Understanding Anger

Anger is a learned response – children watch very closely at the way parents handle anger. In addition, anger usually masks other emotions, which can further complicate how a child may interpret witnessing anger.

It’s okay to become angry. Anger is an inevitable emotion, and must be expressed (hopefully in healthy ways), otherwise the emotion will build-up and eventually be expressed in aggressive or passive-aggressive ways. New scientific information on brain development provides parents with a special opportunity to understand how anger is processed in the brain and how to teach children to understand and manage anger in healthy ways.

Scientists have recently found using brain scans of live brains during highly emotional times, like when expressing anger, that there are amazing new insights into what’s happening in a child’s head during an angry exchange. Children can be taught at a very early age what’s happening inside them when they get angry, how to understand it and manage it more effectively.

Repeated exposure to anger as a child has long-term impact. Most chronically angry adults were exposed to excessive amounts of destructive anger in their childhoods. Role-modeling how to express anger in healthy ways is very important for parents. A child’s memory bank and the interpretations of those memories will be full of information about how the adults closest to them handle anger.

It’s important for parents to learn to remain calm and find additional healthy ways to express anger.