How To Let Your Toddler Deal With Anger

01:05 – Help them understand the emotion
01:47 – Let them get out the emotion and express it
02:20 – Talk about anger itself
02:36 – Explain the good things
03:34 – Let them understand the mean and the malicious things

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Hi everybody, Harper Jones with Bow-Tiger here, and you are watching Saturdays with Harper. Do any of you guys out there deal with an angry toddler or angry child? This isn’t something that we maybe want to discuss in our parent groups or with friends, because you may feel that you are a little embarrassed if your toddler is maybe more frustrated than other toddlers, or gets more frustrated over certain situations. Of course, there are a lot of things that come into play with toddlers and the emotion of anger. So, you want to make sure at first you do go to your doctor and get everything checked out, just to make sure there isn’t any underlying medical issue that’s causing this frustration with your toddler.

Now, with that said, if all of that is clear, you need to figure out how to help your toddler through their emotions and how to help them deal with anger. Now, the best way to be able to deal with an emotion and help a child deal with an emotion, is to first help them understand that emotion. With toddlers we really have to get down to the simple basics of things, and anger to them is something that they feel, something that they can see. So, that’s the first thing you want to do with your toddler. You want ask them, have them express to you how they think anger looks like. If somebody is really red in the face, they’re squinting their eyes, maybe they pull up their fists or maybe they’re crying. Maybe they’ve run away, maybe they don’t want talk to people. That’s what anger looks like. But have your toddler express to you what they think anger looks like.

The next thing you want to say, “Well, how does anger make you feel?” Let them kind of get out the emotion and express it, “It makes me feel sad, or it makes me feel scared.” There are a lot of different emotions that play into anger in different ways that can make our children feel. And allowing them to express that kind of give them sort of a safe feeling, or more of an understanding of how they are feeling, and maybe we can help them walk through some of these frustrations.

Now once you’ve done that, once you know and your toddler knows that they have good understanding of what being angry, what that emotion really is, you want to talk about anger itself. Anger has been known — and although this is probably not the most popular way to state anger — but anger has been known to do a lot of good in the world.

Now has anger been good for the world? You can explain to your toddler the good things that people have decided to do because they were angry about something. Not the malicious things or the mean things that people decided to do because they were angry, but the stance it made them decide to take. Maybe they decided to stand up for something or somebody, because the way a person or something was being treated, really made them angry. So, it made them take a stance. You can of course lessen it down on a level so we’re down on a toddler level, but ideas like that to let your toddler know that being angry isn’t necessarily bad, they just have to understand and figure out how to sort of harness that frustration and that power to turn it into something good. And if we can teach our kids...I say this all the time, if we can teach our kids though at the toddler age, the toddler level, to express their emotions or use their emotions for the good, it’s going to be great for their future and the future of all of all of our children.

Now, of course you do also want to make sure that they understand the mean, the malicious things that can come out being angry and the things you can and cannot do. It is not polite or right to yell at somebody and scream at somebody if you are angry. It is not right for them to hit if they are angry. They need to know that those are lines they do not cross and it’s not acceptable. Again, what we want to do is we want to help them understand how to cope with their anger, maybe with breathing techniques. Counting to 10 is a really good one where you just breathe deeply and count to 10. I do it myself, and my daughter does it as well when she’s mad. But help them understand how to work with their anger to have positive outcomes, how to harness that energy, that frustration that they are feeling, and use it for something good.

All right guys, of course if you are watching this video on Facebook or YouTube, I’d ask that you also checkout our video blog on bowtiger.com. And as always, we’ll see you...