How to Help Your Child Overcome Anger

Excessive anger can be a limiter on the growth of your child's mental well-being. As a caring parent, you are expected to be concerned about your kid with anger issues and seek to stop it. Therefore, you should learn techniques to help your child overcome anger. One such technique is teaching them about their feelings, the causes of such feelings, and the ways they manifest. Through such teaching, they will understand the triggers for their anger and how to express themselves correctly without emotional or physical harm to others. You can also teach them anger management techniques to help them calm down during angry episodes. Meditation, thinking happy thoughts, or staying quiet can be used to remain calm and gentle despite being offended. Moreover, you can help them get over their anger by making sure to discourage their tantrums. Instead of giving in to their demands while angry, ensure you remain firm about not giving them what they want until they behave well.

Be sure to read this detailed overview on how to help your child overcome anger:

Explain the Concept of Feelings to Them

You can give your child well-rounded mental well-being by erasing excessive anger episodes from their behavior. To help your child overcome anger, you can teach them about their feelings, helping them understand what they are going through. The teaching can be done through some games and fun activities. For instance, you can have a game where emotions are drawn on cards, instructing the participants to label each emotion. By seeing the faces on the cards, they will be able to understand the good and bad emotions. Also, you can get videos about the emotional spectrum so they may watch. Since kids respond well to audio-visual learning methods, they will quickly soak up knowledge about feelings. As the videos perfectly depict an angry face, your child will realize what they look like while angry and want to prevent that. Furthermore, you can teach them through your interactions with them. When they are expressing any emotion, be sure to label the feeling with your words. Doing so will help them link the word to their exact feeling at that moment, allowing them to remember even after a long time.

Teach Them How to Calm Down

To prevent anger from eroding their mental well-being, it's essential that you teach your child how to calm down when angry. You can help your child overcome anger by teaching them some helpful anger management strategies. Humans generally take shallow breaths when angry, and your child will likely do the same. You can teach them to calm down by consciously taking deep breaths. By focusing on conscious breathing, they will focus less on the anger and more on their body, leading to a diffused atmosphere. Picturing a clear image can also help keep anger at bay, and you can teach them this strategy. You can have them imagine a family picture or a peaceful moment during a family vacation. Ensure that you teach them to have a particular image in their head always to visit when angry. Also, you can tell them to calm down through muscle relaxation. With this strategy, they will intentionally tense their muscles and relax them one after the other. The strategy tries to mimic the relaxation of anger, and it works.

Don't Encourage Their Tantrums

Your child's first way to show anger is through tantrums, but they may not outgrow it as they age. This may point to disturbed mental well-being. However, if you help your child overcome anger, tantrums will disappear. If your child throws a tantrum, you should ignore it so they understand that tantrums aren't the best communication method. You should use this technique, especially at home, since no stranger will be disturbed by their tantrum. However, if you are in public, you have to respond to their tantrums. Just make sure you don't encourage it. You can distract them with other things or a new environment, but ensure you don't give them exactly what they want. Instead, you should only encourage their good habits. Therefore, you should keep the gifts and rewards for when they do something good. Doing this will ensure they are motivated to be good and avoid bad things.

Reduce Their Exposure to Violence

Society can influence anyone's thoughts and actions, and this effect can also extend to your child regarding the acceptance of violence. If you desire to help your child overcome anger, you have to reduce their exposure to sources that encourage violence. You can do this by being diligent in your research before letting your child watch anything. Before you permit them to watch a movie, ensure you check reviews of the film to see the level of violence in it. If the violence level is not what you want, be your child's protector and do away with it. You don't have to do it alone. You and your partner can get advice from other parents about how they reduce their kids' exposure to violence. Even if the other parents have not done it before, you can all bring up ideas from different perspectives and create different plans. Researching and reading reviews should not be the end of your involvement in your child's media consumption. You should also try to watch with them to make sure you can turn it off if there's any unwanted surprise.

Create Consequences for Their Actions

Without consequences, society will be filled with evildoers. To a more innocent degree, this also applies to kids. When kids notice no consequence to their wrong actions, they will continue to engage in them. If you desire to help your child overcome anger, you have to draw some consequences for it and let them know. If your child has hurt someone emotionally or physically because of their anger, you may punish them by making them say nice things about the person. This will make them embarrassed about what they have done and prevent them from hurting the person again. Also, you can punish your child with time out or time in. This involves telling them to go and sit alone in a spot while mulling over what they have done. Doing this will tend to make them realize that they have done something terrible for you to tell them to stop the current activity and go and think. Furthermore, you can prevent them from having a privilege as punishment for their excessive anger. For instance, you can prevent them from watching their favorite cartoon because they got outraged earlier in the day.

Conclusion

Ensuring your child has robust mental well-being is a noble goal, but their anger issues can ruin it. You can help your child overcome anger by explaining the concept of feelings to them, teaching them how to calm down, not encouraging their tantrums, reducing their exposure to violence, and creating consequences for their actions.

Resources

https://www.kiddiematters.com/9-ways-to-teach-children-about-feelings/

https://www.apa.org/topics/anger/strategies-controlling

https://www.verywellfamily.com/ways-to-help-an-angry-child-1094976

https://www.goodrx.com/health-topic/childrens-health/stop-toddler-tantrums

https://www.verywellfamily.com/violence-in-the-media-621159

https://amotherfarfromhome.com/32-consequences-bad-behavior/