Anger at Children: Who Has the Power

by
Steven Stosny, PhD © 2004

Every parent since the beginning of time has been painfully aware that children can do a great many things to irritate, frustrate, and otherwise turn the pleasant feelings of their caretakers into moods from hell. Those same creatures who look like little darlings when they sleep can almost at their whim produce headaches, upset stomachs, jangled nerves, strained muscles, aching bones, and overloaded emotional and sensory circuits.

But there’s one thing that even the most exuberant or obstinate of children cannot do: They can’t make us angry. They cannot force us to give up internal regulation of our emotional experience. To understand this scientific fact that seems to fly in the face of common sense, consider the psychobiological function of anger.

Why Anger is a Problem in Families

An automatic response triggered whenever we feel threatened, anger is the most powerful of all emotional experience. The only emotion that activates every muscle group and organ of the body, anger exists to mobilize the instinctual fight or flight response meant to protect us from predators. Of course, our children are not predators. For the vast majority of problems in family life, anger constitutes overkill and under-think. Applying this survival-level fight or flight response to everyday problems of family living is like using a rock to turn off a lamp or a tank to repair a computer.

Is anyone really stupid enough to turn off a lamp with a rock? When angry, everybody is that stupid. The problem has nothing to do with intelligence, it has to do with how hurt we are. Anger is always a reaction to hurt. It can be physical pain, which is why, when you bang your thumb with a hammer while trying to hang a picture, you don’t pray.

Far more often, though, anger is a reaction to psychological hurt or threat of hurt, in the form of a diminished sense of self. Vulnerability to psychological hurt depends entirely on how you feel about yourself. When your sense of self is weak or disorganized, anything can make you irritable or angry. When it’s solid and well-integrated, the insults and frustrations of life just roll off your back.

For instance, if you’ve had a bad day, if you’re feeling guilty, a little bit like a failure, or just disregarded, devalued, or irritable, you might come home to find your kid’s shoes in the middle of the floor and respond with: "That lazy, selfish, inconsiderate, little brat!" Yet you can come home after a great day of feeling fine about yourself, see the same shoes in the middle of the floor and think, "Oh, that’s just Jimmy or Sally," and not think twice about it.

The difference in your reaction to the child’s behavior lies entirely within you and depends completely on how you feel about yourself. In the first case the child’s behavior seems to diminish your sense of self: "If he cared about me, he wouldn’t do this; if my own kid doesn’t care about me, I must not be worth caring about." The anger is to punish the child for your diminished sense of self. In the second instance, the child’s behavior does not diminish your sense of personal importance, value, power, and lovability. So there is no need for anger. You don’t need a tank to solve the problem of the shoes in the middle of the floor. Rather, the problem to be solved is how to teach the child to be more considerate in his behavior; you won’t do that by humiliating him because you feel humiliated. His reaction to humiliation will be the same as yours: an inability see the other person’s perspective, an overwhelming urge to blame, and an impulse for revenge or punishment.

Modeling Anger Regulation for Children

Although their intellectual maturity is far less advanced than that of their parents, children experience anger for the same reasons as adults, mostly to defend the sense of self from pain and temporary diminishment. At the moment of anger, both children and adults feel bad about themselves. Making angry people feel worse about themselves will only make things worse. Rather, children must learn from their parents that the sense of self is internal and can be regulated only within themselves. They must restore their own sense of core value while respecting the rights of other people, which means regulating the impulse for revenge through validation of the hurt causing the urge for revenge, and through understanding the perspective of the person at whom the anger is directed. They will only learn to do this by watching their parents do it.

Self-Compassion and Compassion for Others

Mastery of the three steps of self-compassion and compassion for others makes us virtually immune to the ill-effects of anger. The first step of self-compassion is seeing beneath the symptom or defense (anger, anxiety, manipulation, obnoxious behavior) to the cause, which is some form of core hurt (feeling unimportant, disregarded, accused, devalued, guilty, untrustworthy, rejected, powerless, unlovable). Second, the core hurt must be validated (this is how I feel at this moment), and, third, changed (this behavior or event or disappointment or mistake does not mean that I’m unimportant, not valuable or lovable.) Compassion for others is recognizing that their symptoms, defenses, and obnoxious behavior come from a core hurt, validating it, and supporting them while they change it. Compassion does not excuse obnoxious behavior. Rather, it keeps us from attacking the already wounded person, which allows focus on changing the undesired behavior.

Anger Regulation

Here are a few of the common activators of anger, which we call core hurts: feeling disregarded, unimportant, accused, guilty, untrustworthy, devalued, rejected, powerless, unworthy of love. Once activated, core hurts put the sense of self at stake in solving the problem, which greatly distorts thinking, blows the problem out of proportion, and increases the emotional intensity of the response. Of course the child is responsible only for his/her behavior, not your sense of self.

To regulate anger, we must reduce the sensitivity of these activators. We must learn to view anger as a signal, not to assign blame to our children for tripping the activator, but to look within the self to reset the activated core hurt, i.e., to restore Core Value, a sense of personal adequacy and worthiness. With the sense of self no longer at stake, the problem, no longer a source of self-diminishment, can be solved for what it is: a call for more attention/effort, an inconvenience, disappointment, or mistake.

Emotional regulation skills can be learned fairly quickly in three concentrated learning sessions, with consistent practice between sessions. But whether learned through training or through personal experience that internally regulates anger activators, successful parenting, personal happiness, optimal work efficiency, physical and psychological health, and the capacity to sustain viable attachment relationships demands self-regulation of the impulse to anger and resentment.

Copyright 2004 Steven Stosny, Ph. D., all rights reserved