Anger is a perfectly normal emotion, and learning to manage it appropriately is one key to emotional health and well-being. If your child is having frequent angry outbursts, it’s important to get to the root of the issue and teach them calming strategies that work. Before we get into those calming strategies, let’s look beneath the yelling, hitting, and aggressive behavior and into the emotional world of a child.
According to a paper from the National Scientific council on the Developing Child (2004), children rapidly develop their abilities to experience and express a wide range of emotions starting from birth. The emotional experience of newborns and infants occur most commonly during interactions with a caregiver, such as when feeding, comforting, and holding. They experience negative emotions and show distress when they are hungry, uncomfortable, or lonely, and they experience positive emotions when they are fed, soothed, talked to, etc. They cannot control their expression of overwhelming emotions and have no ability yet to regulate these on their own.
The emotional life of toddlers and preschoolers is much more complex, the paper says. Notably, the authors say, “The emotional health of young children is closely tied to the emotional and social characteristics of the environments in which they live.” While differences in temperament are part of their biological makeup, their experiences are coded in their brain circuitry, and what we both model and teach regarding emotions affects how their brain circuits get “wired.” The early childhood years are critical for learning positive ways to deal with one’s emotional world as the emotional center of the brain and the prefrontal cortex (where empathy, reasoning, and self-control lie) are rapidly developing.
This doesn’t mean that an older child who didn’t learn good emotional control as a preschooler now has little hope for the future, though. We are always capable of learning new skills and developing the mental muscle needed to exercise self-control. While early childhood is the optimal time for developing emotional intelligence, it’s not too late for the tween, teen, or adult.
Unfortunately, the tendency is to punish children when they display anger, and punishment only serves to compound the problem. Rather than discussing the feeling and helping them work through the emotion, it is common parenting practice to spank or to send a child to time-out for displaying anger in an unacceptable way. Hitting, insulting, biting, and yelling are not acceptable ways to express anger; this is a lesson children must learn, but we simply can’t expect them to be able to express anger more appropriately if we don’t show them what to do with this uncomfortable feeling. They may learn to only stuff it down in order to avoid punishment when it would be much more prudent to teach them to handle it in a healthy manner.
On the flip side of punishment are parents who go to great lengths to teach their children how to express anger appropriately by telling them to punch a pillow or a punching bag, scream into a cushion, stomp their feet, etc. I once thought these were appropriate tools to “get the anger out,” but research now tells us that these actions do not help us calm down. In fact, they continue the adrenaline rush that fuels the hostility.
This brings us to our main point: How do we help an angry child calm down?
10 Ways to Calm an Angry Child on page 2...
1. Help your child name the emotion. “You’re feeling angry. Let me help.” This is helpful because children who can name anger can learn to recognize their anger cues.
2. Meet anger with empathy. By listening to and validating your child’s experience, you create space for the anger to melt away. Empathy speaks to their higher brain and helps them get out of that lower brain where the anger and reactivity are taking place. You can read more on this topic in my articles, The Brain Science that Changes Parenting and Connection-Based Discipline.
3. Try time-in instead of time-out. Take your child to a calm down area where he can watch the glitter swirling in a jar, scribble on a notepad, color a coloring page, or look through a picture book with you. Don’t worry, these alternatives to time-out are not rewards for inappropriate behavior – it’s teaching an important life skill.
4. Teach your child breathing techniques. Even children as young as toddlers can learn to take big breaths and blow them out. Older children can learn more meditative breathing.
5. Teach mindfulness. Here are 8 ways to do so from the Huffington Post.
6. Give him play dough. For many kids, tactile sensory activities can be soothing.
7. Allow enough time for kids to de-stress through free and creative play. Drawing, finger painting, rolling in the grass, and music help soothe the nerves of an over-stressed kid, which in today’s culture is way too common. A child who is stressed is more likely to have outbursts of anger.
8. Put her in the bath. A poem by the artist SARK says “If they’re crabby, put them in water.” A warm and soothing soak in the tub is a good way to reset a bad mood.
9. If your child needs space to calm down, that’s fine. Just don’t force isolation as that usually further triggers the flight or fight response. Remain warm and available, but respect their need for space.
10. Teach them how to do a body scan. Start at the top of the head and scan down to the feet, noticing any tension or bad feelings in the body. Relax the parts where tension is felt.