Why is My Child So Angry All the Time?

Many of us parents have been there. One minute, you have a sweet little angel playing happily. The next thing you know, your child is a ball of rage screaming over a missing toy or perceived injustice. 

This can leave us feeling utterly overwhelmed, and frankly, completely helpless. “Why is my child so angry all the time?” is a question that probably bounces around in your home every once in a while, and it’s completely normal! 

The trick is, if you can identify the causes of your child's anger and learn to respond in helpful ways, you and your child will both have a much better experience.

Understanding and Supporting your Child

The first thing to note is that these emotions are not always what they seem. Often, emotional outbursts stem from underlying, alternative emotions that are not being expressed. This means they are displaying a secondary emotion, a reaction to something else the child is feeling, showing it with anger instead of what they’re experiencing. Try to think of this as an iceberg in the way you can only see the tip on top, while the rest is underwater.

Here are a few feelings and situations that can appear as rage:

• Anxiety/Fear: Although it might seem like the opposite, many children's fear and anxiety come out as anger or irritability. Rage is a good way to get a sense of control or push something away that feels scary.

• Frustration: Young children, especially, have a hard time expressing frustration. Specifically, what they are or are not getting, or activities they are not allowed to do. When these things happen, it makes them furious and act out as a response to feeling out of control.

• Sadness or Grief: Children feel sadness just like adults do, except they have a harder time identifying it. Often, this anger and rage we see comes from grief and children not knowing how to express their sadness.

• Fatigue/Hunger or Overstimulation: Sometimes, the reason behind anger is simple. Acting out can easily be caused by your child's fatigue or hunger, or even from them getting too much stimulation at once. Once again, this lack of awareness causes their emotions to express differently than they are feeling, leading to anger.

• Learning Differences, ADHD, etc.: Sometimes children who have a developmental disorder such as ADHD may not know how to deal with anger. Even though many children struggle to express their emotions outwardly, these children especially struggle, which is why it’s important as parents to recognize these emotional outbursts.

• Environmental factors: Changes in your household, family conflicts, or even struggles at school may cause a child to become enraged.

What Parents Can Do to Help

So what can we do to help when children are raging? It is not about stopping it, as anger is a normal part of being human. Instead, we should be helping children to learn to deal with and express anger in the right way.

The first concept to understand is that you are a detective, not a judge. Instead of punishing your child immediately, try to find out what is underneath this anger. When your child is calm again, ask questions like: "What happened right before this upset started?" or "How were you feeling?" 

With this being said, it’s important to calm your child down first, before asking them what’s wrong. This is because it’s difficult to think straight when emotions are high and unregulated. Once you have soothed your child, begin inquiring what went wrong.

Another helpful technique is to validate your child's feelings. No matter what they are doing, try to recognize what they are feeling. Say "I can see you are really angry right now", or "It is okay to feel angry." They will feel a lot more accepted, and it will help them calm down. 

Oftentimes, emotional outbursts are not to seek attention, but to seek connection. Giving your child a moment to validate their feelings can oftentimes be enough to calm them down, as this void of connection is suddenly filled.

Moving away from immediate strategies to long term help, teaching coping techniques can be beneficial. After you have calmed your child, show them techniques they can use to further regulate. Teach them how to breathe deeply, count to ten, draw what they are feeling or think of a safe space. 

This concept is called co-regulation and, with practice, leads to self-soothing. When you help your child practice coping strategies (co-regulation), they learn how to later calm themselves down on their own (self-soothing). This phenomenon gives your child the tools to calm down before reacting when upset in the future.

An alternative issue that arises when children are upset is a feeling of injustice. They act out because they feel something was not “fair” or a rule wasn’t clear. Which is why setting clear rules and consequences is crucial. Although we do not want to be “punitive” parents and our focus should not be on punishment, we do need to have a standard for our children's behaviour. 

Anger should never result in unacceptable actions such as hitting someone, so setting boundaries with your child, i.e. no yelling, hitting, or screaming, can set a solid structure. Although this might sound simple, instilling rules is impactful as children strive for consistency and structure. 

With that being said, one of the most important factors of setting boundaries is following them, parents included. Making a conscious effort to model the “rules” you carry for your child goes a long way. Children learn the most from the people around them, so being a good example of how to regulate emotions, self sooth and bounce back when things go wrong, demonstrates realistic expectations.

It is extremely beneficial to talk through problems with your child. Of course, this should occur once emotions are regulated, but using meltdowns as learning opportunities puts a positive switch onto a negative situation. This can look like asking them, “Do we explode and yell when something is unfair, or do we take a deep breath and calmly talk about it?” 

Highlighting exactly what went “wrong” with the child’s behaviour helps them to understand specifically what NOT to do next time. As well as giving them an alternative reaction, like talking it out or taking a deep breath, teaches them an alternative response.

Lastly, take a look at their basic needs. Make sure your child is getting enough sleep, regular food, and has outlets to burn off steam with physical activity, as well as downtime. These basic needs are very important and often a cause of irritability and rage. Sometimes thinking about the basics makes us realize this may be an easier fix than we think.

When Parents Lose Their Cool

With this being said, as parents, we often don’t react as well as we should. Sometimes our kids decide to have meltdowns, kicking and screaming after a long day of work, and we are simply on our last straw. This can lead to yelling back and maybe engaging with our child in ways we could have avoided. 

This does not make you a bad parent. We are allowed to have bad days, make mistakes, and react in ways we are not always proud of. Although we can’t take it back, we can fix it, which looks like apologizing and taking accountability. 

As we discussed earlier, our kids mirror what we model and lashing out at them (even if they were being disruptive) sets the wrong expectation. It’s crucial that after an argument, you go to your child and apologize for a poor reaction you might have had, modelling what you would like from them if they were to mess up. 

Taking the moment to do this, rather than avoiding a conversation out of shame, also allows your child to feel like an equal and gives them a feeling of fairness (which is a large focus for young children).

Reminder: You're Doing Your Best as Parents

When your child is raging or acting out, it can feel very overwhelming and lonely. It’s difficult to deal with conflict between you and your child, but it's crucial to realize how common it is! There is no such thing as a parent who can always detect their child’s emotion, consistently know what to say and never react poorly…they just don’t exist.

Although we would all love to be perfect parents, no one is, and sometimes all we can do is try our best! With that being said, we can learn about why children act the way they do. They might need a person to talk to, someone to validate their feelings, a parent to teach them coping skills or even someone to calm them down. Even if we don’t know what our child is necessarily angry about, we can do our best to calm them down, so we're able to talk it out. 

Remember, we can’t always control our child’s reaction, but we can do our best to control our own and  model healthy anger management. Sometimes these tricks are more than enough to help our kids, and other times, we might just be dealing with a more dysregulated child who needs some extra support. Luckily, there are many professionals (like our clinic) that can help, and there is no shame in reaching out if these typical “fixes” don’t fix.