The Four Stages of Child Anger

Excerpted from
The Angry Child: Regaining Control When Your Child Is Out of Control
By Timothy Murphy, Ph.D.

When children explode in anger, even adults can feel intimidated and overwhelmed by the strength and depth of their emotion. We may also feel there is little we can do to stop or control the situation. Fortunately, this is not true. Every angry outburst follows a predictable progression from buildup to explosion through a series of four stages, and the good news is that each stage provides an opportunity for derailing the child's anger once you've learned to recognize it.

Witness a grouchy child whose anger simmers at a low level all afternoon, only to culminate in a fight when his sibling calls him a name. This name-calling may go back and forth for several minutes until it finally erupts into a knockdown battle. Another day the anger may strike with the swiftness of lightning, seemingly without provocation. Anger is often not a momentary event, but a process, sometimes starting days, months, or even years before a blowup. Sibling squabbles can last well into the teen years or adulthood, and may have truly begun as toddlers when one child perceived the other to be Mom or Dads favorite. Memories such as these might cloud one's judgment so that in a moment of anger one is remembering and fighting prior wounds instead of the matter at hand.

Consider the otherwise happy teenager who suddenly snaps when asked about her day. What's perceived simply as an outburst of anger represents the culmination of a process that clearly began elsewhere.

Every episode of anger progresses through four linked stages: the Buildup, the Spark, the Explosion, and the Aftermath. It you learn to identify these stages in your child, you can take the right action at the appropriate moment. Without this awareness, you'll miss an opportunity to prevent an outburst, or you may worsen the situation by coming on too strong or too weak.

Stage One: The Buildup

The buildup stage sets the foundation upon which the anger will be built. It is filled with memories of old, unresolved conflicts, poor problem-solving skills, and stresses of the child's age and stage of development. Hours, days, even months of tension can accumulate until the angry child can no longer take it.

The buildup can be likened to stacking up sticks of dynamite with each stick representing a painful memory of teasing, losing a game, rejection by a friend, exclusion, etc. Fatigue, hunger, illness, and other physical strains can shorten the fuses on those explosives, as can low self-esteem, defeatist attitudes, and specific worries.

All of us enter situations with a history of experiences that have shaped the way we view the world. They also shape the way we act. One child may have learned to take his defeat at soccer in stride, while another rails against his teammates. One girl may get mildly annoyed if a classmate bumps her chair, while another reacts with rage. Our reactions to the present are influenced by the experiences of our past. Each time the stresses build in an angry child, that child comes closer to exploding. Experiences, learned attitudes, past reactions, and physical stresses all combine in the buildup stage. It these four factors have left the child angry at the world, then you can expect to see a huge explosion when the anger ignites.

Of course, everyone's reaction is unique, and children are no different, especially at the buildup stage. Girl was one of those walking time-bomb kids who long ago developed an attitude that everyone was out to get him unless he struck first. He foiled at most things he tried because he gave up too early. Carl had never learned how to solve a problem without lighting. Talking about his feelings never occurred to him. His parents kept to themselves and didn't spend much time encouraging him along the way. By the third grade, Carl's parents described him as having a hair-trigger temper. His buildup was usually overloaded, like his temper, because it was so filled with years of conflict with no solutions in sight.

Emily, on the other hand, was able to keep her buildups small. Though she too had frustrations in school and was coming to grips with her parents' divorce, she was by nature very talkative, and her parents were responsive to her. When she had troubles on her mind, she voiced them to her parents or friends. Even though her parents were apart, they worked hard at settling their differences as reasonably as possible, and they listened to Emily's concerns, offering reassurances often. Although she did have bouts of anger, keeping the buildups small generally made Emily's anger manageable.

Parents can influence their child's anger in the buildup stage by avoiding or removing the source of the pain, solving the problem, or directing the child down the path toward a workable solution before problems and frustrations grow out of control. In the buildup stage, your goal is to prevent an outburst. Since a wide range of factors contribute, you'll need several strategies to prevent these outbursts from multiplying.

Stage Two: The Spark

The spark is the action or thought that sets off the angry outburst. It may be big or small. It can be a thought, a feeling the child experiences, or an action by someone else. Kids respond differently to potential sparks. Some may react with rage, while some may have no reaction at all.

The experiences in the buildup will influence how a child responds to a particular spark. For example, a spark may set off mild selective anger directed at a friend with whom there is no problematic history. Thus, a couple of six-year-olds may give each other the cold shoulder one moment and be ready to play the next. On the other hand, the spark could ignite a major rage between a parent and child who have a long history of mutual antagonism. If a parent and child have had countless arguments over using the telephone, its ringing during dinner may spark an argument. A child who feels she's had enough nagging about how she dresses may unleash a tirade in response to her father's innocent question "Are those new shoes?"

Think of the sparks that start nuclear meltdowns in your house. Common ones include "clean your room," "go to bed," "turn oft the TV," "finish your dinner," "you cannot wear that," or "I won't buy you this today." Other external sparks may include being ignored by a friend, teasing, stubbing a toe, or getting caught in the act of breaking a rule.

It's important to recognize that it's not always an external event that sparks anger. Thoughts can also ignite an angry reaction, taking parents by surprise as their child seems to start a fight for no reason at all. Sixteen-year-old Adelle called to tell her mother she was on her way home. In the ten minutes it took her to drive home, her mood turned black; once in the house, she began to yell at her startled mother, complaining about what she'd served for dinner and claiming she couldn't stand it there another minute. Another parent recalls her five-year-old son Ben playing quietly on the couch while his three-year-old brother across the room looked at a book. Ben climbed off the couch, walked over and slugged his brother. "What happened?" she asked me. "Was there anything I could have done?"

Each child had probably reviewed a mental checklist of grievances that had festered for some time. Adelle may have been angered about having to leave her friend's house before she wanted to, or suddenly remembered an embarrassing comment her mother made long ago. Ben might have been thinking about how his brother took his toy the day before. Thinking about a problem was all it took to spark an angry reaction.

Children set off their own internal sparks with memories of being wronged by a teacher, spurned by a girlfriend, or by dwelling on their own failures. The thoughts don't even have to be about real events - their imaginations can create problems where none exists in reality. Immature reasoning skills can lead to the creation of illogical conclusions. A child can distort history when he gathers one memory from here, another from there, links them together, and presto! He's managed to create a whole new reality, in which he plays the unlucky victim. In such cases it's the parent's role to point out the faulty reasoning in a calm, nonjudgmental way, and douse the spark.