We have all been angry parents at some point. As parents of young children, we deal with a lot of strong emotions regularly. The Pandemic has exacerbated our negative emotions disproportionately. Whether you are a working parent or stay at home, you may have noticed how our tempers fly high much more easily. In my previous post, Positive Discipline has some wonderful tools that can be useful. Recently Sumbul and I did an IG live session on our Instagram page where we discussed this in light of Positive discipline guidelines.
I became a certified Positive Discipline Parenting Educator in November. While I have been thinking about making a six-week program on Teaching Parenting the Positive Discipline way, I knew this topic needs to be discussed more, with a focus on tools.
Let’s break down the anger part
In this post, I will outline:
- How your childhood experience shapes your response
- The belief behind the behavior
- Brain in the palm of your hand
- Dealing with the emotion
- The strategy for problem solving
How dealing with anger shapes us
Growing up in Pakistan in the 90’s, I believe a lot of us shared the experience of being yelled at, slapped or told that we need to just stop being angry. While each generation may have preformed ways of dealing with negative emotions, we have to put the cultural aspect aside and really ask ourselves, what is the goal of this kind of reaction?
When we experience anger, we are reacting to a conflict between what is happening and what ‘should’ be happening. This conflict creates anger. It tells us that we are not in a predictable environment so we demand some explanation.
When the grown up responds in a harsh tone or says things like, ‘what is wrong with you?’, it further makes the child believe that being angry is not normal/acceptable and they feel bad for experiencing an emotion that is very natural. Further, they learn that when they become older themselves, they should also react in the same way because that is being modeled to them.
Our goal as parents is to raise children who are not afraid of their emotions. They should have the tools to deal with them instead of feeling powerless when they experience them. Otherwise they spend their lives believing that they are bad, which leads to all kinds of other negative outcomes. It also makes it much harder to change that belief.
They start believing that people will stop loving me if I got angry.
What happens when we become angry
Most of us, including me, have had the experience of getting angry at something the child did and then reacting right away in a harsh manner. It is important to know that in the moment, if we are not dealing with the feeling of anger, we will not be able to correct behavior effectively. That means the situation will repeat itself because we cannot get through to someone while they are angry.
hence it is important to know how our brain works when we are angry and why we act this way.
Brain in the Palm of your hand
Dr. Dan Siegel has a wonderful book in which he talks about what happens to our brain when we get angry.
To understand what happens when we are angry, consider the following two images in which the brainstem is represented by the inside of the palm of your hand, the hipoocampus is your thumb when you fold it inside, and the rest of the fingers represent the Frontal cortex.
When you feel threatened in a state of anger, the frontal cortex responsible for thinking and processing the experience constructively, becomes disengaged. All you are left with is the primitive part ofthe brain that senses feeling unsafe and hence leaves you with only three options: flight, fight or freeze.
Unless you can re-engage the cortex, you cannot come to a reasonable solution to the threat.
Further, if you see someone in a state of anger and you talk back, you will ikely mirror their response thanks to our mirror neurons. Hence you can imagine a shouting match ensue. We all know how useful those are, thanks to Facebook.
How to deal with the feeling
Once you identify that you have a ‘flipped lid’, the ext step is to find a way to cool down.
There are many strategies for that. I will briefly mention a few here.
For children younger than 3:
Since children at this age are too young to follow multi-step commands, the easiest way is to instruct them to do something simple such as:
- Take deep breaths through the nose (asking them to smell the flowers) and then out through the mouth. Do it with them for 5 times or more.
- Count to ten. You can either count forward with them (1 to 10 ) or backward (10 to 1). Backward counting needs them to concentrate more so they will be able to disengage quciker.
- Do five jumping jacks
- Drink a glass of water
- Ask them if they need a hug. Physical contact releases oxytocin and develops more emotional bonds.
For older children:
Older children have a chance to do something more creative. One very useful strategy is to talk about creating a positive timeout zone before the incient happens.
Timeouts have a negative reputation but again the intention here is what matters.
The goal of a positive timeout space is to go to a place that helps them bring back a sense of safety and familiarity. If you want me to explain it in a separate post , I would be happy to do so. Please comment below if you agree.
Once they are there, they can decide what they want to do to calm down. Some examples can be: read a book, color or draw, paint, listen to music or audiobook, write in a journal, cuddle with stuffed toys.
Dealing with the problem: The 3 R’s and 1 H
After they have had a chance to cool off, it is important now to discuss the incident that triggered the strong emotions. The aim is to solve the problem in a constructive manner so it does not lead to the same situation.
The goal here is to involve the kids in the process of problem solving. The solution they come up with has to be:
- Related to the problem
- Respectful
- Reasonable
- Helpful to avoid such a situation
Patience to improvise
I wish I could say that this works 100% of the time like I imagine. But every time I learn something new. While this strategy is useful, you may find that some of the things will not work as well as others. The idea is to have a mathod of dealing with the emotion to help cool off. Unless we get the frontal cortex (our chief executive officer) back online, nothing useful or productive can come out of confronting the situation in the heat of the emotion.
What is the strategy that you like the most? Do you want to larn about setting up a positive timeout space? Comment below and I will see what I can do.
Thanks.