On March 30th, 2019, the first event of Adoption Support Group Finland was held in Helsinki at the premises of Adoptioperheet ry. It was titled “Practical Tools for Anger Regulation” and saw psychologist Angela Leiva as guest speaker. Angela had a fitting professional experience: she worked in the field of emotional aid and education in early childhood with foster and adoptive families in Spain.

The event was praised by all participants. I myself went back home with an excellent toolbox and renewed hope. Not too long ago I had an epiphany that my role as a parent when my children are overwhelmed is to help them express their feelings in a safe and contained way. Please don’t imagine me as Gandhi while my child is in the middle of a tantrum, I am not. Screams and defiance are terribly triggering for me, but defining my role allowed me to feel way more in control of the whole situation. However, I was quite at loss about what I could do concretely to help my children. Here’s what I personally brought home.

What is anger, really

Anger is a secondary emotion. The “Anger iceberg” visually shows some of the primary emotions hiding behind anger. Primary emotions are painful and make us feel vulnerable. Our innate instinct to run away from them make us shift to anger instead. This is common to all human beings, not just children. For example, someone who feels sexually rejected from their spouse may react by getting mad or becoming resentful instead. The key idea here is to try and understand what is the underlying emotion the child is not capable of showing. This may vary time to time and it’s closely connected to triggers, which I discuss later. For example: if your child shows anger – through defiance or tantrums – when you pick her from daycare, it may be that seeing you was a reminder of how she missed you during the day and how vulnerable she felt. In this field, my advice is to trust your guts. In the end, parents are always the best experts on their children. When you have a good idea of what the real issue is, you can react more appropriately. Sending a child who feels rejected to a time-out is the worst thing to do (I talk from experience!). You may wanna comfort and reassure, instead. With my children, it truly helps if I try to voice the emotion for them: “Maybe you felt rejected because I was paying little attention to you when I listened to your sister telling me about her day. I’m sorry you feel like that. I love you also when I’m not looking at you”. Imagine how frustrating must be to lack a way to properly express yourself, like when you try to speak a language you are not fluent in.

Anger is not a bad emotion. Anger is just a red flag. How we express anger is the real point we are trying to fix. We need to teach our child how to express anger in a healthy and constructive way. Another point Angela made was about anger management VS therapy. My understanding is that while anger management may act as a quick fix to defuse the emotion, therapy is the only long-term working strategy. In the context of parenting, I interpreted this as having to teach or help the child to dominate the emotion in the spur of the moment, but also applying long-term strategies to allow the child to identify, cope with, and express their primary emotions and what they are rooted in. Just focusing on dealing with tantrums won’t solve the root cause. The main goal should not be to manage the single anger episode, but to help the child grow and learn how to self-regulate over time.

Identify the child’s triggers

What pushes your child’s buttons? What is that something that sets off the primary emotion and, consequently, the angry reaction? Common triggers in children can be tiredness, hunger. In adopted children they could connect to feelings, emotions, events in their past. I remember once reading about an adopted child who would throw a tantrum before every car ride, until their parents understood he associated car rides to the multiple home moves he had to endure. Every time they would board him on a car, he was terrified he was being moved to a new family. Knowing your child’s triggers can help you to prevent anger, as well as react at best. For example if your child is clearly exhausted and struggles to finish eating lunch, it may be wiser to break off the meal and put her to nap earlier. Or, in the example of the child angry when picked up from daycare, if she is hungry it may be wise to keep some snacks in the car. If the child is old enough, the parent can brainstorm and identify triggers together with her. Even if kids are small, it’s empowering to try and voice their triggers when they have calmed down: “Maybe you got mad because you were hungry“. We need to teach kids to become self-aware. A practical tool here is to print the identified triggers in a worksheet like this. With some creativity and cliparts, you can make up something more appealing yourself, the point being having the list accessible or visible somewhere.

Help the child to learn how anger feels

Anger can set in slowly or quickly. In any case, there are always announcing signs. For example my son starts changing his mind 30 times in 2 seconds and goes “yes-no-yes-no-” on everything. It’s useful for a parent to learn what the signs are, but in the long run the child should become self-aware. The body usually shows early signs of anger and we can help our children to identify those. For example ears may feel hot, or fingers may start tapping. At the risk of annoying you, remember with small children you can be the first to voice these signs: “When you get mad, your eyebrows go down like this and you start stomping your feet”. These remarks should be made when the child is calm, because she won’t be receptive during an episode. It can be useful to fill up a sheet like this one on the fridge and regularly go over it with the child. In my opinion, talking about the anger episodes during quiet moments is also a healthy way to normalise them.

Teach your child to express emotions verbally

A healthy long-term strategy is to teach your child to express their emotions verbally. Here Angela showed something that was nothing short of a revelation for me: the wheel of emotions.

She explained how children live mostly in the inner circle but growing up they should start to see the different shades of feelings, and move more and more outwards. How can you enrich your child’s emotional vocabulary? Some practical ideas:

• lead by example: voice your own emotions. I do it all the time. “Argh, I feel so frustrated this dress doesn’t fit me anymore” “I’m so excited we are going on a trip tomorrow” and so on. Children are always listening and observing their parents even when they don’t look like they are (no pressure);
• read books together: nowadays there’s an incredible selection of children’s books on feelings and emotions. I put a list together, but there’s plenty more available, in several languages;
• try and voice your child’s emotions: “I wonder if you feel tired” “Are you curious to see what’s inside this gift box?”;
• play games: for instance, mirroring each other face announcing a feeling (“Let’s make a sad face” “Now a happy face”). Once I made a deck of emotion cards and regularly had my kids guess what emotion the drawing on the card represented (ashamed, worried, surprised, …);
• create an emotion chart: Angela provided us with several examples of emotion charts. You can make your own and help the child express through figures how they feel (not during the anger episode, but maybe afterwards when she is calm). Charts can be used to identify what feeling one feels as well as how intensive it is. A similar useful concept is the anger thermometer. The chart should be age appropriate and can be created together with the child. Put it somewhere accessible.

Most importantly, you parent have to embrace the idea that feelings are a normal part of being human. Never punish a child for expressing her feelings. Just teach her the best way how.

Teach the child how she can feel better

As someone who who worked hard to pinpoint what made her really feel good only in her thirties, I cannot stress enough how enriching this learning can be for children. This is a crucial building block for self- regulation and control. The parent can guide the child to identify what helps her to defuse feelings, calm down, feel good. There’s such an empowering teaching in this approach: you may not be able to control what hurts you, but you can control how you take care of yourself. A “feeling-good kit” or “calm-down kit” can take several forms: it can be a physical box with soothing and/or sensory objects. The child doesn’t have to necessarily calm down by herself, the key is for her to learn in time to stay in control and go fetch the box; the kit can be a list of activities, like “counting to 10” or “go for a walk” or “ask for a hug from mom”. You can print a colourful list and have it accessible and teach the kid to redirect to it when necessary.

Behavior contracts

Another parenting tool presented was behavior contracts. Those are joint resolutions that a parent and a child agree on. Thinking of my own experience, I have some concerns on this approach. If you go down this road with an adopted child, you have to be alert on shame. The contract has to be a constructive and positive intervention step, not a routine opportunity to underline how the child has failed. Again, the cornerstones are helping and empowering the child.

Most importantly, regulate yourself

One key teaching was that parents have foremost to regulate themselves and be in control of their own emotions. Parents, willing or not, lead by example. If you don’t practice what you preach, your teachings are worth nothing. This doesn’t mean you have to be perfect, no one is. If you didn’t learn to self-regulate during your own childhood, you’ll start now. It’s never too late. If you slip away from your teachings, just apologise to the child. There’s much to learn by witnessing how parents face their own mistakes.

All the tools presented here can be applied to yourself as well! I myself made a “feel-good” list and hanged it in my bedroom. My husband and I once drew a representation of the negativity cycle we’d go when fighting and now it’s hanging on our bedroom closet. It really helps to have this sort of things written down and accessible. It’s the same principle of goal journals or to-do list: we tend to slip into our usual dynamics, good or bad. You can even make your own parenting behavior contract with yourself! In time, you will realise that you and your child are in this learning journey together.

Disclaimer: this post is not a replacement for the training, nor it is a faithful reporting. These are my own key learnings which I tried to convey as faithfully to the original source as possible.