Why Is My Child So Angry And Aggressive? Exploring Anger and Aggression And What We Can Do To Support Our Child Through These Big Emotions.
Children, like adults, experience a range of emotions, including anger. Anger is a normal and natural emotion, but it can become much more challenging when it becomes aggressive. While anger is an internal feeling, aggression refers to behaviours that are intended to cause harm or damage and can manifest in physical, verbal, or relational forms. We might experience our children hitting, kicking, biting, swearing at us or their siblings, breaking and throwing objects. These are hard to witness (and/or be the recipient of), but it is all occurring for a reason.
What is anger and why does it come up?
Anger is driven by the part of the brain that is responsible for instinctive impulsive behaviour.
As you become angry your body's muscles tense up. Inside your brain, neurotransmitter chemicals are released causing you to experience a burst of energy. The heart rate accelerates, blood pressure rises, and blood flows to your arms and legs to prepare for physical action. You become so focussed on the target of your anger that it’s hard to see anything else. In short, the ‘fight’ part of your stress response system becomes activated.
A threat has been perceived and our body gets us ready for action; our instinctive response is ensuring we keep ourselves safe. However, this can sometimes cause problems as this response system shuts off the prefrontal cortex (the thinking and reasoning part of our brain) meaning we can’t check on the reasonableness of our reaction.
In other words, our brains are wired in such a way as to influence us to act before we can properly consider the consequences of our actions.
Anger arises for a number of reasons;
To let us know that there is something in the way of what is important to us.
To prevent more difficult and intense emotions from rising to the surface. There is always another more powerful emotion driving anger, such as sadness, disappointment, jealousy, anxiety. Anger is the only emotion that doesn’t exist on its own. When these other more powerful emotions feel too intense or the environment doesn’t feel able to handle these other emotions, then anger can step in to stop the difficult feeling from taking over.
To give us energy to proactively get our needs met.
So, does this mean it’s ok for our children to be aggressive?
This is not an excuse for our children to cause harm and damage property. The angry emotion itself is absolutely normal and necessary, and it is very healthy to express. However, our children aren’t born knowing healthy ways to express emotions, especially these big overpowering emotions like anger.
They respond instinctively and it is one of our roles as a parent to help our child learn the more helpful ways to get these emotions out.
It's likely that many parents were raised feeling like we had to supress our anger because being angry was not acceptable. All of that suppression of big feelings that need to come out is actually more emotionally damaging than letting it out. Suppression can lead to anxiety, depression, stress-related illnesses, substance abuse or suicide. It’s crucial that we allow these emotions to come out. Anger is ok and expressing it is essential to healthy emotional wellbeing. When we start to view our child’s angry and aggressive outbursts through a lens of recognition that this is emotion that needs to come out, we cease trying to stop it, and instead we see a child needing help, so we ride the storm with them and show them the healthy ways to express.
How can we support our children to move from aggression to expression?
Anger has to find a way out. We can’t ask our children to calm down or sit still as their bodies are in distress. When our child has already got to the point of aggressive behaviour our role is to redirect where that aggression is going; “You are so angry right now, but I won’t let you bite me, you can bite this (necklace/toy etc) instead”, “you’re so angry and it needs to come out, but it’s not ok to hit your sister, here, hit this cushion as hard as you need to”.
Our children won’t immediately go to what you are redirecting them to in the moment, but you are laying down a limit and making it very clear what part of the behaviour is not acceptable and what they can do instead. Keep riding that storm with them while keeping yourself, your child and siblings safe. Once the storm subsides, and it will eventually, we connect back in with them; “that was really tough, it doesn’t feel good when big emotions take over in that way does it? It’s ok to get those emotions out, we just have to keep on practising letting them out in ways that don’t hurt anyone, and I’ll keep on helping you with it”.
What other ways can we support our children’s experience with anger?
Before the emotions get too big, we can help our children manage and express angry feelings by understanding the common trigger that sets off the outburst.
For example, if doing homework is always causing big angry emotions to arise, working out what they are finding difficult and helping them break it down into digestible steps is valuable.
We can provide healthy coping mechanisms by teaching our children various coping strategies to manage anger.
This wouldn’t happen during the storm, but helping them recognise there are ways to keep the thinking and reasoning part of our brain connected so that we don’t always react to these emotions with aggression is beneficial. For example we can show them deep breathing exercises, physical activities, mindfulness techniques, or explain about taking a break from whatever is becoming stressful to cool down. Here we are helping them identify what works best for them individually.
Take time to help our children work out what emotion is behind the anger.
Are they feeling sad about something that has happened at school? Are they feeling shameful about something they have done? Jealous that someone has something that they want? Frustrated because they feel like they’re not being heard? Addressing the emotion behind the anger will allow the real emotion to be heard, which can dissipate the anger attached to it.
Anger is a normal healthy emotion and aggression is an instinctual response. We can see the expression of anger as a natural and necessary part of being human and guide our children into healthy ways to let this emotion move through them. By recognising triggers, understanding the underlying causes, and equipping them with the necessary tools to acknowledge and work with their emotions, we can help children develop healthy ways of expressing themselves.
We, as parents and caregivers, can provide a nurturing environment where children feel supported in their emotional journey and can move from aggression or suppression into expression.
