I receive feedback on what parents find helpful in my sessions and workshops. The science of anger and aggression is near the top. Here are some simple insights for you and your child:
What is anger
Anger isn’t fear, stress, or anxiety, though they can travel together. Anger runs hot, it makes you and your child hot-headed, flushed, keyed up. Fear tends to run cold, clammy, shrinking. They’re genuinely different states in the body, even if they feel tangled up in the moment.
What triggers it
In adults, anger usually comes down to one of two things: something violating our expectations, or something blocking a goal we’re actively pursuing. Someone cuts you up in traffic while you’re driving happily along, and both happen at once.
In children, it’s more complicated, they’re not born with self-control, so they get angry faster, and often for reasons that look small to us, sharing a toy, being told no to a lolly, or simply being tired and hungry at the wrong moment.
Is anger good or bad?
Neither, really, it’s more complex than that. Anger is a normal emotion, one to understand, work with, and gently bring under control, not eliminate. It can genuinely motivate and energise. It just carries a bad reputation in our culture.
What’s happening in the brain
Simplifying a genuinely complex structure, there are three broad layers.
The brainstem, often called the reptilian brain, shared with birds and reptiles. This is the housekeeping brain, hunger, temperature, fight-or-flight, defending territory, staying safe.
The limbic system, shared with cats, mice, and other mammals. This is where feelings and attachment live and develop.
The neocortex, the thinking brain, uniquely developed in humans, where we reflect, create, and empathise.
The Guard Dog and the alarm
Inside the limbic system sits the amygdala, your child’s Guard Dog, and I write about this properly in my free guide Understanding Your Child’s Guard Dog Brain. When it activates, it wants action, usually fight, sometimes flight. It doesn’t think, it simply wants survival, sending out signals that release hormones like adrenaline to power the response. All of this is hardwired, not chosen.
How long does an anger response actually last?
The neurological burst itself lasts under two seconds. Everything after that is a choice, consciously or not, to amplify it or let it settle. Counting to ten, and slow breathing, genuinely work, they buy time for the thinking brain to come back online. This is much harder to manage in a child mid-meltdown, since children’s brains develop from the bottom up, the reptilian and limbic layers first, the thinking brain last, so they genuinely get angrier faster, and can take longer to settle, especially if the feeling underneath goes misunderstood. If you’re in the thick of a meltdown right now, my blogs Anger, Meltdowns and Tantrums: Navigating Emotional Storms and Why Talking to Children in Hot Moments Does Not Help go into exactly what to do, and what to avoid, in that moment.
What anger does to the body, over time
Occasional stress can actually be stimulating, but chronic anger carries real cost. Research from the University of Sydney, led by Dr Thomas Buckley, found the risk of a heart attack is 8.5 times higher in the two hours following a burst of intense anger
Children carry real risk too. Dysregulation itself is completely normal in childhood, but constant dysregulation raises cortisol levels persistently, and elevated cortisol has been linked to depression, anxiety, ongoing emotional dysregulation, and physical illness later in life.
Nature or nurture?
Genuinely, both. We inherit genes, though we don’t always know which ones get switched on. But we learn to manage anger the same way we learn everything else, largely from the environment we grew up in, especially if the adults around us weren’t good models for regulating their own. Most of us settle into one of two patterns: angry withdrawal, bottling it up until it eventually spills over, or venting, letting it out more openly and often.
How do you tend to manage conflict at home, with your children, and with yourself?
The good news
Everything starts with how we react as parents, our children learn far more from watching us than from anything we tell them directly. If you were raised in a home where anger wasn’t modelled well, or you carry your own difficult history with it, please seek support, and consider these three things:
Become genuinely conscious of your own body, your own reactions, and how your brain works, then teach that awareness to your children too. I meditate myself, a step beyond simple mindfulness, and it’s been genuinely life-changing for my own sense of calm.
Set a real intention to respond differently, and prioritise it. Old habits take time to shift, but the brain stays plastic throughout life, there’s always time to change the pattern.
Practise, repeatedly. This is exactly as true for your children as it is for you, they need to understand their own brain and how it works, and be helped to talk through and express what they’re feeling, again and again, until it becomes more familiar.
To summarise
Anger is complex, and it’s neither purely good nor purely bad, but repeated, unmanaged outbursts genuinely take a toll, on you and on your child. Parenting is hard, and none of us are meant to do it entirely alone.
Interested in working with me?
If you would like more tailored support for your child or family, I offer one to one therapy for children and young people, therapeutic parenting support for parents, and training and consultation for professionals working with children and families. Please do get in touch if you would like to find out more.
You can reach me via my contact page.
Free resources
Understanding Your Child’s Guard Dog Brain explains what is happening in your child’s nervous system when big feelings take over.
Holding in the Storm is about staying steady as a parent in the hard moments.
When Darkness Comes includes specific support for sleep difficulties and anxiety at night.
All free to download.
Related reading
Anger, Meltdowns and Tantrums: Navigating Emotional Storms
Why Talking to Children in Hot Moments Does Not Help
How to Stop Shouting at Your Children
Managing Your Child’s Anger Through Validation
References
Buckley, T. et al. (2015) Triggering of acute coronary occlusion by episodes of anger. European Heart Journal: Acute Cardiovascular Care.
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With warmth,
Catherine
