Help Your Child Manage Anger

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.

Overscheduled Children

In an article called “The Overbooked Child” published in Psychology Today a few years ago, David Elkins described what has been happening to kids who are over-scheduled and pushed too hard by well meaning parents to be successful and involved in too many activities. As in all areas of pediatrics, there is wide variation in parenting styles.

However, I believe that given the high stress nature of our environment and society, children could really use more free time and a relaxed schedule. Parents can help even more by modeling the need for relaxation and non-goal oriented activity, like puttering around in the yard, going for a walk, spending time playing sports or wandering on the beach or in the woods.

If children grow up thinking it’s their job to be busy every minute of the day, this will surely take a toll on their health and wellbeing in the long run.

Let me know what you think about this topic by leaving a comment.

To read the original article on overscheduled kids, follow this link to the Psychology Today reprint called “Are We Pushing Our Kids Too Hard?”