Your Angry Child

A Guide for Parents

Daniel L Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135416010
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Teoría, práctica y referencia médicas

Discover an important source of practical and understandable advice for parents of children with anger management issues! Your Angry Child: A Guide for Parents was created to provide parents of angry children and teenagers with an up-to-date understanding of the whys and hows of anger problems. You'll find specific, focused ways of helping angry children and managing the difficulties that anger causessome brand new, some time-tested. Written by a psychologist with over 30 years of experience treating troubled and severely behaviorally disordered youth and 20 years experience as a forensic psychologist, this book provides practical and understandable advice that parents can make use of immediately. This insightful book presents up-to-date case histories, current research, and practical, down-to-earth techniques that can help parents of children and adolescents with anger problems. Extraordinarily useful for parents, this book is also an ideal adjunct to counseling and psychotherapy and an essential reference for teachers, pediatricians and family practice physicians, students of psychology, corrections officers, and others who work with angry/violent youth.
The first chapters of Your Angry Child: A Guide for Parents provide a thoughtful introduction to child development concepts and the development of anger, examining how hostility and aggression impact the family and illustrating the effects of resistance and oppositional behavior. Next, the book focuses specifically on practical aspects of anger management, including:

• attachment issues
• antisocial behavior
• anger's impact on temperament, development, moral reasoning, and the thinking process in general
• indicators of anger problems, such as temper tantrums, cruelty to animals, and fire setting
• the effect of the media on violent tendencies in children
• ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder, and other conduct disorders
• mood disorders, including suicidal feelings and depression
• links between anger and substance abuse
• problem solving
• the power of strong values and positive role models for angry youth
• and much more!

With chapters specifically devoted to the anger problems of children and pre-teenagers as well as advice directed toward parents of angry adolescents, Your Angry Child: A Guide for Parents is an ideal resource for helping professionals and the parents who come to them in varying degrees of desperation. Make this vital book a part of your therapeutic arsenal today!

Chapter 1

The Impact of Anger

Aggression and Hostility in Today’s Society

From what is heard on radio and seen on television or even in a casual look at the newspapers, it seems that hostility and aggression are perhaps the most common forms of interaction between people in today’s society. We encounter stories of assault, random aggression, and other attacks on persons daily. It appears as if we live in a world that is increasingly terrifying and out of control. Through the media, we learn of youth that, after patterns of previously unseen “cues” or “warnings,” commit some horrifically violent act. Other youth, for no apparent reason, seemingly erupt and seriously injure or kill someone. Even many mental health and social service professionals publicly report that these violent, antisocial youth are beyond any help and can only be removed from the community. We see their images, hear their names, and shudder at what has happened.

We fear that our own children might become victims of a violent act. Or, even more frightening, we fear that they may act in some violent manner and hurt others. We look across our dining room table and there sits an angry, defiant preteenager or teenager and we worry about what is or could be happening. We remember when we could hold them in just one arm, and remember how they used to love to ride atop our shoulders. We recall all those things and wonder, How did it get to this point? Or more urgently, What can we do? According to the U.S. Department of Justice (Snyder and Sickmund, 1999), one out of every 290 youth between the ages of ten and seventeen was arrested for a violent crime. Although there may be periodic drops, youth aggression remains at a historically high and unacceptable level in our communities. In response, many locales and states have become far more restrictive when dealing with these youth. Aggressive and antisocial youth are now sent to juvenile correctional facilities at an earlier age and often for much longer periods of time. A substantial number of youth are now serving time in adult correctional facilities. Further, many states have lowered the age at which a juvenile may be transferred to the jurisdiction of the adult courts and subsequently sent to an adult correctional facility. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, in 2000 there were nearly 10,000 juveniles in adult prisons or jails. According to trends in correctional populations, there may eventually be more youth incarcerated in adult facilities than in juvenile correctional institutions.

Although crime statistics suggest a recent drop in the number of violent crimes reported, this is a misleading statistic. Many youthful perpetrators of violent crimes who are now either incarcerated in adult or juvenile correctional facilities will someday be discharged. Without proper interventions throughout incarceration, when they do leave they may be as violent and most likely more so than when they entered the system.

The Effect of Aggression and Hostility on the Family

As frightening as the crime statistics are, for most of us they remain in the abstract. What matters most, of course, is what happens in our cities, in our neighborhoods, and in our families. In our homes, we are no longer insulated from the effect of hostility and aggression. Family life can become almost engulfed by an angry and difficult child. Much is said about the effect of the family upon the youth, but it works both ways. The angry and difficult child can have a substantial and negative impact upon the rest of the family. Then, in response, members of the family rejoin back in an angry way and the youth becomes even more angry and oppositional. The cycle repeats over and over until one side (generally the parent) becomes exhausted and gives in.

In other situations, circumstances may become explosive to the extent that others outside of the family must intervene. This cycle will repeat until something stops it. That something can be positive or negative. If positive, such as learning how to solve problems without fighting, the family can regroup and learn from what happened in a manner to prevent or lessen the possibility of the problem happening again. If the intervention is negative, such as an arrest, then matters can become even worse. When those negative consequences do happen, families look for something or someone to blame. Often, parents blame themselves. The mental health field has had a long history of looking for causes or blames that masquerade as exploitations. This is changing, but it is probably not soon or well-known enough to allow us to build upon what is right rather than blame what is wrong in families.

There was a time when a person’s unconscious mind was blamed for his or her negative actions. It was thought that much of what a person did was the result of his or her unconscious reactions to what happened in early childhood. He or she wasn’t responsible for what he or she did. After all, the true cause of behavior happened years ago. How could the person be held accountable for actions that really resulted from the actions, years ago, of his or her parents?

Thankfully, the mental health field doesn’t think that way anymore. Clinicians know that people are responsible for their choices and their actions, including the youth.

There was another time, maybe even darker, when the problems of society were blamed upon “bad seeds,” or genetically inferior humans. Not only did this lead to horrific examples of genocide in Europe and sterilization of minorities in the United States, it also formed (and probably still contributes to) prejudice and discrimination. Although no rational behavioral scientist disagrees today that genetics play an important role (e.g., studies of the behaviors of twins reared miles apart who act in almost identical fashion), we recognize that it is the interaction between a person’s genes and his or her environment that determines how that person will act. This “interactive” model has been the standard, but a rise in genetic research raises again the possibility that valuable scientific findings will be misunderstood or deliberately misinterpreted by those who wish to justify and further their own prejudices.

Why are kids so angry and why do some become violent? There is no single answer to such a complex question. Anger is an emotion that can have very positive or negative consequences. Often, the nature of the consequence depends upon how anger is expressed. For example, positive anger can lead to social change. In the middle of the twentieth century, African Americans used their anger, a result of years of oppression, to dramatically change society. We have all benefited from that change. Without that anger, we would have lost much in our society. At an individual level, a person can be angry at a situation or circumstance and with constructive expression of that anger make a meaningful change. Films such as Norma Rae (1979) or Erin Brockovich (2000) tell the heroic struggles of individuals who used their anger to make changes in their lives and in the lives of others. At a not so dramatic level, we can learn to channel and redirect our anger into all sorts of positive efforts. Sports, for example, can be a means by which a young person can funnel his or her aggression and anger and learn habits of self-control and self-confidence.

Resistance and Oppositional Behavior

Responses to anger are not always direct. Indirect expressions can also be both positive and negative. Anger can be internalized and result in a number of health problems such as heart disease, high blood pressure, and depression. Anger can show itself in negativism and defiance. It can also be indirectly expressed in a positive way. Take for example the writings of Henry David Thoreau, whose treatise on civil disobedience led to the nonviolent revolutions of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. In these circumstances, anger at injustice and oppression resulted in active but nonviolent resistance that eventually overcame the forces of repression and injustice in society.

All of this philosophy does little good when your child throws a major temper tantrum at the grocery store. Rather than dwell on the meaning of your child’s screams, you really just want the tantrum to stop. Later on, you can see if that particular explosion over the lack of a favorite item at that store has much to do with the ultimate meaning of life. But for now you think, Could we please just get this kid to calm down?

Chapter 2

The Workings of Anger

Temperament and Anger

Lucifer

Karen and Jim had the perfect child. Karen’s pregnancy and the delivery went smoothly. Little Betsy wasn’t really perfect, but she was so good that it seemed as if she had slept through the night very quickly and always woke with a warm and loving smile. Why, little Betsy was such an ideal infant that she not only was asked to pose for all sorts of infant modeling jobs, she toilet trained herself while helping the photographer set the camera angles. Or so it seemed. Parenthood was such a joy to Karen and Jim that they just couldn’t stop at one baby. Since, after all, they had the perfect baby, why not have another? When one child is this good, two can only be better. (Experienced parents of more than one child, please hold your comments until the end of this introduction.)

So, Karen and Jim produced another child, certain that any other baby was destined to live forever in the shadows of their progeny. Just as before, Karen sailed through her pregnancy. The delivery went so easily that Karen later remarked that she could have fit it in between her aerobic lessons and mowing the yard. It was only later that the horrible truth fell upon them: theirs was not the pretender to the throne of the perfect child. Not even close. Instead, it was clear that they had brought into their family the “Infant from Hades.” Never was there a fussier child. Never was there a child who could instinctively know as well the very moment either one of the parents had fallen asleep and would then let loose with a demonic cry that not only shook the parents from their beds but the neighbors as well. This child never slept at regular times. Night would become evening, and just when Karen and Jim adjusted to that, young Lucifer would decide to become an early riser. Not only did Lucifer not breast-feed, his approach to formula was more like a grumpy gourmet who never found a meal worth eating. But no gourmet was as adept at projectile vomiting as young Lucifer, who rivaled Davy Crockett in aim and accuracy. And these were his good days!

In between nearly hourly diaper changes, constant crying, and dodging of partially digested food, Karen and Jim wondered how they could have so very different children. Weren’t their genes the same as before? Didn’t they act the same way toward lovely little Betsy as they did toward young Lucifer? “How could these two children be so very different?” they wondered aloud while driving to the doctor’s office for Jim’s vasectomy.

The story of poor Jim and Karen most likely resonates with many people. Parents often struggle with trying to understand how it is that one child born to the same family can be so very different from a sibling. Certain differences can be understood, but it can be quite puzzling when the differences are great. Parents often blame themselves (or accept the blame of others) for the difficult child. They are given remedy after remedy for the uncooperative infant. They dive into self-help books and pray that some television talk show has a child-development expert who can answer the question once and for all, someone who can simply tell them what to do.

What did they do to deserve this fate? Often, the answer is nothing. Children are not born the same. Nor, as once believed, are they born as “blank slates” ready to be molded and shaped by the behaviors of their parents. Now we understand that children come “prewired emotionally” into this world. Some are born with an easy, agreeable temperament, and others are just the opposite. They are difficult, challenging, and sometimes exhausting. This is not to say that the actions of the parents have nothing to do with the temperament of a child— far from it. In fact, the emotions of the child affect the parents, who then respond back to the child, who then responds to the response, and so forth. One clearly influences the other. There is no real way to ever truly separate fully the influences of nature and nurture.

However, there really are differences in children in their basic emotional state or temperament. Temperament is defined as the in-born ways or repertoire of traits with which a child is equipped to deal with his or her environment. Although we are born with these basic traits and there is some continuity throughout life, temperament can be modified throughout the child’s development. This is especially the case with interactions, or the lack of them, with the primary caregiver early in the child’s life.

Child-development research provides three basic categories of temperament (understanding of course that no one child is a “clean fit” in just one category): easy, difficult, and slow to warm up. Differences between these types are clearly distinguishable from birth. The easy child is generally happy, flexible, and regular in his or her behavior. He or she gets along well with nearly everyone and presents few problems to parents and, later on, to other adults (e.g., teachers). The difficult child is starkly the opposite. As an infant and later on as a young child and adolescent, he or she can be intense, demanding, inflexible, and very moody. The third group, slow to warm up, does not respond very well to changes in environment, but his or her reactions are not intense. The child generally has a low activity level and tends to withdraw from new situations and people.

Does that mean that once children are born, that’s it? Nothing can change? No, of course not. Parents can and should work with their children’s temperament. Although it will most likely be the case that parents can’t make major changes, a lot can be done. This knowledge is so very important because children who are chronically oppositional and defiant often have problems regulating or managing their moods. They can be taught to manage how they feel, even if they can’t change how they feel. For example, children can be taught to express their frustration in ways that aren’t so destructive. This can and ideally does begin early. If children are “difficult,” parents need to work hard at being consistent in discipline. Although it can be hard at times, when it is time to discipline, parents should try to be objective and nonemotional with difficult children. As we will see later in this book, an excellent skill for parents of oppositional children to learn is to not get caught in power-and-control struggles. Conversely, with slow-to-warm-up children, parents need to remember to allow them to move at their own pace; gentle encouragement is best.

Sometimes, parents and teachers can change the environment of the children to make it so that they do the best they can. Children who are difficult in temperament also have a very difficult time coping with environments that change frequently and are unstructured. Thus, parents of difficult children would want to educate teachers to make sure that classrooms are structured in a manner that is consistent and fair. This is not to say that easy children are without problems. Sometimes easy children feel the need to please others and to reduce conflict. As adults, we know that this is not always possible. But children, with their limited range of experience and tendency to internalize, will often blame themselves when they fail to solve conflict between two difficult peers.

Understanding temperament is important for parents because it forms the developmental basis for our emotions. One of the most basic and perhaps essential emotions of human beings is anger. We all know what anger is. We have felt when we’re angry, and when others are angry with us. Anger is a basic and necessary human emotion that is completely healthy and usually normal. It is not so much the anger that causes problems. It is, rather, what we do when angry that can result in difficulties. When anger is expressed in a healthy way, it can lead to positive change and psychological growth. Sometimes, it can just be a fleeting annoyance in our lives. Other times, it can be a destructive rage. It is when anger becomes constant or gets out of control that relationships and quality of life suffer.

Children are not born knowing how to handle their anger. They learn through trial and error, through teaching, and, most important, by observing others. Many parents are proud to see their children act the same way that they do. However, when they haven’t learned to handle their anger, parents wish their children could do better than they did.

Thinking and Anger

Children are born with different temperaments, and they respond differently to situations. Some children simply become angry much easier than others. The child with the difficult temperament is the child who most likely has a shorter fuse. The child who is slow to warm up will be just as likely to be slow to anger. In much the same fashion, the easy child may not perceive the circumstance or situation in a way likely to cause anger.

In each case, what seems to be most important is not so much whether the child becomes angry but what the child does with that anger. Anger and aggression are not the same thing. Anger is a feeling, and aggression is a behavior. Sometimes children act in an aggressive way because they are angry. In fact, aggression may be the very first way that they learn how to respond to their anger. Aggression is an instinctive and natural way to respond. But of course that doesn’t mean aggression is the only way to respond. There are many other ways, some healthy, some not.

It is even possible for some individuals to act in a very aggressive way and not feel the least bit of anger. A good illustration of non-emotional aggression would be the athlete who channels aggression into superior performance. Because of this believed link between aggression and anger, parents can confuse them and teach their children to not respond at all to perfectly justifiable feelings ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• About The Author
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Impact of Anger
• Chapter 2. The Workings of Anger
• Chapter 3. Influences on Anger
• Chapter 4. Responses to Anger
• Chapter 5. Anger and Emotional Problems
• Chapter 6. Anger in Children and Preteens
• Chapter 7. Anger in Teenagers
• Chapter 8. Building on the Positive
• Bibliography
• Index