When You Are So Angry with Your Child You Could Scream, or Worse

Three Steps to Greater Emotional Stability

When I was going through foster parent training, I nodded along to all of the sessions about how trauma impacts child development and behavior. Of course, kids who have experienced trauma have a harder time physically regulating themselves when they’re upset because of the way that the brain reacts to traumatic events–their emotional “platforms” are shakier than those of kids who haven’t had those hard experiences. Yes, kids who have experienced trauma are thus more likely to lash out in all kinds of ways and in different contexts. I had done so much training as a volunteer advocate in the legal system for foster kids and had read the books and talked to lots of foster parents in the years leading up to this moment, and I knew this stuff. I had soaked it all in, and I was ready. Or so I thought.

Now, a couple of years later, I’m a parent of a foster teen and a toddler (my biological child), and I also teach some more-or-less entitled college students. Despite knowing all of the things that provoke emotionally-motivated antisocial behaviors, I still find myself raging. I have a reputation for being “chill” and “calm,” and I’m not an angry person by nature. But when my kids push the right buttons, it’s like Mr. Hyde takes over from Dr. Jekyll: I get flushed, my heart rate spikes, and I marshall a half dozen cutting remarks and consequences to devastate my little opponents. Occasionally, I might storm out of a room and shut a door with a little extra oomph. Okay, slam the door. It isn’t a great look. I can only imagine how much worse it would be if I didn’t have the great support structures and resources that I do. 

As parents, we can’t control our kids. We can do our best to support, nurture, influence, guide, and lead, but ultimately, they make their own decisions. We all know this, perhaps especially if we parent kids with unique needs. It can be easy, though, in a difficult moment to forget that we do have a lot of power over something crucially important: our own responses. If we aren’t emotionally steady, we can’t expect to be able to help our kids stabilize. But remembering and practicing our power to regulate our own emotional storms can make all the difference in how we parent.

Before I get into the three steps, I want to emphasize that nothing I’m writing here is new. Most of these ideas are synthesized from things I’ve learned from the work of Bruce Perry, Karen Purvis, Dan Siegel, Tina Payne Bryson, Michaeleen Doucleff, and lots of other people who have done great academic research or investigative journalism looking at parenting and emotions. They’re also all things that have been corroborated by other parents. Although these steps are more likely reminders than revelations to the readers here, they’re offered in a spirit of encouragement that we can keep taking small steps toward growth. 

Step One: Don’t Add Fuel to the Fire.

If you are in a spot where your child is dysregulated and feel yourself getting emotionally unsteady, do your best to secure the situation so that everyone is safe, and then get out of there. It’s especially challenging to down-regulate your own strong feelings in a high energy situation, so if you can step into another room, go for a walk or do some other movement-based activity (see Siegel and Payne Bryson’s The Whole-Brain Child), or even just close your eyes, take some deep breaths, and picture yourself somewhere more calming (Doucleff has a great bit on this in Hunt, Gather, Parent), it will give your body and brain a chance to get out of fight, flight, or freeze mode so that you aren’t just reacting, but can act from a place of calm. If you have a prayer or meditation practice, this is a great time for it. 

If you can manage it, it can also be great to practice diffusion and redirection techniques. If you can use humor when confronted with an unsettled child, it can have an incredibly powerful deescalating effect on a tense situation. It also can backfire–practice and knowing yourself and the child(ren) in question is crucial to this approach’s success. For me, if I am too mad, the humor often ends up being mean, so I only use this technique when I am mildly annoyed—not when I’m furious. 

I have found that it is helpful to have a range of strategies for calming myself so that I can try to do things appropriate to the context. For example, if my toddler is screaming and not sleeping and it’s really starting to get to me, I will get into a child's pose or other relaxing yoga pose on her bedroom floor and practice breathing. I can’t do that at the grocery store, though I may still close my eyes and take a couple of breaths before intervening with a distraught child. I sometimes will also just not engage with a child if I’m afraid I might react in anger. I might say, “I’m not going to talk about that now,” and ignore the behavior that’s triggering a strong response in me while I collect myself.

Step Two: Call for Backup

Call a partner, family member, or friend for whatever support they can give you in the moment. The key is to try to ensure that anyone you ask for help will have a calming effect on you, as well as your child, if that’s relevant. And be specific with your ask. Will a phone call with a sympathetic listener help you to restabilize for whatever you need to do next? Can you get someone to watch the kid(s) while you go outside for a few minutes? 

If you have a spouse or partner parenting with you, it is great if you can get into a rhythm of noticing and helping to cover for each other when emotions are running high. My husband and I have had lots of conversations about what child behaviors trigger strong feelings in us and what the other person can do to help (for ex., give a hug, take over childcare while I take over dinner, do bedtime, make a joke, do NOT make a joke, etc.). We’ve gotten a lot better at tapping in or asking to tap out when we need that emotional break, and it’s helped both of us to stay more emotionally steady with the kids and with each other.

Step Three: Reflect and Practice

It is probably unfair to call this a step, because in reality, learning strategies for emotional regulation is more of an ongoing life project than a quick trick. 

For one thing, emotional disruptions can take a lot of forms, and they likely will change as kids grow. For example, while my eighteen-month-old has mostly stopped trying to stick her fork in the little vent above the oven (did you know that your oven door had a little vent? because I sure didn’t), she has started occasionally scratching and hitting me. It does not feel good.

So, the work of noticing things that trigger big feelings in you as a parent likely isn’t ever completely over. It might be helpful to have a therapist or friend periodically check in with you on this, or at least have someone who knows it’s something you’re working on and is willing to listen when you want to talk about it. 

Then, in the moments when you have some space to reflect, identify concrete things you can do to calm yourself when you’re upset, and practice them when you are calm. This will feel silly. Do it anyway. Identify a type of breathing that you want to do, and practice it so that the feeling of it is familiar. You might try a breath prayer or mantra. You could try Doucleff’s visualization exercise, imagining yourself in a place that calms you.

You might also work with your kids to set a protocol of sorts for when things get heated. You could designate a cool down spot in your home, or a word or phrase that signals to your children that you need a break. You can invite the child to come up with their own cool down spot and to use the phrase when they want to take a pause, too. Having some shared ownership of this strategy will hopefully promote buy-in. 

(Of course the child may very well follow you to your cool down spot and continue to be extremely provoking. If they do, I’d say, close your eyes, breathe, and try your best to ignore them while you take a minute to check in with yourself. If calming down is impossible with your kid there…maybe go lock yourself in the bathroom. And have a conversation again later when everyone’s calm about how you can make your system better.)

Rupture and Repair

As humans, we’re going to make mistakes along with our kids. But there is an opportunity in those mistakes, too: when we emotionally lose it and model inappropriate behavior, we can apologize, identify what we’ve done wrong, and ask for forgiveness and how we can make it better. As the psychologist Edward Tronik and many researchers and parents after him have found, the process of restoring a relationship after a break is crucial to developing secure attachment. Our growth in emotional stability may or may not directly lead to greater emotional stability in our kids. But exercising and focusing on our own power to calm ourselves has the double benefit of self-control and modeling the kinds of responses we’d like to see our kids imitate one day.

If you have additional strategies you use, or if you try any of these things out and have feedback, please leave a message! I’d love to hear from you.