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Teach your child to manage his anger by giving your child words for his feelings.

Anger often escalates when a child feels misunderstood. Simply enabling your child to communicate by giving names to his feelings can help him feel more calm and be understood.

Is it safe to say that all of us as parents at one point or another have asked our children to apologize? Apologies are transparent when you think about it. The ‘I just want to get out of trouble and get this over with’ apologies are really obvious. With these types of apologies there is li
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Follow, Don’t Fight, Children’s Emotions

(There have been no ratings yet.)

“This is too hard! I’ll never get it! I’m just stupid!” The slam of your 10-year-old son’s bedroom door underscores his angry voice.

“No one will ever want to go out with me,” your teenage daughter sobs with the school dance looming in her future.

When kids are experiencing sadness, anger or fear, you may have the impulse to talk them out of it, to steer them away from it. Your own anxiety that their unhappiness will eat them up, or sometimes pure frustration, may drive you to remind them that they’ve got “lots to be thankful for” or that it “could be worse,” or to try to distract them from their feelings.

Perhaps you adopt a cheerleading approach. But the reassurance you offer your son – “You’re not stupid! I know you can do it!” – is met immediately with an angry, “I can not!” And when you insist to your daughter that she’s beautiful, that she’ll have many dates in the future, she answers, “You really don’t understand!”

That’s because when kids are upset, they need to feel that you understand their feelings even more than they need a solution to the problem at hand. When you try to talk kids out of their feelings, they’re likely to either respond angrily or choose not to confide in you at all. Either way, their misery escalates, and so does their fear that it will never subside.

Instead of steering them away from their feelings, accept them and listen with your complete attention. Keep listening until you fully understand their perceptions and feelings about the problem they’re facing.

Psychiatrist and author John Birtchnell uses a metaphor to illustrate this way of helping. Just like hitting a slick spot while driving in snow, the way to help your child find relief when he is overwhelmed and become grounded again is to “steer in the direction of the skid.” By doing so, you reduce his own panic over the intensity of his feelings.

Here’s how it quietly, gently sounds:

“Hey, Bobby – what’s going on?”
“Tell me about it.”

When the car is righted, when your child has regained traction, you steer normally again. That is, only after he feels understood is it time to offer help with problem-solving.