BASIC MECHANISMS FOR DEALING WITH ANGER IN CHILDREN

Excessive anger, selfishness and fears in children can be major causes of tension and conflict in families and marriages. This write up is meant to help parents to come to a deeper understanding of how they can protect the emotional lives of their children and guide them. A number of virtues will be presented which can help children and teenagers grow in their ability to deal with their anger, insecurities, fears and sadness in an appropriate manner.

There are basic mechanisms that are used to deal with anger in children.

Denial

During early childhood, the most common method of dealing with anger is denial. The dangers attached to denial include emotional harm to the child, increased feelings of sadness, guilt and shame or the misdirection of the resentment towards others.

Expression

The next method commonly used for dealing with anger is either to express it openly and honestly or to release it in a passive-aggressive manner. It is of benefit to review with children the numerous ways in which anger can be vented passively.

It may be helpful to view actively expressed anger as encompassing three types:

• Appropriate

• Excessive and

• Misdirected

Children benefit from learning the value of healthy assertiveness as well as the danger of responding consistently to situations in an excessively angry manner. It is important for them to realize that when they do not resolve their anger from a particular hurt, they may later misdirect the resentment towards others. Such anger can damage friendships, interfere with learning, harm family relationships and limit participation in team sports. In clinical practice, it’s been found out that the most common recipients of misdirected anger are younger siblings, peers, mothers and teachers.

Concepts of displacement and the consequences of displacing anger can be difficult for children to understand and accept, so, concrete examples need to be used. At times, it can be helpful if parents relate stories of misdirected anger from their youthful experience.

Some therapists believe they have been successful in treating anger in children and adolescents when their young patients express anger they had previously denied. Actually, what has been accomplished is only one step towards actual resolution because, in itself, expression is incapable of freeing children from the burden of resentment which they carry. The experience of anger can lead to a desire for revenge which does not diminish until the existence of the resentful feelings is uncovered and subsequently resolved. Without this uncovering and resolution, anger can be displaced for many years onto others and erupt decades later in loving relationships. Anger may not be fully resolved until a conscious decision is made to work on forgiving the offender.

Victims of misdirected anger:

• Mothers

• Siblings

• Teachers

• Peers

• Oneself

• Society

• The church/God

Forgiveness

It was discovered that children need to learn the following issues and that is why we need to clarify what forgiveness is Specifically, forgiveness is

As already stated, clinicians oftendiscover that the relationship in which children experience the greatest degree of disappointment and subsequently the greatest degree of anger, is in the parental relationship, especially the one with the father. This is particularly true at the present time when almost forty percent of children and teenagers do not have their biological fathers at home. Numerous studies have documented difficulties with resentment and aggressive behavior in the children of divorce (Block, Block & Gjerde, 1988Guidubaldi, 1988; Hetherington, 1989; Johnson, Kline & Tschann, 1989; Wallerstein & Blakeslee, 1989). One study of parental love-deprivation and forgiveness, revealed that most respondents implicated the father, not the mother, as being emotionally distant (Al-Mabuk, Enright & Cardis, 1995).

The major cause of anger in the father relationship is the result of growing up with a father who had difficulty in communicating his love and in affirming his children. Misdirected father anger may be a contributing conflict in our schools and homes today. Many children who have intense father-anger present with conduct disorders, oppositional defiant disorders, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorders and intermittent explosive disorders.

Difficulties in the mother relationship that lead to intense anger can be the result of not experiencing enough love and praise, feeling controlled or criticized or being made to feel that one does not measure up to some standard. At time, too, the child may have felt overly responsible for the mother, or may have come to the contribution that she was overly critical of the father.

Other sources of anger sometimes result from hurts and disappointments from siblings or rejection by peers. Often an older child misdirects anger at a younger sibling that is really meant for a parent or peers. Many children and adolescents crave peer acceptance to develop a positive sense of self and to protect themselves from loneliness. Those children who are scapegoated regularly in school rarely tell their parents how they are treated because they are so ashamed or because they believe that their parents cannot protect them. Therefore, parents need to be aware of the various ways in which this conflict can manifest itself. These include: isolation, withdrawal, ventilation of hostility towards others, social anxiety or depression.

Some children have difficulties with their anger as a result of modeling after a parent who could not control anger. This excessive expression of anger is then passed from one generation to the next which occurs most often with the father.

Many in the mental health field believe that the excessive anger seen in ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) and other disorders in children is biologically determined (Hechtman 1991).

Parents can assist their children in their character development by teaching them to understanding and forgiving when angry. We refer to this as an immediate forgiveness exercise. This does not preclude punishing a child for a display of excessive or misdirected anger nor asking an angry child to apologize to the recipient of their excessive anger. Appropriate punishment for angry behaviors often helps a child learn to control anger.

After an angry incident, the child can be recommended to try to forgive if they have been truly hurt by another. Also, children can learn to stop denying their anger and to resolve it by thinking at bedtime of forgiving anyone who may have hurt them on that particular day or in the past.

In Ephesians 4, St. paul recommended that we not let the sun go down on our anger. Unfortunately, many children and adults do because they do not work on developing and using the virtue of forgiveness at the end of the day.

Children are usually pleased to learn how the virtue of forgiveness can help them control and resolve their angry feelings.