to manage their own nervous system
• Repair matters more than purity
• And Facebook is still a terrible place for nuance

In short: Parenting isn’t about never raising your voice. It’s about knowing why you raised it, owning it, and not pretending you were morally forced into it by a four-year-old who still can’t tie her shoes.

Which, frankly, is a lesson most adults haven’t learned either. 😏👏

1. HumansBeHumaning #VolumeIsNotConsent #ToddlersArePhilosophers