How Can Anger Management in Children Be Helped With Counseling?

What are your evenings at home characterized by? Are you exhausted from the anticipation of your child having another bad day at school? Have you tried positive reinforcement, pep talks, consequences, and times out with no luck? Do explosive emotions, angry outbursts, meltdowns, meanness, tantrums, and aggressive behavior characterize the life of your child?

The Need for Anger Management in Children

These scenarios might lead parents to seek out the help of a counselor for their child and family. Honestly, even as adults, anger can sometimes get the best of us. Anger can quickly overwhelm us and cause destructive patterns of emotional response.

The interesting thing about anger is that it is often a secondary emotion, meaning that there are likely other primary feelings that are hiding underneath the display of anger that need to be identified to bring change to the cycle of negative emotions and behavior.

Counseling for anger management and other destructive emotional behavior patterns in children will often begin with psychoeducation. Simply put, initial counseling sessions are used to educate the client about a wide array of emotions. For children, this must be done in an environment where they feel safe and seen. Parents need to find a therapist that they feel comfortable with and one that can build relationally with their child.

Approaches to Anger Management in Children

Once care is established, you can say, “Let the games begin.” There are many games and activities available to help children begin to learn more about what and why they are feeling so much anger and outrage. Approaching therapy this way with children will allow them to avoid feeling like therapy is punitive.

Therapy will allow children who are struggling with big emotions to safely explore all feelings. Over time, children will be able to identify not only when they are angry. Some of the more common hidden feelings under the anger are fear, embarrassment, loneliness, hurt/sadness, and feeling overwhelmed.

Uncovering these hidden feelings is powerful for anyone working through issues with anger. Some resources that can be helpful during the psychoeducational portion of therapy are feeling charts, anger thermometers, Mr. Potato Head, feeling puppets, scenario-based games, and role playing, and puppets, to name a few.

Following psychoeducation, therapy will move into learning a technique often referred to as “name it to tame it.” The principle of this is much like it sounds. If anger, or any other undesired emotion, comes up, children who learn to identify that feeling and say it aloud to someone will begin to have the ability to tame the feeling.

The acknowledgment brings light to the feeling, and as a result, the feeling begins to lose some of its power. Kept trapped inside, the feeling will rage and grow until it explodes out.

Involving parents in therapy will increase the benefits of a skill like name it to tame it. When parents provide a safe place for their children to name their feelings, they can be a part of the taming process. Over time, this process will help children gain confidence in their ability to tame these big emotions rather than giving in to them.

Identifying Anger

Learning to identify and name feelings lays a foundation for children to be able to recognize what triggers big feelings and emotional responses. Feelings are the easiest thing to identify in an emotional cycle. Using the psychoeducational skills learned early on in therapy helps to identify more specific feelings.

“Name it to tame it” helps children establish some control over the feeling. What comes next is teaching coping skills for when destructive and explosive feelings emerge. Coping skills are where children will gain the most control over their feelings and how they can learn to back out of a feeling and not have the explosive emotions, angry outbursts, meltdowns, meanness, tantrums, aggressive behavior, etc. that brought them into therapy in the first place.

There is a wide variety of coping skills and strategies that can be implemented in the heat of an emotional moment. Many of these coping skills and strategies are easy for children to learn, can be practiced anywhere, and give an additional level of control back to the child.

Developing Coping Skills

Once clients are skilled at identifying feelings and/or triggers, they can work to put coping skills into practice in order to avoid a complete meltdown. The age of the client and the severity of the emotion will often dictate what coping strategies will work best.

For situations when anger is present, but in a milder form, such as annoyance or frustration, some useful coping strategies include playing some favorite music, moving away from the trigger, getting some fresh air, journaling, or engaging in an expressive hobby such as art or building manipulatives.

When things get heated and elevated to anger, one can squeeze a stress ball, take a shower (if possible), get a drink of water, do calisthenic exercises, do some mindfulness breathing, or use imaginative imagery to calm emotions.

If the situation reaches the point of explosive rage, one can try a drastic temperature change like handling a warm or cold pack, practice grounding techniques learned in therapy, do isometric exercises, and practice positive self-talk. At each degree of emotion, therapy will work to help children know how and when to ask for help.

Digging Deeper

As therapy continues, the goal will be to get clients to a place where they can begin to do deeper work through cognitive behavioral therapy. This approach takes things to the next level. The goal during this phase of counseling would be to begin to identify the thoughts that are coming before a feeling is even felt.

This is easier said than done for both children and adults alike. However, with the skills learned previously, steps have already been taken for the client to be able to go back into thoughts that cause feelings before a reaction happens.

This stage in counseling is crucial to making lasting changes in the life of the child who is in therapy and the family system. Once a child can identify their emotions and is practicing coping strategies, they can then begin the work of uncovering the thoughts that cause the emotional response.

These thoughts will begin to uncover insecurities, core beliefs, unmet desires, and even negative interpretations. The level of understanding that can be gained at this stage will depend on a few factors, including age and cognitive development. However, even at its simplest level, this technique can positively affect one’s level of emotional intelligence.

Achieving emotional maturity at an early age can set an individual up to be able to manage changes that come in adolescence and into young adulthood, both in themselves and others. Some of the benefits of emotional maturity include self-awareness, empathy for others, strong interpersonal relationships, resilience, and a healthy self-image.

Therapy for children and adolescents can set individuals up with tools that will continue through all other stages of life. Having the life skill of self-awareness can lead to a life of healthy relationships with others.

Next Steps for Anger Management in Children

Anger management is a dynamic issue with many layers to uncover. If you are a parent and you see some destructive emotional response patterns in your child, and you are considering finding a counselor for them, we at Texas Christian Counseling would love to help.

Therapy can help peel the layers, increase self-awareness, teach a variety of coping strategies, and build cognitive awareness, leaving you with a more emotionally healthy child. In the context of the family, making positive changes with one member will, in return, change the system. You do not have to wait until you are at your wits’ end. You can give your child and family the benefits of emotional health and intelligence now.