‘My partner keeps raising his voice – now our child, 5, thinks yelling is okay’

A woman on Reddit has been left exhausted by her partner’s yelling and the impact it is having on their young daughter – but he believes he’s just “expressing himself”

A woman who claims her partner won’t stop yelling over “trivial” things has vented her own frustrations – as the man’s behaviour is now having a negative impact on their child.

The woman said her 29-year-old boyfriend expresses “intense anger” over things which she believes are “complete non-issues”, and it has been causing their five-year-old daughter to start yelling too.

She said: “I live with my partner and our child. My partner yells, a lot. The most simple and trivial things raise his voice to a decibel level that I heard as a child maybe five times total, over major issues, not daily affairs.

“So many of the things that provoke intense anger are complete non-issues – think literally spilt milk.

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“As a result, our child has a very low stress tolerance and ends up yelling in frustration herself, with little provocation. This provokes my partner yelling, and it’s just an impossible situation that happens five to 10 times a day.”

The mum, 28, said she has confronted her partner about his “dysfunctional and abnormal” behaviour – but her boyfriend thinks she’s just trying to stifle his “self-expression”.

She added: “This weekend I tried to have a significant talk about this pattern and its effects on everyone.

“I basically said that the level of yelling in the house had to stop because it was completely dysfunctional and abnormal, and my partner took issue with the ‘abnormal’ bit.

“He contends that my childhood experience is not a golden standard to hold other people to, and that I’m in fact a huge a**hole for trying to limit how he expresses himself in his own home.

“I pointed out that he’s angrily yelling, not simply self-expressing – and that he is p***ed off when I sing in the house, or when our child makes excited child sounds.

“I also mentioned that anger can be expressed without yelling incessantly.”

The woman also said her partner accused her of having “extremely unhealthy expectations” of him, and said she was being “controlling” by asking him to stop shouting.

She wrote: “Ultimately, he says that withholding his natural expression is an extremely unhealthy expectation and indicative of major a**hole territory control issues on my part.”

Fellow Reddit users were quick to defend the mum, with many slamming her partner for having “anger issues”.

One person wrote: “He’s not displaying effective self-expression and it’s negatively effecting your child. Unless he can teach your little one healthier habits of expression then counselling may be in order.”

While someone else said: “He clearly has anger issues. What does he have to yell about so frequently?

“My dad was a yeller, it made me an incredibly sensitive person. He shouldn’t be yelling all of the time in front of your child. I’d be a nervous wreck, honestly.”

And a third added: “Yelling occasionally is fine, but five to 10 times a day is kind of weird. Stick to your guns.”