Anger Management for Parents

Understanding and managing your anger and learning how to be a calmer parent regardless of your child’s behaviour.

Are you:

• Worried about the impact on your child’s mental health and self-esteem of your angry outbursts towards them?
• Seeing signs that your child has anger issues and worried that s/he’s copying your behaviour?
• Worried that your child is caught in the crossfire of your parental conflict?
• Concerned to manage your temper before you start a family, so you don’t repeat the cycle of the aggression that you experienced from your parent(s) as a child?
• Scared that shouting at or hitting your child has damaged / will damage your relationship with them?

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Why do parents need help with anger management?

It’s commonly said that parenting is the hardest job in the world and it’s easy to understand why that is. There’s the sleep deprivation, not just when they’re babies, but when they wake in the night and come into your bed, and when they’re sick; there’s the importance of the task to you – you love them so much and are so invested in getting your parenting “right”; there’s the stress, as you juggle your life alongside them, which can feel like you’re spinning plates, and the impact of days off nursery or school because of illness, school holidays etc; there’s the fact that finances are tighter. Tiredness and stress both shorten the fuse. It is no wonder that parents need help with anger management.

And that’s not to mention the frustration and conflict that comes from the differences of opinion with your partner on how to parent and the unhelpful parenting role models your childhood may have given you.

To make things additionally challenging, emotions are “contagious”:

• Kids and teenagers tend to have strong emotions.  When they shout, cry, scream, and stomp, it triggers strong emotions in us.
• If we’re stressed about a work deadline or anxious about a conflict with our partner etc children will pick that up and feel unsettled, which is likely to result in behaviour in them which will trigger our anger. If we shout at them, it sets off their emotions, making a bad situation worse.

What are the benefits of anger management classes for parents?

Parenting is exceptionally hard, but you can learn to manage your anger, stress and frustration and become a calmer parent. As you implement the tools in the programme:

• You’ll help yourself

  Instead of feeling upset with yourself for the way you’ve behaved, when you manage your anger you’ll be able, instead, to feel pleased with the way you’ve handled the situation. And when we’re feeling good about ourselves, we’re less easily triggered, meaning it’s easier to stop being an angry parent when faced with the next situation.

• You’ll help your child

  The negative impact of a parent having anger issues on a child’s mental health and self-esteem is now well recognised. As you learn, through anger management, to stop the shouting etc your child will reap both short term and long term emotional and mental health benefits.As you know, children learn through how their parents behave. As you manage your stress, put boundaries in place without shouting, deal with challenges without losing your temper etc your child will learn from you. This is obviously important, given that emotional intelligence is now recognised as a better predictor of success than IQ.
  
  As I’ve said above, emotions are contagious. In the same way that shouting etc at children triggers high emotions in them, as you learn through anger management to be calm, you can expect your child to feel calmer. As well as being of benefit to your child, you’ll be able to enjoy having a more peaceful household – a win win.

• You’ll help the generations to follow

  I imagine you can recognise in your behaviour how your mother or father behaved when they were angry. As you control your temper, you give your children a different model to copy when they have children of their own.

Why choose the Stop Seeing Red programme to deal with your anger?

I know what it’s like to be at your wit’s end from the 24/7 job of being a parent; to have your buttons pressed by a child; to feel shame and disappointment that your best doesn’t feel good enough.

Yes, I believe it’s important to acknowledge the seriousness of losing your temper with your kids, so I’m glad you’re on this site. But I also believe that feeling inadequate and ashamed only makes it more likely you’ll snap at your children. I see my role as to empathically support you, helping you to behave more often like the parent you want to be. And I know from my own experience and from working with clients how powerful this anger management programme is in helping people to change.

I am an anger management specialist psychotherapist. I bring not only my Anger Management training and over 15 years’ experience of working with clients with anger issues, but also my own personal experience of being angry, aggressive and even, at times, violent, before I brought my temper under control with an anger management programme.

I talked in this television interview on ITV’s Tonight programme about how I overcame my angry and aggressive behaviour and became a group programme facilitator with the “British Association of Anger Management”. With the help of anger management classes, I am confident you can deal with your anger, too.

My child has anger management problems.  Can you help?

I only work with people aged 18 and over. However, if your child is younger than this and has anger management issues, I may still be able to help:

As you’ll know, children learn from the behaviour of their parents. “Do as I say, not as I do” isn’t effective with kids. What has your behaviour been teaching your child/ren? If you can see that you’re not controlling your anger as a parent, or that you’re escalating the situation when your child gets enraged, it’s likely to help if you take anger management classes. You’ll then:

• • have tools to help them when they have anger outbursts – if only by not making things worse
  • be able to model for them constructive ways to behave when they’re angry and also
  • be equipped to teach them the material from the programme, which is relevant even to children as young as around 3 or 4.

If they’re of junior school age or younger, then I’d recommend the book for children: “My Hidden Chimp” by Prof Steve Peters – with the word of caution that you need to be familiar with the material it teaches and able to help your child with it.

If children are too young to learn cognitively about anger management, what’s most important is that you feel empathy whilst keeping your cool. Their brains haven’t developed sufficiently to enable them to manage their emotions and they’re reliant on you to help them to regulate themselves. In the same way as we need firemen, paramedics etc to be calm, children need their parents to be calm in situations which, to them, feel like an emergency.

As well as anger management classes helping equip you to do this, you may find ahaparenting.com a useful resource – including the option of signing up to free weekly emails from Dr Laura Markham.

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Anger Management Classes for Parents

If you live in the UK, you can work with me to deal with your anger as a parent through private classes, or by signing up for one of my online anger management groups.

Click the images below to find out more.