Parenting : How to Deal with Your Angry Child

How to deal with your angry child
I am a mother of two children. Having an infant and a toddler make me feel like a busy bee. Both are the attention seeker with their own different ways. I’m not complaining but I am truly blessed to have them in my life as they are the precious gift from God.  

My eldest daughter has a very bad temper. At her early age right now, she loves to explore new things and a super talkative too. She like to questions every single things and sometimes she tend to show natural aggression towards her surroundings. At some points, children at the early age are engage in aggressive outbursts when they feel out of control, frustrated or desire attention. Thus, children often turn to kicking, hitting, biting, screaming and throwing things to make their emotions known. This is how the toddler trying to communicate with the parents or to the adult. Besides the fact that they’re loud, annoying and embarrassing, we often feel it’s our job requirement to make our kids act the way we feel they should behave. If we can’t do that, we feel ineffective. We also don’t like the judgments that we imagine others are making of us when our kids are out of control. We don’t know what to do, but feel we must do something after all, we are the parents. I am sure, some parents out there are also having a bad temper children as they requires a full attention from us as a parents.

And of course, on a deep level we want our kids to learn how to calm down and act normally. When they’re not able to calm down and start to press our button of anger, it is just like we only adds more fuel to the fire. Sometimes, I have no idea to calm down my daughters when she start to scream and crying when thing is not going in her own way. And when we feel a sense of helplessness, we often react by getting angry or giving in and then we feel controlled by our child behavior. But attempting to manage our anxiety by trying to control their responses never works. I think it’s better to focus on dealing with our own feelings of helplessness, embarrassment and frustration when our child are having a meltdown.

I think it’s natural to have tantrums. What is tantrum? Tantrums are a normal part of child development. They are the way young children show they're upset or frustrated. It may happen when kids are tired, hungry, or uncomfortable or because they can't get something to do what they want. We adults have them all the time. We can lose our temper when someone cuts us off in traffic or when our kids don’t listen. Maturing is all about managing our emotions more effectively, and it’s a lifetime project. In my opinion, we can’t prevent tantrums, but we can impact how often and how long they go on by the way we respond to our children’s outbursts.

I think when our children feel that we need them to behave “our own way” in order for us to feel calm, it’s a natural reaction for them to become defensive. In my situation, when my daughter start to show her mad and begin to scream, crying with a full volumes, it really make my emotional rush and I feel sympathy to her as I can’t help her to calm down. My own way to handle this situation is that I’m trying to relax myself and not to use any force toward her. Sound like easy but it hard to practice. Sometimes, you play with your own emotion and feel stressful and down when you can’t handle your bad temper child. 

The most important is not to use any FORCE toward your child. Let take this scenario as an examples:

1.     “If you don’t stop yelling, I’ll take away your stuffs.

2.     “If you don’t want to listen to mommy, I wouldn’t not buy  your new toys. No more hello kitty.

3.    “If you don’t want to sleep, mommy will punish you, and no more ice cream, snack for you.

4.    “If you don’t stop crying, mommy will leave you alone.

The above examples are common among the parents and yes I admit that it is my wrong approaches to calm down my daughter when she’s angry. And after a while, I start to find an answer on how to deal with the angry child. Thus, rewards and punishments are motivational tools in order to calm down your angry child. The most important approach is to wait until your child is calm before figuring out how to make things right.

Remind yourself that it’s your job to teach your child: Remind yourself that you are the teacher. Thus, education begin at home. At the early age, our child need us to guide them. Your children can’t handle these strong emotions yet and it’s our job to help them learn how to do that. Remember, they are testing you and believe it or not, they truly want you to win this particular test. On the surface, your child really wants you to give in, but on another level, they wants to see how much you care for them. Kids want to know that their parents are strong and reliable and are people who mean what they say. They don’t want parents who are going to fall apart. They need us to stay strong so that they won’t drown. 

Trust me, one day when they grow bigger, you will miss all the bad and good moments with your child. At their early age, they demand a lot of attention as it is their own way to learn new things and adopt themselves with the surrounding. How time flies so fast as one day, they will grow up so fast and of course you will miss the chaos situation when they are still a kids.The chaos home with an active child who like to put their toys and stuffs everywhere,the smell of a baby, and of course the sweet moments when you try to make them laugh or push them to finish their meals. After all, this is the real fact of a life as a parents and yes motherhood journey is so much challenging. To all parents out there,  all of you are the super parents with your own way and approach. 

-XOXO-