Your Child Learns Anger Management From You May 25
As soon as your child is old enough to feel the emotion of anger, you are going to start wondering how to help her learn anger management skills. There will be books to read, counseling classes to take and plenty of friends and acquaintances to get advice from about the best methods of making sure your child learns how to control her anger. These tools are all important; but in the end, your child is going to learn how to control her anger by watching how you control yours. Modeling positive anger management is the best method of making sure your child learns how to behave appropriately when she gets mad.
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One of the most important steps in anger management learning is being able to identify the feeling of anger. When your child first starts dealing with issues of anger, she’s not really going to be able to understand what those feelings are. Giving a name to those feelings will help her to better understand them. When you see your child getting angry, you should identify that emotion out loud. And just as importantly, you should identify out loud when you are feeling angry so your child can learn to understand that all people get angry and there are appropriate ways to deal with the emotion. |
Identifying the emotion of anger isn’t all that there is to modeling responsible anger management, of course. You also need to be sure that your child sees your reacting to anger in the way that you want her to react when she is angry. If you want your child to be able to identify anger and put herself in a time-out to take a break from whatever is causing her to be angry, then you need to model this in your own behavior. Let’s say that you are angry because the dog has just torn up your favorite blouse. Instead of yelling at the dog and then telling your child that you yelled because you were angry, you should be able to think ahead, tell your child that you are angry because the dog tore your blouse and then say to her, “I’m going to sit in a time-out for a few minutes until I am not angry about this anymore.”
You should also be able to admit when you have acted out in anger and fix the problem. Sometimes, you’ll get mad and yell at the dog. Identify out loud for your child that this is what happened and then state what you would prefer to do next time to better handle your anger. When an opportunity arises to behave differently in the face of anger, take it and point it out to your child. By modeling his ability to make improvements in your own anger management, you are teaching your child how to improve her own behavior when she is mad.
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