Angry Children, Worried Parents: Helping Families Manage Difficult Emotions
Parents worry when their children struggle with anger. Angry feelings and behavior can be especially challenging for children who have learning and attention problems. To help parents address this problem, Sam Goldstein, Ph.D., Robert Brooks, Ph.D., and Sharon Weiss, M.Ed. have teamed up to co-author a new book, Angry Children, Worried Parents: Seven Steps to Help Families Manage Anger (Specialty Press, 2004). This practical book presents a step-by-step program to help parents understand the causes of anger in children and to design a program to help their children learn to manage angry feelings and behavior. The following is an excerpt from the book.
What is Anger?
We all become angry at times. Anger is a natural human emotion, one of many responses we can express when we are frustrated and prevented from reaching our goals. Since anger is a universal emotion, it seems logical to conclude that there is nothing wrong with feeling angry. The problem occurs when anger leads to inappropriate actions or behavior. The problem, then, is not being angry but dealing with angry feelings in an ineffective way.
Childhood experiences as well as inborn temperament powerfully influence the way parents express anger and teach their children to manage anger. How do you respond when you're angry? Do you become cynical or overreact? Do you yell? Do you hit your children? How did your parents respond to you when you were angry as a child? Did they punish you? Did they shame or blame you? Do you have a tough time dealing with anger because your parents didn't know how to deal with it?
We choose to view anger as a signal, an indication to the individual that a goal or outcome is being blocked and that frustration is building. How children - or adults, for that matter - learn to respond to this signal will determine ultimately whether they manage anger or anger manages them. In response to anger, some blame others as the source of their problems. They use anger as fuel to drive and justify what they view as a necessary response. Yet anger is best viewed as a signal to take action rather than a sign of being treated unfairly.
What Role Does Anger Play in Everyday Life?
Anger begins as an emotion of varying intensity. It can be experienced as a mild irritation or as unbearable frustration. At the extreme end, particularly for children who are impulsive or inflexible, anger often leads to intense fury and rage. As with other emotions, anger is accompanied by physical and biological changes in the body. Heart rate and blood pressure increase. Levels of certain hormones, such as adrenaline, increase, leading to other physical changes in the body. Some researchers have suggested that aggression in response to anger may be instinctual. They believe that anger may be a natural, adaptive response to stress, allowing people to respond to a perceived threat and defend themselves. Therefore, a certain amount of anger is likely necessary for survival, even in our complex, civilized society. But when defense occurs in the absence of true provocation, anger becomes a liability. It also becomes a liability when we react verbally or physically in an extreme way to angry feelings, when children are unable to modulate anger, or when problems occur at home, on the playground, and in the classroom.
Teaching Anger Management
The goal of teaching children anger management is to reduce excessive reactions when angry and to develop skills to use anger as a signal to redirect their behavior. As with learning to swim or ride a bicycle, as you begin to work with your child it is important to be patient. Not all children learn to swim in the first lesson or master riding a bicycle that first day. Some children require much longer periods of practice to develop proficiency.
Keep in mind also that some children are born more likely to be irritable and easily angered. These symptoms usually appear at an early age. Yet, it is also important to remember that some children behave this way because they live in households in which they are exposed to models of poor anger management. Some children experience both risks, leading to a significant probability that they will struggle to learn to manage anger effectively. Some of these children may require professional help.
The primary goal is to help children and adolescents express anger in an assertive rather than aggressive manner. This means they are neither pushy nor demanding, but learn to be respectful advocates for themselves. This also means that they learn to cope with, not simply suppress, their anger. Suppression is only a partially effective strategy. When angry feelings are suppressed they often emerge later on, usually in an excessive way in response to a minor event related to an earlier anger-provoking experience. Suppressed anger is also thought to contribute to passive-aggressive behavior such as getting back at people indirectly without telling them why or confronting them directly. It also fuels cynical or hostile behavior, leading children to be excessively critical and fault-finding.
