How to handle an angry aggressive child

This is a more frequent question asked by many parents nowadays how to handle an angry child? 

More and more parents have been complaining regarding the angry behavior of children regardless of their ages, it has been increasing even in 2 or 3 years of kids.  have you ever gotten angry at your kids?  I am wondering about feeling angry. I know that we are not supposed to yell at our kids, but do you think it is fine to say you are making me so mad not, why not? I think authenticity is incredibly important, I think not saying I am mad when I am "or acting like I am not is like muting myself" and suppressing my feelings. That can not be an acceptable example for my kids,  feeling angry is just a human emotion that children need to witness as well Today  I am going to express about managing our adult tantrums whether our anger is justified, and what to do about it.

Here is my thinking on this.

What is anger?

First and foremost, we should understand that anger is a natural thing

that all of us are going to feel from time to time, and it all depends on the temperament and grown-up of a human being,

your body language is not with your words when you are angry. And it might be possible that you indeed struggle.

Anger is a natural feeling and Your feelings are justified. and bashing or slapping yourself up about it or feeling regretful about it definitely will not help. Despite this, we need to understand and find out the difference between your felling and your behavior.

If we feel angry, that is fine and justified. However, performing out our anger, expressing it on someone else, and vomiting whatever we have inside us when we're angry at our children, not okay. the Same thing happens with children as well,.We want to teach our children that it's adequate for them to be angry or unhappy or jealous. But for them beating, grabbing or screaming, and yelling are not suitable.

The other thing to apprehend about feelings is that we must have to be responsible for them. Other people don't make us furious. And we do not get angry at other people. We get angry with ourselves. There was an exterior stimulus for it, something produced our anger. But it is our own interpretation of that external situation that made us angry. However, the fact that we are feeling angry and that we get angry does not give us the license to blame or shame someone else behavior. You can disagree with your children's behavior, you can think that they need guidance or consequences, or a lot of teaching around what they have done, that it was not appropriate. despite the fact that they are even not responsible for your emotional, vigorous response. Therefore, no, we should try and shy away from telling our children that they made us furious or that we are mad at them. We need to start taking responsibility for our feelings and saying I am feeling outraged right now is very different from saying you're making me very angry. It might sound like just a semantical difference. Still, I think it is honestly quite an essential difference in how we are treating the other person and what we are putting on them versus what we are putting on ourselves.

Anger is a growth opportunity. Anger is the moment that we can step into being the peaceful person that we want to be. It is effortless Hurricanes. It is very easy on the yoga mat or in meditation or when you're on a retreat. It's very hard and very meaningful when we can rise above and become peaceful in a moment of being triggered. the time when our prefrontal cortex is offline and our reptilian brains are driving our body, by a reactive brain, that is the exact time we want to rise overhead. The moment that anger wants us to get really, really loud is the point where we should be quiet. It is in distancing ourselves from the anger and admitting that it is not proper to say I am furious. It is not that I am angry. We do not allow it to become us. We, in fact, differentiate from it and recognize, this is anger that is trying to control us. This is an outrage that is pushing to deliver me a message. So how about we allow ourselves to become the recipient of anger's message but not the messenger of anger. In other words, we allow anger to speak to us but not to us. When we permit anger to speak to us we listen, and we express, huh, why did anger come to visit just at that moment? What boundaries were being crossed? What story was I telling myself? How was I permitting myself to be treated in a manner that in fact, I do not want to be treated? How it is possible that I was disrespecting myself and passing over my own limits and boundaries? That's listening for anger and understanding and drawing important conclusions for the future.

So if you locate yourself in that very moment that anger has come to visit, you are super triggered, you are so angry you want to hurt someone, your children probably, and you want to hurt them badly, you want to yell at them. You want to tell them how bad they are. You want to cause them pain. You want to unleash your anger.

What can you do at that moment?
How can you calm yourself down?
How can you stop yourself from releasing that toxin?
That poison?
That vomit onto someone else?

Here are some ideas.

Control your emotion and Stay calm:

The first step is that we need to control our emotions and we have to stop ourselves somehow. And Dr. Laura Markham recognizes this as the first step in her Stop, Drop, and Breathe sequence. But the first step of stopping ourselves, we want to gag ourselves, we want to hold back our arms, we want to kind of be a limitation for ourselves.

My four-year-old daughter once said to me,

"I  wanted to hit however my skin did not allow me to do it and stopped me."

And it was such a great analogy of having your skin actually pull you back. She actually succeeded in self-regulating.

her emotions so that he was not unleashing them on her baby brother. Her skin was stopping her.

How can you help your skin stop you?  In that very moment, you can redirect your anger, and rather than saying words that are hurtful and toxic and that you can not take back later, how about you say something that does not make any sense whatsoever? Just yelling or making noises that express that energy without saying something hurtful.

How about you excuse yourself, you pull yourself back and you say, "I need a break."Or you can say, "I am extremely upset right now."I require you to go and settle down "Please move from here and play  until  am calm "I need a few minutes to myself, "and we will talk about this later."This isn't your fault but I can't handle this right now. "I need to calm down."I will see you soon. or If you have another grown-up at your home it could be an older child, you can ask for help. You can say, "I really need a break."Can you guys play together?"I need to go calm down."Try to inhibit yourself the way you would if you had guests over or you were being on camera if you were being watched by strangers in the street. Is this about suppressing your emotions? Not at all. It is about listening to them but not acting on them. You are allowed to feel angry. Remember, you're not allowed to unleash toxicity on other people, right? And I do, too. I do it the whole time. So let's give ourselves compassion for that because of course, there is always repair, and there's always apologizing.

1. Create a Calm-Down Plan.

Step number two is to wait for the feelings to pass. And this is very hard if you are a hurricane, Harville Hendrix talks about hurricanes and turtles. Hurricanes, when they're angry they blow really big and really loud and they sweep everybody up around them in that tantrum that they are having. Turtles retreat to their shells, and they actually close off and ignore and stonewall and gaslight and do all sorts of behavior that stop other people from allowing any kind of engagement for penetration into their emotions. So, if you are a turtle, this is a good phase for you. You want to retreat from the anger and you want to wait it out. But if you're a hurricane this is very challenging. This is the place where we actually do not act on our feelings. We don't say what we wanted to say. Instead, we wait. Now, what can you do during this incubation period? Well, you can express your anger in a healthy way, through art, journaling, through dance. Let it out definitely, just not on your children, hey? And not on yourself. Let it out by talking to a friend or a therapist, calling your spouse, and writing it down. Do something to let it out, but don't let it out on your children. Now if you're stuck with your children and you can't leave them alone because they're little then change up the atmosphere. Go watch a movie. Go on a walk, get outside, go upside down, literally changing perspective and changing atmosphere is going to genuinely help you to let your emotions move through you. Therefore you must realize that all emotions pass. All emotions are temporary. So the fact that it feels like you have to act on it now, that is just the urgency of that triggered state. But it's not true when you do not have to listen to it. You can say to yourself, yes, this is important, and no I would not let it go, however, I am only going to talk about it when I am calm. When I am calm I will be able to choose my words wisely, and I'll be so much more effective.

Sometimes we think that parenting is like dog training, that if your dog pees on your couch you immediately have to respond or they will never learn. You cannot sit the dog down for a conversation, two hours later when you are calm and say, "You comprehend that peeing over the couch indeed should be stopped. But with children, you can. It is really a wonderful thing. Furthermore, if you are angry when you respond, you are not going to respond effectively. Your children are going to get defensive, and scared, and their brains will shut down and they will go into survival mode and they will not hear you anyway. It is simply not a teachable moment. It is well worth the wait.

1. Develop Anger Management Skills:

finally, you get to express yourself. Number three is express. Express what was making you angry, but not saying I am so angry and you made me furious and it is your fault and you are not okay, but saying, "You know, I got really upset"when I saw this and this happens," and here's why, here's what I feel about it." It's about getting close and cuddling and feeling calm and having a bit of a laugh. It is about holding your child's goodness to light and saying, "I know that you are such a good kid, and I understand that you do  not represent any harm by this," but this did not feel me entirely correct."Can we have a dialogue about that?"Let's talk about it."And it's about listening to their side and understanding that we may have missed an entire perspective. In fact, by definition, we missed an entire perspective on what happened. So we want to express ourselves in a mindful way, through nonviolent communication and real connection, and at a time and place and in a way that feels good, close, and connected with our child. This  can be  the time to apologize as well because probably, if you got really triggered and angry, you made a violent face or you hurt your child or you said something that you do regret, and this is the time to take responsibility for your behavior,  by  your words "That was not the adequate way,  and I am sorry.""I am truly ashamed for losing my temperament  with you "and screaming  at you and I do not mean what I said."It was not good what I said."And I am going to work very hard to teach myself to calm down" when I am angry and to speak respectfully."That sense of pride is when you have managed to navigate a situation that used to trigger you, and today, for some reason, you managed to rally your resources and navigate it peacefully, that sense of pride is growth.

That is where we become really the peaceful people we want to be. The peaceful ninjas we are. And that is what our children deserve, too. They deserve to see a model of leadership that takes responsibility for emotional outbursts and for bad behavior that takes responsibility and it takes action in trying to make changes and indeed reform. So if we bring in remorse and we bring in reform and show our children we're taking that two-pronged approach to our anger problems, then I think that we're doing the very best that we can.

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Keep on loving us.