Help Your Child Manage Anger
July 24, 2009 by Dr Pete
Filed under Pediatrics
I believe one of the most important topics that parents can teach their kids about is how to handle emotional states like anger. As youngsters, we have a lack of experience and little where-with-all to handle powerful and unpredictable emotions.
Learning how to manage emotions like anger in constructive, natural and acceptable ways is one of the ongoing processes of childhood and beyond.
Here is a site and a book I came across which specifically deals with anger in children and gives some great alternatives to medication and the conventional approach, while respecting the individual variations that children inherently have across the spectrum of the population.
Dear Sebastian was written by Bianca Tora, a grandmother and writer who put together this book and the website called Help-Your-Child-With-Anger.com.
The following is a quote from the author:
“Thanks to recent research on brain neuroplasticity, exercise-induced brain stimulation, psychoenergetic science, the power of intention and attention, we knew we could help our grandson manage his anger without relying on drugs or institutional care. And that’s what we did–helped him manage his anger–with love, patience, belief and brain-building exercises. This website is the result of our encounter with anger. We decided to turn what we learned from it into anger management tips and resources that can help others like us.”
- Bianca Tora
In Chinese medicine, anger is under the functional category of the liver and gall bladder sub-system. What this means is from an energy perspective, children (and all of us) must use some of their allotted liver gall bladder energy to deal with anger as an emotion, either in the expression of it or the inhibition of it. Both outward expression and inward repression require energy from the liver and gall bladder system.
Not surprisingly, this same sub-circuit is in charge of dealing with stress (both internal and external) in addition to many other categories. It is no wonder then, that stress can increase the chances of a child having anger episodes more frequently or more pronounced as a result of stress provoking events and experiences.
In my practice, I have learned that I must look for additional pieces of information when investigating the causes of anger and the Chinese medicine system is a very useful framework in this regard. At the same time, it allows us to look for individual differences in order to come up with a strategy that will work for your child, not anyone else’s and not based solely on statistics and numbers.
Here is a short video that highlights this site called Help-Your-Child-With-Anger.com.
If you have a child who is having difficulty with anger as an emotional state, go to this website and read more about the many techniques available to address it. You may also leave a comment on this post or submit a question through my contact form.
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Dear Dr. Pete: As I read each topic you send, I think about the awful abuse, anger, arguments, and degrading comments from my father when I was a young child up to age 14. I was determined to raise my children very differently. And we did……… Now I have a neighbor with a little boy who has “temper tantrums.” His parents are hispanic and I wonder if cultural differences contribute to the permissiveness of his behavior. I would like to show the book by Tora to his parents. He knows English, goes to nursery school. I think he is 4 yrs old.
I think cultural diversity can always play a role in how parents approach their kids. However, for a 4 year old to have temper tantrums is a normal part of development. The question should be how are these parents going to help him learn how to deal with anger over the next 10 years, not how to stop it from happening right now. It also makes sense to look for contributing factors that might cause the tantrums to be extreme in severity or frequency. There’s always more to the story than meets the eye or ears.
In the book, Dear Sebastian, the author Bianca Tora found out that her grandson needed to express himself in his own way, and after much time, trial and error, they found a way to help him do so and function in school and social situations at the same time. This seeking out of the solution that works for the individual child was the key to unlocking the door of resolution for the whole family.