How to Help Your Child Manage Their Anger
Are you finding it difficult to help your kid whose struggling with managing their anger or their acting out behavior? This is very common and this is tough for both the parent and the kid who struggles with anger management. If your kid is experiencing anger outbursts and it’s impacting their daily functioning, it’s important to help them build the emotional tolerance that they need to manage these big feelings. The following are ways that you can help your kid whose struggling with managing their own anger.
Help them understand their feelings
Kids are more likely to get angrier and have outbursts when they don’t understand their feelings. Teaching your child about their feelings will be very beneficial in helping them understand and label their emotions that they’re feeling. To help with this, begin teaching them basic feeling words such as “mad, sad, happy” and discuss situations in which they feel each emotion. Over time, they will be able to learn how to identify and label their own emotions.
Differentiate between feelings and behavior
Helping your child label their feelings will help them in identifying them. Differentiating between feelings and behavior will allow them to understand how their feelings impact their behavior when feeling angry. Try saying to them “its okay to feel angry, but its not okay to act aggressive.” This helps the child understand that they’re in control of their behavior when they feel angry.
Utilize an anger thermometer.
An anger thermometer is a tool utilized in DBT that helps the child recognize their vulnerabilities and recognize their anger is rising and rising. Having a conversation with your child about what it physically feelings like for their anger to increase and having them identify physical sensations in their body. Using this tool will help them understand when their anger is rising and identifying what it feels like.
Utilize coping skills
For a child whose struggling with managing their anger, creating a Coping Skill Box or having coping skills easily accessible will help them begin to self-soothe when feeling angry. Encouraging your child to practice the coping skills when feeling calm will help them utilize the skills when in a crisis. Encourage them to read, draw, color, play with a favorite toy. When they’re upset or acting out, reminding them to utilize their coping skills will eventually help them to self-soothe. A ‘time out’ coping skill is very useful in helping them calm down and take a break from the tantrum.
Follow through with consequences
Consistent discipline when your child is acting out or throwing tantrums is very effective in helping the child understand that disrespected behavior is not accepted. If your child breaks the rules, following through with a consequence each time will teach them that their negative behavior will not be tolerated.