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Parenting "With Anger"

Question: My husband is a loving man and loves our children and me very much. He is tender most of the time and tells us that he loves us. Sometimes though, he gets very angry with the kids and spanks them when he is angry. What can be causing his anger and is he hurting our children with his anger?

Your question is more common than you might think and many men and women have a problem with anger. They are angry about their lives and often don’t even know why. Their inner anger can be controlled much of the time but at other times it comes out at loved ones who are not responsible for the angry outbursts. Parenting with anger is hurtful to children and can cause them problems later in their own adult life. Your husband needs to seek help so that he can learn to resolve his anger and better manage the way he relates to his children.

In this article, we will discuss common causes of unresolved anger. We will also explain how disciplining children with anger hurts them, ways to avoid it in the future and offer strategies to resolve deep-seated anger.

Unresolved Anger

Life is difficult for everyone and all of us have painful experiences in our relationships. Painful experiences, especially when we are vulnerable and too young to understand why others might hurt us, can leave us angry inside. We can be secretly angry about our past, so deep in our hearts that we don’t even know that we are angry. One man whose father had disciplined him in anger and used guilt trying to control him, found himself very angry as an adult. He didn’t realize that he had anger hidden in his heart until life situations brought it out of him and he expressed excessive anger toward his loved ones. His anger was inappropriate because it was more than the situation deserved and he didn’t know why he became so angry over his children’s misbehavior. He had unresolved anger toward his father that he projected on to others. This very common occurrence sounds like the man described in the question. Let’s examine the specific cause of unresolved anger.

Cause of Unresolved Anger

When painful events occur in life, it is always best to resolve all of the issues involved before we let it go and move on in life. If we could think it all the way through, understand the reasons for it and forgive the people involved, we could resolve the primary issues and people without storing up anger. In a perfect world with better people this might happen, but we don’t live in a perfect world and most of us just hang on as we go through our lives. Many of these painful events occur when we are children and have not developed the perspective to think things through nor the strength to forgive others. When children encounter great pain, they feel deeply hurt and their only method of dealing with the pain is to suppress it. Suppression of emotional pain is accomplished by simply putting it out of our conscious minds or by distracting ourselves by thinking about something else. When a child feels hurt they will naturally suppress it being unable to deal with it. Every child has experienced some level of hurt and repressed pain. This repressed pain come out as inappropriate anger later in life. Deeply damaged children will often “act out” by practicing attention getting behaviors in school or with their peers. They become bullies, emotionally conflicted or the strange, overly quiet kids we remember from school. If we reach adulthood without resolving our anger, it has a tendency to come out under stress in life events. When our children rebel or cross clear boundaries we can find ourselves feeling excessive anger toward them and using angry tones to discipline them.

Parental Anger Hurts Children

Parental discipline is intended to correct bad behavior while expressing love to the child’s person. Good parenting assures children that they are deeply and permanently loved while confronting them about behaviors that will hurt them or others. The idea is to extinguish the behavior while building up the self-esteem of the person. This kind of parenting does not come naturally, must be learned and practiced for it to become a reality.  When a parent becomes angry with their child, the child thinks that their mom or dad does not like them or love them. They interpret anger as meaning a lack of love for them. This is most often untrue but this is the common way children interpret anger. A child who is disciplined with anger all of his life will believe that his parents did not have a great deal of love for him. Believing that your parents don’t love you is very hurtful to the heart of a child. It causes the child to think poorly about themselves as if they don’t deserve to be loved. In adult life, this child will have a difficult time believing that anyone loves them or even that anyone could possibly love them. Children who are handled with anger will label themselves as unlovable and never believe that they are worthy of love. The number of problems this causes is way beyond the scope of this article. Let us summarize this section by saying that parenting with anger is very bad for your children and you are strongly encouraged to find ways to avoid doing it.

Ways to Avoid Parenting with Anger

Almost all parents instinctively love their children and are willing to make changes to avoid hurting them. One of the ways we build anger toward children is by being lazy and sloppy with discipline. A common mistake parents make is to let children slide when they violate the family boundaries. The child crosses the lines over and over while the parent does nothing. As the child learns that nothing will happen for bad behavior, they begin to escalate their behavior getting away with everything they can. As the whole scene progresses, the parent begins to raise his voice and use harsher tones to enforce his will. The parent allows the behavior to escalate until he/she has had enough and they become angry at the child for disobeying. At this point, the whole scene is out of hand. The child has been habituated to disobey until the parent becomes angry and only then comply with the rules or the command. The parent escalates anger in an attempt to regain control wrongly believing that anger will convince the child to obey more often.

Solution: give children clear and simple boundaries and discipline them without anger every time they violate the boundaries. Don’t allow misbehavior to become habituated and anger to build up so that an explosion occurs. When discipline is immediate and consistent, children become habituated to obey and parents can enforce their will without raising their voices or using harsh tones.

Another strategy for avoiding anger directed at your children is to practice waiting. When you wait for a time before implementing discipline, it gives you time to cool off and regroup. You might form a pact with your partner to remind one another to wait until the anger has gone before dealing with the disobedience.

Another strategy is to prepare yourself for your child’s disobedient behavior by learning realistic expectations about children’s tendencies to disobey. Children naturally want what they want and parental boundaries stand in the way of what they want. Disobedience is to be expected and should not surprise us. If our children’s disobedience never surprises us, we are less likely to be shocked and become angry with them.

Deep Anger

When deep seated anger is the cause of disciplining with anger, the solution is not as easy. The parent who is unconsciously angry must seek help to resolve the deep anger in their heart. In this day and time, there are many professional counselors who are trained to help people explore their hearts and resolve issues from the past. As a professional counselor myself, my suggestion for those in this situation to seek help from a trained counselor. You might feel resistance to the idea of telling your painful secrets, especially to a stranger, but it is the shortest distance from where you are now and where your children need you to be. If you choose not to seek professional help, your pastor or spiritual leader might be willing to help. If the people involved in your painful experience still exist, you might be able to find closure through talking with them. However you decide to approach the problem, it must be talked out and forgiveness must be given to those who hurt you. Forgiving those who hurt you will release you from the anger you feel. I wish you the best on your journey to make peace with your past.

My final suggestion is one that I use in my own life to keep me on a positive track. I believe in God and trust what God has said in the bible to help me see a positive future. If you have found God for yourself or think it is time for you to make things right with God, there are links in this website that discuss how to go about entering a relationship with God. My prayers will be with you.

Healthy Parenting & The Angry Dad

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