Now imagine them three times as big as you, towering over you. Imagine your husband or wife losing their temper and screaming at you. What Happens to Your Child When You Scream or Hit To know that parental anger can be harmful to young children. Just as important, because it gives us incentive to control ourselves, we need It helps to know all this, if we're struggling to cope with anger. It can be enormously challenging to lay these ghosts to rest. The fears and rage of childhood are powerful and can overwhelm us even as adults. That’s etched like forgotten hieroglyphics deep in our psyches. They mean that our children stimulate the intense feelings of our own childhoods, and we often respond by unconsciously re-enacting the past Psychologists call this phenomenon “ghosts in the nursery,” by which Similarly, our kids push our buttons precisely because they are our children. (Who has greater power to annoy you and make you act childish than your own mother or father?) Even as adults we are often irrational in relation to our own parents. Parents and kids have the ability to trigger each other as no one else can.

That's why it's our responsibility as the grownup to stay awayįrom the cliff. We can expect our kids to act out in ways that send us over the cliff at times. We all enter the parenting relationship wounded in some way from our childhoods, and our kids surface all those wounds. We know this because we lose our ability to think clearly at those moments, and we start acting like children ourselves, throwingĭon't worry. Any issue that makes you feel like lashing out has roots in your ownĮarly years. Your child may be pushing your buttons, but he isn't causing your response. The whole process takes all of two seconds. Is a good offense, so we lash out at our child in anger. This cascade of thoughts creates a run-away train of emotions - in this case fear, dismay, guilt. We see our child's behavior ( 'He hit her again!'),Īnd we draw a conclusion ( 'He's going to be a psychopath!') which triggers other conclusions ( 'I've failed as a parent!'). We can sometimes stay patient and empathic and settle the storm.īut if we're stressed, we're primed to over-react. And we snap.īut no matter how aggravating we find our child's behavior, their behavior doesn't cause our angry response. In the middle of that stress, enter our child, who has awakened early and wants us up, or has suddenly remembered that she never did her assignment for school today, or is teasing her little brother. The pressures on parents are endless: health and financial worries, children fighting, just getting dinner on the table.

Teens react to the angry red button