Category — Fears

1. Will my parents stay together?
2. What if my parents die or get in an accident?
3. How can I keep my mom or dad from getting angry with me?
4. Will people at school like me?
5. Will I be able to do well at school?
6. What if my friends don’t want to be my friends anymore?
7. Will my parents be able to pay all our bills?
8. Will I be safe today?
9. Do I look okay?
10. What if I get embarassed?
11. What if someone hurts me or my family?
12. What does the future hold for me?

Imagine an infant crying in her crib — a shrill, piercing, unrelenting cry. You pick her up, she cries. You snuggle, you rock, you coo, she cries. You lay her down again, she cries. You search madly for the pacifier; surely, that will do the trick! But a tiny tongue, dripping with mucus and saliva, propels it in your face! The wailing sirens on and on. Is she hungry? No, she whips her head side to side fighting your attempt to feed. You check the diaper, she’s dry. You check her temp, it’s normal. Perhaps it’s fright — or pain! Did a spider bite her, the cat, the older sibling? Why, oh, why can’t babies talk?!

Feeling anxious? I am. Just writing about it knots my stomach, tightens my neck, clenches my jaw. My palms are even sweaty. In these situations parents can go down one of two paths. Neither is easy, but one is a horror.

When soothing words flop, parents continue talking — to themselves! “I can do this. Things WILL get better. This, too, shall pass. Dr. Know-It-All says it’s a stage all babies go through. He did say that, didn’t he?!”

Two parents makes coping with the stress easier. When one runs thin on patience, the other can step in. But tag-teaming only works when both parents are willing, and both are at home. Single parents must be resourceful. Some call a relative or friend for support. Or they muffle the crying by waiting in another room until the little one tires herself to sleep. Most parents, and children, survive the tough times. Of course, the chances are greater if kids are of easy temperament; they don’t test parents as often!One path is to hang tough, to ride out the crying jag without shaking, tossing, or hitting the child — come hell or high water. And most parents can do it. They cling tenaciously to patience. Some do it by talking — first to the baby: “There, there, Sweetie. What’s wrong? Don’t worry, mama’s here. What do you need, angel?”

But there’s another path that can lure parents. When children are perplexing, exasperating, and infuriating, parents can succumb to anger and violence. Feeling abused themselves, parents retaliate, matching a child’s wrath, decibel for decibel, flail for flail. Sometimes it works. Abuse scares kids into compliance. But that doesn’t make it justifiable or right. In time, abuse backfires, setting the stage for a frightening ballet. Parents withdraw, then explode, withdraw, then explode. Sometimes leading, sometimes following, children join the dance, taking their cues from the parent’s mood. Ultimately kids carry the dance into our child cares, schools and businesses.

The macabre choreography provides jobs for social workers, psychologists, police, lawyers, and judges. It robs kids of the sabbatical known as childhood — a fragile time of growth that’s a necessary prelude, not a luxury, for a stable adulthood. It’s hard to fathom why, once indulged, the dance continues. Obviously hurting a child vents intense emotion, but surely one twirl would shock (scare!) a parent into restraint. Yet often it doesn’t. So (I shiver to wonder), does inflicting pain provide a momentary euphoria? Is abuse satisfying, to the point of becoming habitual?

We don’t like to say adults “chose” to abuse. We call it impulse, as if abuse is a residual, primitive behavior that over-rides thinking, takes control, and makes us lose our minds. But abuse isn’t dirty laundry handed down from our evolutionary past.To say instinct drives abuse, rather than free-will decisionmaking, infers humans are innately evil, that we’re at the mercy of genetics. I don’t believe a chromosomal stew destines one to hurt children.

Abusing children, especially repetitive abuse, is a behavioral choice, not an accident. Through mind-searing experiences, abuse is taught, often looping from one generation to the next. The cycle is highly resistant to change. Conditions setting the stage for abuse can be cited and examined, but they don’t absolve the abuser of his or her actions.

I don’t think abuse is merely impulse, but I also don’t think it’s usually premeditated. It’s a wits end, knee-jerk decision, a misfire triggered by anger. In an imperceptible split-second, parents decide to fly off the handle, to use belittling language, to toss, throw, kick, bang, or pound. When parents are pushed against the wall of their limits, abuse must seem a rational choice. It’s not of course. But at the moment, it must seem so.

Whether due to panic, fear, selfishness, or even shame, abusers typically choose to protect themselves first, and their children second — if at all. They keep evidence of their offenses, their children’s scarlet marks, covered from public view until bruises and wounds heal. Though hard to imagine, kids are rehearsed, taught to fib about injuries.

Parents who abuse can choose to seek help, but they often don’t until forced to by child protection laws. Family members can fail to demand an abuser seek help, hoping to keep the abuse a secret — even though they know child abuse is illegal, and more damning, inhumane. Denying reality becomes an unsavory family conspiracy of silence. And so kids lie to neighbors, caregivers, teachers, social workers, and even ministers. Stymied in silence, they fear revealing parents’ flaws, fear sending parents to prison, fear landing in foster care. But mostly, kids remain silent or lie because they’re afraid of losing their parents’ undying love. Surprise you? It shouldn’t. Our society gives greater permission to keep secrets than to seek help. We perpetuate self-defeat. And we condemn kids to years of torment. We’re fools to pretend that even the strongest of kids can endure such stress and still end up contented, stable adults, unscathed and undamaged.

From what I’ve seen, adults can get by with abuse for years. No one wants to point a finger. We believe parents are well intentioned,we give them benefit of the doubt,we preserve a false sense of normalcy instead of facing reality. But we wear our optimistic blinders too long, as we allow children to suffer. Their suffering is guilt we must bear. To stop abuse we all, especially family members, must be realistic as well as optimistic. There’s much we can do to reduce the violence. We must identify abuse early, when it’s most treatable. We can reinforce kids’ rights to hold offenders, even parents, accountable for their actions. It will earn children’s trust.

We must openly discuss abuse and then reach out to help kids be resilient. We can counteract abuse by teaching kids to manage anger constructively and to problem solve cooperatively. We can model self-respect and civil treatment. We must support young parents by lending a sympathetic ear, an empathetic wink, a bit of advice. In doing all that,we’ll earn the right to be optimistic about making life safer for kids.

I’m convinced we can keep abuse from eating away at family trees like a crippling fungus. But it will take you, and me, and all who love your children to exert the will to do it.

1. The Wake-Up

It is important for a child to have some parent-love in the first conscious moment of his or her day.

2. The Send-Off

Horses, Olympians, and children run a good race when they get off to a good start.  As often as possible, you should be there for breakfast and for your child’s departure to school.

3. The Reception

If you want to get a real reading on how the “game” went, you have to be there when the “player” comes off the field.  Your presence when your child comes in the door says “I love you.” Your responsibility at the reception is mostly to hug, to listen without judgment, to notice your child is home, and to be available.

4. The Debriefing

This may come right after the reception.  Kids need to debrief their day–not to be interrogated but to report, celebrate, evaluate, or explode.  Again, your role is to listen.  Your undivided attention communicates that you care.

5. The Happy Ending

If “all’s well that ends well,” it’s good for a parent to be there at the end of the day.  It’s a time for an “I love you,” an “I’m sorry,” or a “thank you.” It puts a period on the end of the day.

By Ronald Hutchcraft from Five Needs Your Child Must Have Met at Home

Children’s anger presents challenges to teachers committed to constructive, ethical, and effective child guidance. This Digest explores what we know about the components of children’s anger, factors contributing to understanding and managing anger, and the ways teachers can guide children’s expressions of anger.

Three Components of Anger

Anger is believed to have three components (Lewis & Michalson, 1983):

The Emotional State of Anger. The first component is the emotion itself, defined as an affective or arousal state, or a feeling experienced when a goal is blocked or needs are frustrated. Fabes and Eisenberg (1992) describe several types of stress-producing anger provocations that young children face daily in classroom interactions:

• Conflict over possessions, which involves someone taking children’s property or invading their space.
• Physical assault, which involves one child doing something to another child, such as pushing or hitting.
• Verbal conflict, for example, a tease or a taunt.
• Rejection, which involves a child being ignored or not allowed to play with peers.
• Issues of compliance, which often involve asking or insisting that children do something that they do not want to do–for instance, wash their hands.

Expression of Anger. The second component of anger is its expression. Some children vent or express anger through facial expressions, crying, sulking, or talking, but do little to try to solve a problem or confront the provocateur. Others actively resist by physically or verbally defending their positions, self-esteem, or possessions in nonaggressive ways. Still other children express anger with aggressive revenge by physically or verbally retaliating against the provocateur. Some children express dislike by telling the offender that he or she cannot play or is not liked. Other children express anger through avoidance or attempts to escape from or evade the provocateur. And some children use adult seeking, looking for comfort or solutions from a teacher, or telling the teacher about an incident.

Teachers can use child guidance strategies to help children express angry feelings in socially constructive ways. Children develop ideas about how to express emotions (Michalson & Lewis, 1985; Russel, 1989) primarily through social interaction in their families and later by watching television or movies, playing video games, and reading books (Honig & Wittmer, 1992). Some children have learned a negative, aggressive approach to expressing anger (Cummings, 1987; Hennessy et al., 1994) and, when confronted with everyday anger conflicts, resort to using aggression in the classroom (Huesmann, 1988). A major challenge for early childhood teachers is to encourage children to acknowledge angry feelings and to help them learn to express anger in positive and effective ways.

An Understanding of Anger. The third component of the anger experience is understanding–interpreting and evaluating–the emotion. Because the ability to regulate the expression of anger is linked to an understanding of the emotion (Zeman & Shipman, 1996), and because children’s ability to reflect on their anger is somewhat limited, children need guidance from teachers and parents in understanding and managing their feelings of anger.

Understanding and Managing Anger

The development of basic cognitive processes undergirds children’s gradual development of the understanding of anger (Lewis & Saarni, 1985).

Memory. Memory improves substantially during early childhood (Perlmutter, 1986), enabling young children to better remember aspects of anger-arousing interactions. Children who have developed unhelpful ideas of how to express anger (Miller & Sperry, 1987) may retrieve the early unhelpful strategy even after teachers help them gain a more helpful perspective. This finding implies that teachers may have to remind some children, sometimes more than once or twice, about the less aggressive ways of expressing anger.

Language. Talking about emotions helps young children understand their feelings (Brown & Dunn, 1996). The understanding of emotion in preschool children is predicted by overall language ability (Denham, Zoller, & Couchoud, 1994). Teachers can expect individual differences in the ability to identify and label angry feelings because children’s families model a variety of approaches in talking about emotions.

Self-Referential and Self-Regulatory Behaviors.Self-referential behaviors include viewing the self as separate from others and as an active, independent, causal agent. Self-regulation refers to controlling impulses, tolerating frustration, and postponing immediate gratification. Initial self-regulation in young children provides a base for early childhood teachers who can develop strategies to nurture children’s emerging ability to regulate the expression of anger.

Guiding Children’s Expressions of Anger

Teachers can help children deal with anger by guiding their understanding and management of this emotion. The practices described here can help children understand and manage angry feelings in a direct and nonaggressive way.

Create a Safe Emotional Climate. A healthy early childhood setting permits children to acknowledge all feelings, pleasant and unpleasant, and does not shame anger. Healthy classroom systems have clear, firm, and flexible boundaries.

Model Responsible Anger Management. Children have an impaired ability to understand emotion when adults show a lot of anger (Denham, Zoller, & Couchoud, 1994). Adults who are most effective in helping children manage anger model responsible management by acknowledging, accepting, and taking responsibility for their own angry feelings and by expressing anger in direct and nonaggressive ways.

Help Children Develop Self-Regulatory Skills. Teachers of infants and toddlers do a lot of self-regulation “work,” realizing that the children in their care have a very limited ability to regulate their own emotions. As children get older, adults can gradually transfer control of the self to children, so that they can develop self-regulatory skills.

Encourage Children to Label Feelings of Anger. Teachers and parents can help young children produce a label for their anger by teaching them that they are having a feeling and that they can use a word to describe their angry feeling. A permanent record (a book or chart) can be made of lists of labels for anger (e.g., mad, irritated, annoyed), and the class can refer to it when discussing angry feelings.

Encourage Children to Talk About Anger-Arousing Interactions. Preschool children better understand anger and other emotions when adults explain emotions (Denham, Zoller, &Couchoud, 1994). When children are embroiled in an anger-arousing interaction, teachers can help by listening without judging,evaluating, or ordering them to feel differently.

Use Books and Stories about Anger to Help Children Understand and Manage Anger. Well-presented stories about anger and other emotions validate children’s feelings and give information about anger (Jalongo, 1986; Marion, 1995). It is important to preview all books about anger because some stories teach irresponsible anger management.

Communicate with Parents. Some of the same strategies employed to talk with parents about other areas of the curriculum can be used to enlist their assistance in helping children learn to express emotions. For example, articles about learning to use words to label anger can be included in a newsletter to parents.

Children guided toward responsible anger management are more likely to understand and manage angry feelings directly and non aggressively and to avoid the stress often accompanying poor anger management (Eisenberg et al., 1991). Teachers can take some of the bumps out of understanding and managing anger by adopting positive guidance strategies.

Condensed by permission from Marian Marion, “Guiding Young Children’s Understanding and Management of Anger,” Young Children 52(7), 62-67. Copyright 1997 by the National Association for the Education of Young Children.