Every child gets frustrated or angry when they are tired or hungry or don’t get their way. However, many adoptive or foster parents and kinship caregivers worry that their kids have something *more* going on. They feel overwhelmed by what to do and how to help their child. When a child is raging, struggling with physical outbursts, or seems to operate in a cloud of anger all the time, it’s challenging to feel a warm connection and be present with them. However, parents and caregivers must maintain a connection with their children when they are struggling with *more-than-typical* anger to help them learn new, healthier ways to express anger.

Understanding the Difference Between Anger & an Anger Problem

Kids impacted by trauma or loss typically need many repetitions to learn healthy management of their emotions. They’ve usually had many repetitive experiences where they could not (or learned not to) trust the adults around them to help them navigate their big feelings. The only way they can learn healthy management of their emotions is to feel safe and keep feeling safe.

Parents and caregivers must allow space for typical expressions of anger and normalize that anger is a valid human emotion we all experience. However, it’s also crucial to determine if this child is struggling more than is developmentally or typically appropriate.

What is the impact?

  • Does this child’s anger result in violence, harm, or fear in others?
  • Are there outbursts that negatively impact others at home or school?
  • Does their response ramp up quickly and with little warning?

What is the frequency or duration?

  • Are this child’s angry actions or reactions occurring more often?
  • Do these events last longer than they used to?
  • Is their response bigger than the event warrants?

Don’t dismiss your gut feeling!

When you are raising a child impacted by trauma, loss, or prenatal substance exposure, learn to trust your gut about this child’s behaviors. You know their challenges, and you’ve learned how trauma plays out in children. Pay attention to the warning signs you might be sensing.

Understanding Prenatal Exposure to Alcohol and Drugs

Understanding the Steps to Manage Typical Feelings of Anger

It may help you to do some self-work around your history of anger management, including how your family of origin handled anger. Your brain and body have developed coping skills from those experiences, and you will serve yourself and your child well to approach this issue from a point of wholeness.

Acknowledge to yourself that teaching anger management to your kids is hard work! Managing your triggers, modeling how to identify and manage their triggers, and understanding typical anger versus “an anger problem” is all exhausting. So, give yourself grace for the learning curve and include nourishing self-care into your regular household rhythms.

These steps can help you manage the natural feelings of anger that all humans experience. As frustrating as it might be to read, understand that these steps must be repeated in dozens (nay, hundreds!) of different ways across the day. Re-wiring a child’s brain for safe, healthy interactions is not for the faint of heart!

1. Name the experience with just a few words.

It’s helpful to narrate what your child is feeling by labeling their emotions. Keep it short and sweet, and match your facial expression to what you observe. For example, “Yes. So mad.” Or “I know, bud. So frustrated!”

2. Co-regulate back to calm.

Try various ways to help the child return to a calm state. You might try deep breathing together, walking it off, or use a mantra like, “Let’s stop and think,” or “Deep breaths to calm down.”

3. Offer a re-do and a repair.

Now, give this child a chance to try a different response after an angry outburst. You can try a short, light-hearted cue like, “Wanna try that one again?” to signal their brain to change their reaction. You may also suggest that they count to three and then try again.

It’s also crucial that your child or young person learns how to repair the connection between you when they’ve broken it. For example, if the child shouts something unkind in anger, let them know that you realize they were venting. But also be clear you would like to hear them express what they need in a kinder, more respectful way.

4. Practice playfully.

Use your everyday parenting experiences as opportunities to practice all these steps together. Naturally occurring activities like riding bikes, reading books, and discussing your day can be micro-moments of rehearsing regulation, repair, and connection with your child.

Stock your family library with books and media featuring social-emotional learning and rich characters who tackle and overcome hard stuff. When you play together, role-play everyday family interactions. Build these skills right into the fabric of your family’s daily life.

5. Prioritize physical activity!

Whether you perceive your child to have an “anger problem” or are just figuring out healthy expressions of typical anger, getting them physically active is crucial. Your child’s sensory system needs that outlet of energy and the input of movement to handle all the big emotions they feel throughout the day.

6. Pay attention to the environment.

Many kids impacted by trauma, prenatal substance exposure, or neurodiversity are very sensitive to their environment. Take regular inventory of whether they are hungry, thirsty, overtired, or bored. Also, they may hate the feel of the tags on their tees but aren’t quite sure why they feel so uncomfortable in their clothes. Narrating and labeling these types of experiences with them helps to reduce the external stressors they are trying to navigate.

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Maintaining Connection with a Kid with Big Angry Feelings

It can be challenging to navigate regular expressions of anger with our kids. When you are raising a child with significant anger issues, or what many may label as “an angry kid,” it isn’t just challenging. It’s overwhelming, scary, and exhausting.

Most of us want to run the other way when a child has prolonged, frequent, or intense expressions of anger. So, in addition to teaching the previous steps for managing typical feelings of anger, what can you do for a child with serious anger struggles? How can you maintain a connection to make them feel safe and understand that you are with them?

Practice self-compassion.

It’s healthy to acknowledge that this feels hard because it is hard. While you know you are a safe person they can trust, they are still learning that in their hearts and minds.

Acknowledging that your child may have much to be angry about can also be helpful. Children who experience loss, neglect, abuse, prenatal substance exposure, and other traumas likely have this anger stored somewhere inside them, and it’s leaking out in ugly ways. Validate their anger as appropriate and acknowledge that you may have some anger about it, too.

Practice P.A.C.E.

P.A.C.E. is a de-escalation tool developed by Dr. Daniel Hughes to help kids form positive connections with their primary caregivers. The goal is to build a secure attachment that provides safety for a child to explore, process, and resolve their past trauma.

When you can approach your child’s escalations or outbursts from a place of trust between you and sharing your regulation, they can feel free to learn these skills.

Playful

As our guest expert said, “So many things can be diffused with a little bit of playfulness.” However, knowing how and when to inject playfulness into escalating anger takes practice and a firm grasp of self-regulation.

You can often preventatively approach a rising tide of your child’s emotions with light-hearted playful redirections. In these times, you may be able to shorten or ward off the outbursts that drain you all. For example, “Whoa buddy! Should we sing the toothbrush song to help us finish this job?”

Acceptance

Giving our kids labels for the emotions they are experiencing helps them learn how to handle their big emotions. There’s tremendous power in naming what’s going on inside their brains or bodies. In those moments of escalating emotions, accepting their feelings as valid and real can help normalize for your child that all humans sometimes feel mad, angry, or frustrated.

Acceptance can be a simple statement like, “I know. You feel angry. I get it.”

Curious

Accepting your child’s feelings and extending into curiosity can be a powerful tool. When your child feels safe asking (with you) where those feelings come from, you are empowering them to become more self-aware. Giving our kids space to explore what’s happening inside them equips them to choose how to express those emotions.

For example, when you say, “I wonder what’s going on inside you right now?” or, “What do you think that was all about?” without judgment, it can open doors to their self-exploration.

Empathy

Feeling your child’s emotions with them offers them a safe space that validates their feelings. However, remember that feeling all your child’s feelings with them can be too much. As the parent of a child impacted by trauma, you are juggling a lot. You might be raising multiple kids, navigating your own emotional challenges, and trying to truck through therapy, work, school, and cleaning the bathrooms.

Be kind and gentle with yourself when you are overwhelmed in these moments! Try to circle back through the acceptance stage to help you overcome the moment of overwhelm. After you take a well-deserved break for some self-care, you can choose another time to feel all the feelings with this child!

Re-Building the Foundation

Normalizing the feelings of anger and teaching your child how to manage it in healthy, productive ways may take many repetitions and concentrated efforts to re-wire their previous responses. Pairing those repetitions with safety, trust, and connection gives them a new foundation to handle frustrations or challenges without harming themselves or others.

Our kids can feel shame and guilt about their anger. When we help them understand the wide range of human emotions and how to express them safely, including anger, we offer them security and life skills that counter the shame and help them become confident adults.

Image Credits: Pavel Danilyuk; Andrea Piacquadio; SAULO LEITE