Can you make my kid not get mad?
I can’t. When parents reach out to me with the goal of eliminating anger from their child, I usually say I’m a pretty good therapist but that’s not something I can do. Anger is a human emotion, and we can’t remove it any more than we can remove sadness or anxiety or fear.
I get mad when I have to drive in a lot of traffic, or when someone continually interrupts me or dismisses me. A doctor I saw once got mad when he came in ready to do a procedure and none of the staff had been able to successfully give me an IV yet. Jesus got mad and overturned tables in a synagogue. Denzel Washington got mad in that one movie about his kid needing a transplant. Nearly every Shakespearian work contains multiple characters getting angry and/or rageful. Mama bears are notorious for getting mad at anything or anyone who might threaten their cubs. Cute little herbivore prairie dogs have been known to hunt, kill, and discard squirrel carcasses just because.
It’s not that I condone killing for fun, it’s just that we cannot extinguish an emotion that is natural in the human and animal world. What I can, hopefully do when a child is often angry is:
provide coping strategies to help them feel better when they’re upset
validate their experiences and emotions
help them see patterns and triggers that lead to their angry outbursts
identify preventative measures that can help to slow angry escalations
listen without judgement
brainstorm ideas that help them work through the anger in a shorter timeframe
help them feel more in control of their body when angry
translate for their parents ways to best support them at home
I find that most of the time when I have a similar conversation with parents they’re largely like “yeah, that’s what I mean.” They’re on board with anger continuing to exist and working on strategies for diffusion, and they genuinely want to support their kids.
For some reason, we tend to think anger is fine for adults and actors and Shakespeare and the son of God and mama bears, but not for kids. We tend to think when our kids are angry it is somehow a negative reflection on us as parents. We think maybe our kids wouldn’t act like this if we’d been tougher on them or easier on them or given them less red dye #40 or not put them on formula as an infant. This is your reminder that anger is developmentally appropriate at every age, and is does not mean you’ve failed your child or forgotten to teach them something important or that they’re not going to be able to function as an adult in society. It just means that they are a living being with a complex range of emotions, and that you’ve created an environment where they feel safe to be their most genuine self. So congrats on being a great parent who accepts their child in all their humanness!
