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To manage anger in the family, one must realize a few underlying facts:
1- Anger is a natural human emotion. It is alright for children and parents to feel angry. However, it is not all right to use it to hurt yourself or others. Knowing how to control anger is not natural and must be taught by significant adults in our lives.
2- Children must learn how to control themselves before they can control their anger. Self-control can be learned by simple children's activities (i.e.; play). These activities must be developmentally appropriate and fit the age of the child.
3- In order to help children cope with their anger, adults must become aware of how anger affects their lives. They must also display a proper model of appropriate anger management.
4- Adults must intervene when anger becomes explosive and use appropriate methods to cope with angry children.
Because of the amount of information that comes with these basic premises, let's look at two of the basic underlying issues:
"Anger Is A Natural Human Emotion"
A common myth of anger management in our society is that anger is bad and therefore it must be eliminated. Take, for example, the parent who tells his or her child to go to their room when they get angry or the parent who doesn't allow angry feelings to be expressed in the home. This is due to the parent's feeling of discomfort with anger and not the child's. And it probably stems from the parent's own childhood experiences with anger with their parents.
The reality is that anger cannot be eliminated no matter how you try. If you succeed in suppressing it, it will only come out in some other way. One parent stated that when she held in her anger she would start to cry. Push it in one side and it comes out another.
A more common example is the parent who comes home from a particularly tough day at work and yells at the children. Although the children might have been misbehaving, the reality is that the parent is reacting from the day's earlier events more than the immediate situation.
Benjamin Franklin once said, "Anger is never without a purpose, but seldom a good one." The meaning behind this is that while anger is a natural emotion, we seldom use it constructively. That is because we misunderstand the meaning of emotion and its significance in our own lives and that of our children.
"Anger Is A Signal"
The significance of anger is to act as a signal that something in our lives needs to change. It is not a tool to control others or a weapon to blast family and friends, although that is the most common use for anger. The justification for its destructive use (for parents and children) is that other people are to blame for my problems.
When we blame others, we are absolved of all anger management responsibility. Listen to a child talk about why they got angry and hit another child. It will almost always be because the other person "made them" do it because they took their toy or hit them first or said something mean. Blame the other person and they are required to change, not you. You didn't do anything wrong, right? Wrong! The only thing we have absolute 100 percent control over is ourselves. The other person - maybe 10 percent, at best.
So if anger is a signal for a need to change, what do we change and how? We all get angry sometimes. What is important is that we learn how to deal with our anger. And it feels good to be able to stop when we want to and find new ways to solve a problem.
The most important thing to understand about anger is that is requires management. While we all have the right to get angry, we do have to control what we do with that anger. And, as parents, what we do with our anger will help our children know what to do with theirs
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