Handling Your Own Anger

By: Dr. Laura Markham

All parents get angry at their children.

It doesn’t help that there are always the endless pressures of life: appointments we’re late to, things we’ve forgotten until too late, health and financial worries -- the list is endless. In the middle of that hectic momentum, enter our child, who has lost her Photo: MMarsolaissneaker, suddenly remembered she needs a new notebook for school today, is teasing her little brother, or is downright belligerent. And we snap.

In our calm moments, if we’re honest, we can admit that we could handle any parenting moment much better from a state of calmness. But in the storm of our anger, we feel righteously entitled to our fury. How can this kid be so irresponsible, inconsiderate, ungrateful?

But another factor is also at work. We all enter the parenting relationship wounded in some way from our own childhoods, and our kids surface all those wounds.

Parents and kids have the ability to trigger each other as no one else can. Even as adults we are often irrational in relation to our own parents. (Who has greater power to annoy you? Make you act childish?)

Similarly, our kids push our buttons precisely because they are our children. Psychologists call this phenomenon “ghosts in the nursery,” by which they mean that our children stimulate the intense feelings of our own childhoods, and we often respond by unconsciously re-enacting the past that’s etched like forgotten hieroglyphics deep in our psyches. The fears and rage of childhood are powerful and can overwhelm us even as adults. It can be enormously challenging to lay these ghosts to rest.

It helps to know all this, if we are struggling to cope with anger. Just as important, because it gives us incentive to control ourselves, we need to know that parental anger can be harmful to young children.

Imagine your husband or wife losing their temper and screaming at you. Now imagine them three times as big as you, towering over you. Imagine that you depend on them completely for your food, shelter, and safety. Imagine they are your primary source of love and self-confidence and information about the world, that you have nowhere else to turn. Now take whatever feelings you have summoned up and magnify them by a factor of 1000. That is something like what happens inside your child when you get angry at him.

Of course, all of us get angry at our children, even, sometimes, enraged. The challenge is to call on our maturity so that we control the expression of that anger, and therefore minimize its negative impact.

Anger is scary enough. Name calling or other verbal abuse, in which the parent speaks disrespectfully to the child, takes a higher personal toll, since the child is dependent on the parent for his very sense of self. And children who suffer physical violence, including spanking, have been proven to exhibit lasting negative effects that reach into every corner of their lives.

If your young child does not seem afraid of your anger, it’s an indication that he or she has seen too much of it and has developed defenses against it -- and against you. The unfortunate result is a child who is less likely to want to behave to please you, and is more open to the influences of the peer group and the larger culture. That means you have some repair work to do. Whether or not they show it -- and the more often we get angry, the more defended they will be, and therefore less likely to show it -- our anger is nothing short of terrifying to young children.

How can you handle your own anger?

1. Listen to your anger, rather than acting on it. Anger, like other feelings, is as much a given as our arms and legs. What we’re responsible for is what we choose to do with it. Anger often has a valuable lesson for us, but acting while we are angry, except in rare situations requiring self-defense, is rarely constructive, because we make choices we would never make from a rational state.

The constructive way to handle anger is to limit our expression of it, and when we calm down, to use it diagnostically: what is so wrong in our life that we feel furious, and what do we need to do to change the situation?

Sometimes the answer is clearly related to our parenting: we need to enforce rules before things get out of hand, or start putting the children to bed half an hour earlier, or do some repair work on our relationship with our twelve year old so that she stops treating us rudely. Sometimes we are surprised to find that our anger is actually at our spouse who is not acting as a full partner in parenting, or even at our boss. And sometimes the answer is that we are carrying around anger we don’t understand that spills out onto our kids, and we need to seek help though therapy or a parents support group.

2. Find acceptable ways to express anger. All parents get enraged at their children. Your children will certainly see you angry from time to time, and how you handle those situations will teach them a lot. Will you teach them that might makes right? That parents have tantrums too? Or that anger is part of being human, and that learning to manage anger responsibly is part of becoming mature? Make a list of acceptable ways to handle anger: for instance, you can raise your voice, even scream if necessary, but not hit, call your child names, or mete out any punishment while angry. Your children get angry too, so it’s a double gift to them to find constructive ways to deal with your anger: you not only don’t hurt them, you offer them a role model.

3. If you frequently struggle with your anger, seek counseling. There’s no shame in asking for help. The shame is in reneging on your responsibility as a parent by damaging your child physically or psychologically.

4. Take Five. Recognize that an angry state is not the best place from which to intervene in any situation. Instead, give yourself a timeout and come back when you are able to be calm. Just say, as calmly as you can, “I am too mad right now to talk about this. I am going to take a timeout in my room and calm down. I will be back in ten minutes.”

Exiting does not let your child win. It impresses upon them just how serious the infraction is, and it models self-control. And then use that ten minutes to calm yourself, not to work yourself into a further frenzy about how right you are.

5. Set limits BEFORE you get angry. Often when we get angry at our children, it’s because we haven’t set a limit, and something is grating on us. The minute you start getting angry, it’s a signal to do something. No, not yell. Intervene in a positive way to prevent more of whatever behavior is irritating you.

If your irritation is coming from you -- let’s say you’ve just had a hard day, and their natural exuberance is wearing on you -- it can help to explain that to your kids and ask them to be considerate and keep the behavior that’s irritating you in check, at least for now.

If the kids are doing something that is increasingly annoying -- playing a game in which someone is likely to get hurt, stalling when you’ve asked them to do something, squabbling while you’re on the phone -- you may need to interrupt what you’re doing, restate your family rule or expectation, and redirect them, to keep the situation, and your anger, from escalating.

6. Remember that “expressing” your anger can reinforce and escalate it. Despite the popular idea that we need to “express” our anger so that it doesn’t eat away at us, there’s nothing constructive about expressing anger.

Research shows that expressing anger while we are angry is usually counter-productive, because it actually makes us more angry. This in turn makes the other person hurt, afraid, or angry, and causes a rift in the relationship.

Rehashing the situation in our mind always proves to us that we are right and the other person is wrong, which again makes us more angry as we stew. What works is to find a constructive way to address whatever is making us angry so that the situation is resolved, and our anger stops being triggered.

7. WAIT before disciplining. Nothing says you have to issue edicts on the fly. Simply say something like “I can’t believe you hit your brother after we’ve talked about hitting being against the rules. I need to think about this, and we will talk about it this afternoon. Until then, I expect you to be on your best behavior.”

Once you’ve taken a ten minute timeout and still don’t feel calm enough to relate constructively, you can re-enter the room and say “I want to think about what just happened, and we will talk about it later. In the meantime, I need to make dinner and you need to finish your homework, please.”

After dinner, sit down with your child and, if necessary, set firm limits. But you will be more able to listen to his side of it, and to respond with reasonable, enforceable, respectful limits to his behavior.

8. Avoid physical force. That spanking has a negative impact on children’s development has been proven in study after study. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends strongly against it.

Spanking may make you feel better temporarily, but it is bad for your child, and ultimately sabotages everything positive you do as a parent. Do whatever you need to do to control yourself, including leaving the room. If you can’t control yourself and end up resorting to physical force, apologize to your child, tell him hitting is never ok, and get yourself some help. (See the Spanking and Why Positive Discipline sections on this website).

9. Avoid threats. Threats made while you’re angry will be unreasonable. Since threats are only effective if you are willing to follow through on them, they undermine your authority and make it less likely that your kids will follow the rules next time. Instead, tell your child that you need to think about an appropriate response to this infraction of the rules. The suspense will be worse than hearing a string of threats they know you won’t enforce.

10. The way to get rid of anger is to acknowledge the underlying feelings. Don’t get attached to your anger. Once you’ve listened to it and made appropriate changes, let go of it. If that isn’t working, remember that anger is always a defense. It shields us from feeling vulnerable.

To get rid of anger, look at the hurt or fear under the anger. If your daughter’s so obsessed with her friends that she’s dismissive of the family and that hurts you, or your son’s tantrums scare you, work with those feelings and situations, and address them. Once you get to the underlying feelings, your anger will dissipate.

11. Monitor your tone and word choice. Research shows that the more calmly we speak, the more calm we feel, and the more calmly others respond to us. Similarly, use of swear words or other highly charged words makes us and our listener more upset, and the situation escalates. We have the power to calm or upset ourselves and the person we are speaking with by our own tone of voice and choice of words. (Remember, you're the role model.)

12. Choose your battles. Every negative interaction with your child uses up valuable relationship capital. Focus on what matters, such as the way your child treats other humans. In the larger scheme of things, her jacket on the floor may drive you crazy, but it probably isn’t worth putting your relationship bank account in the red over.

13. Keep looking for effective ways to discipline that encourage better behavior. Some parents are surprised to hear that there are families where the children are generally well-behaved, although physical force is never used and parental yelling is infrequent. There are hugely more effective ways to discipline than anger, and, in fact, disciplining with anger sets up a cycle that encourages misbehavior. (

Dr. Markham is the author of an upcoming Q&A e-book series, Ask Dr. Markham, which will have editions for all ages from birth to teens, and of the soon-to-be-released, The Secret Life of Happy Moms, which lays out her relationship-based approach to raising kids who turn out great. - http://ahaparenting.com/about