Your Child Learns Anger Management From You

By TheNanny612 On May 25, 2007 · Leave a Comment

As soon as your
child is old enough to feel the emotion of anger, you are going to start wondering
how to help her learn anger management skills. There will be books to read,
counseling classes to take and plenty of friends and acquaintances to get advice
from about the best methods of making sure your child learns how to control
her anger. These tools are all important; but in the end, your child is going
to learn how to control her anger by watching how you control yours. Modeling
positive anger management is the best method of making sure your child learns
how to behave appropriately when she gets mad.

One of the
most important steps in anger management learning is being able to identify
the feeling of anger. When your child first starts dealing with issues
of anger, she’s not really going to be able to understand what those
feelings are. Giving a name to those feelings will help her to better
understand them. When you see your child getting angry, you should identify
that emotion out loud. And just as importantly, you should identify out
loud when you are feeling angry so your child can learn to understand
that all people get angry and there are appropriate ways to deal with
the emotion.

Identifying the emotion of
anger isn’t all that there is to modeling responsible anger management,
of course. You also need to be sure that your child sees your reacting to anger
in the way that you want her to react when she is angry. If you want your child
to be able to identify anger and put herself in a time-out to take a break from
whatever is causing her to be angry, then you need to model this in your own
behavior. Let’s say that you are angry because the dog has just torn up
your favorite blouse. Instead of yelling at the dog and then telling your child
that you yelled because you were angry, you should be able to think ahead, tell
your child that you are angry because the dog tore your blouse and then say
to her, “I’m going to sit in a time-out for a few minutes until
I am not angry about this anymore.”

You should also be able to
admit when you have acted out in anger and fix the problem. Sometimes, you’ll
get mad and yell at the dog. Identify out loud for your child that this is what
happened and then state what you would prefer to do next time to better handle
your anger. When an opportunity arises to behave differently in the face of
anger, take it and point it out to your child. By modeling his ability to make
improvements in your own anger management, you are teaching your child how to
improve her own behavior when she is mad.

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