Sometimes, It’s Hard Not to Be Angry at Your Kids But This helps

How to calm down and understand your children better? Let's take a breather and remember that children can't help themselves when overwhelmed by emotions, and our reactions aren't helping.

Image created by “AI tool Microsoft Bing Image Creator powered by DALL·E” - the author has the provenance and copyright.

Today was a challenging day

My lovely four-year-old daughter occasionally behaves in a way that drives me insane. I won’t go into details. Let’s just say it impacts those who love her most. It’s annoying as hell, but it is what it is.

I may understand that kids aren’t fully grown adults and can’t handle their emotions the way adults can, but they still get to me. I’m currently in the process of cooling off and finding a way to make peace with what happened.

I am furious, and I don’t want to be. I wanted to believe my daughter had improved at this particular issue, but I was wrong. We’ve made zero progress. Don’t worry, friends. There’s no need to call social services. At worst, I will temporarily ignore the little one until I cool off. It’s not something I’m proud of, but I am only human, and things do get to me.

Let us remind ourselves of the following truths

• Children can’t handle emotions like adults.
  They easily get overwhelmed by things that seem trivial to us, drowning in feelings.

• Children don’t generally act out intending to spite you.
  They don’t plot and scheme to hurt, anger, or disappoint us but merely react to triggers and instinctually act out.

• Children can’t help themselves. If they could, I’m sure they would. They don’t know any better, and if they do, they can’t (yet) follow through.

• Children experience the same situation differently than we do.
  What is trivial for us can be monumental for them. We probably can’t understand things from their perspective.

• Time takes care of most issues.
  Don’t expect too much too fast. Trust your children to figure it out in time. We all grew out of our phases sooner or later, and our kids will as well.

• Sometimes, not reacting is the best thing you can do.
  Reacting makes a minor issue bigger and often only exacerbates and prolongs it. Getting angry and punishing our children for things they can’t prevent doesn’t help. It only adds emotional weight to an already painful experience.

• You can’t force your children to talk to you if they don’t want to.
  We all want to help and believe we could if we knew the underlying problem. They will come to us if and when they are ready to talk. Sonner, if we don’t get all bent out of shape when they make mistakes.

All right. I feel better now. Thanks for reading. Have a good day!