anger and love

Anger and love. The two are more closely related than most of us want to admit. We get angry at the people we love. You may be surprised to find a chapter on anger in a book about love. But the truth is, often we feel anger and love at the same time.

Anger is the most troublesome emotion in family life. It can lead to marital conflict and to the verbal and physical abuse of children. Mishandled anger is at the root of most of society’s problems. Yet we must realize that anger has a positive place in our lives and in rearing our children. Not all anger is evil. You can feel anger because you want justice and care for someone’s (including your child’s) welfare. The ultimate and righteous purpose of anger is to motivate us to set things right and to correct evil. Thus, angry mothers formed MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, to try to stop this scourge on our highways. Their organization began after one woman channeled her anger over her child’s death by an intoxicated driver in a positive manner, lobbying for tougher laws against drunken motorists.

However, anger more commonly creates problems than solves them. As an emotion, anger is not always expressed for righteous reasons. It often becomes irrational and we do not control it; it controls us. In the heat of anger, people often throw reason to the wind and take a destructive course that actually makes things worse. Also, we don’t always judge properly what is the greatest right for ourselves and other people, or we seek to correct wrongs in selfish ways.

The primary lifetime threat to your child is his or her own anger.

Anger is a little-understood emotion—why we feel it, how we express it, and how we can change the way we deal with our frustrations. Unless we as parents know what anger is and how we can handle it in appropriate ways, we will not be able to teach our children what to do when they feel angry. Yes, when , because all of us, parents and children, get angry every day.

It may surprise you that the primary lifetime threat to your child is his or her own anger. If your child does not handle his own anger well, it will damage or destroy him. The mishandling of anger is related to every present and future problem your child may have—from poor grades to damaged relationships to possible suicide. It is imperative that you do all you can to safeguard your child now and in the future.

However, the good news is that if your child learns to handle anger well, he will have a great advantage in life. Most of life’s problems will be averted and your child will be more able to use anger to his advantage, rather than to have it work against him.

Is This Your Family?

Equally important, we parents must learn to handle our own anger as we respond to our children. Few adults have mastered appropriate ways to handle anger. One reason is that most anger is expressed subconsciously, below the level of our awareness. Another is that few adults have made the transition from immature to mature means of dealing with anger. Typically this affects our dealings with our spouse and children. Consider how the Jacksons deal with their anger.

After a day’s work, a tired Jeff Jackson is playing word games on his iPhone in the den. A tired Ellen Jackson is cleaning up after dinner. Neither is very happy with the other. Will comes in and asks Mom for some cookies. She is not in a cookie-giving mood and says, “You didn’t finish your supper and so you can’t have anything else.” Feeling the cause is lost, Will goes to the den where he finds a candy jar. Dad asks, “What are you doing? You heard your mother. No candy!”

Will leaves the room but returns in five minutes, bouncing his basketball. “Can I go to Jack’s house?”

“No, you can’t. You haven’t finished your homework. And stop bouncing that ball!”

Will takes his ball and leaves. In five minutes he is back, this time bouncing his ball in the kitchen. “Mom, I need a book to finish my homework and I didn’t bring mine home. Jack has one. Can I go over there and borrow his?” Just then the basketball hits the table, knocking a glass to the floor.

Hearing this, Jeff is out of his chair and into the kitchen. “I told you to stop bouncing that ball!” He grabs Will by the hand and pulls him into the den where he starts flailing him on the bottom, yelling, “How many times do I have to tell you? You’re going to learn to listen to me!”

Ellen is in the kitchen crying. She calls, “Stop it. Stop it. You’re gonna kill him!” When Jeff stops, Will runs to his room, also crying. Dad plops onto the couch and stares at the TV. Mom goes to the bedroom, still crying. The family anger has not served a constructive purpose.

Many emotions were swirling in this household and everyone was angry. Ellen was angry at Jeff for not helping her clean up. Jeff was angry with Will for disobeying their house rule about the basketball. And Will was the angriest of all because his dad’s discipline was far out of line with his crime. Ellen was also angry at her husband’s actions toward their son.

Nothing is resolved. Everything is worse. What Will does with his anger remains to be seen. Even if he shows compliance on the surface and acts as if everything is all right, you can be sure that his anger will show up later in his behavior.

Now let’s imagine this scene with a different response to anger.

Early in the evening, Ellen leaves the kitchen and joins Jeff in the den, speaking his primary love language for a moment, and then saying to him, “I have a problem. I’m feeling quite angry right now, but don’t worry, I’m not going to attack you. I just need your help in solving my problem. Is this a good time to talk?” Then she may return to the kitchen or go to another room and read for a while.

When they do talk, Ellen calmly shares her sense of unfairness that he is not helping her clean up, especially since she worked all day too and then prepared supper. She tells him that she expects more of him and asks that he make a practice of helping her in the future.

Parents who have not learned to control their own anger are not likely to train their children how to do it.

If Ellen and Jeff had had this talk, Will’s request for a cookie might have received a different response. When he bounced the ball for the second time in the kitchen, Dad could have come in and taken the ball in his hand, spoken Will’s primary love language for a moment, explained to him his disobedience and let him know that his ball would be locked in the trunk of Dad’s car for the next two days. Then he could have spoken his son’s primary love language again for a moment. What a different situation there would have been in this home.

Parents who have not learned to control their own anger are not likely to train their children how to do it. And yet, this kind of training is essential for the well-being of children and of society. If you have never learned how to manage your own anger, we strongly urge you to get some help in this area, so that you will be able to teach your children by example and by word how to best handle their anger.

The Right Kind of Anger

How your child learns to handle anger will largely influence the development of his personal integrity, one of the most important aspects of character. Train your child to manage anger appropriately and he will then be able to develop good character and strong integrity. However, if the child is not taught to handle anger in a mature way, he will always have pockets of immaturity in his character—that is, in his personal value systems, ethics, and morals. Such immaturity will manifest itself in a lack of integrity.

This lack will critically affect the child’s spiritual development; the less able a child is to deal with anger well, the more antagonistic will be his attitude toward authority, including the authority of God. A child’s immature handling of anger is a primary reason the child will reject the parent’s spiritual values.

However, the good news is that when we parents do our job of training our children to manage their anger, we will see them thrive in life. Realize that anger itself is a normal human reaction; it is neither good nor bad. The problem is not the anger but the way it is managed. It can have beneficial results, if it energizes and motivates us to take action when we would otherwise remain silent.

We remember Jill, a shy fourteen-year-old who dreaded confrontations and conflict. She is truly a people-pleaser, and was struggling in her history class, where the teacher made a habit of putting down all religious faiths, especially Christianity. He frequently ridiculed well-known Christians whom Jill admired. As a Christian, Jill at first felt confused by her teacher’s antagonism and later even began to question her own faith.

Then, about midyear, the teacher made a caustic remark about “preachers’ kids.” One of Jill’s friends was the daughter of a pastor and this made Jill angry. In fact, she was furious! That evening she called some other Christian kids in the class and laid out a plan in which they agreed to participate. The next time the teacher began his belittling remarks, these students spoke up, though in a respectful way. They let the teacher know his comments were offensive. His first response was to try to ridicule the young people, but he soon realized how foolish he sounded and changed the subject. For the rest of the year, he made no more derogatory comments about religious faiths. Jill had used her anger constructively, to educate her teacher and to protect her personal freedom.

The Passive-Aggressive Child

Unfortunately, most people do not manage their anger as well as Jill did. A more common and destructive way to handle anger is called passive-aggressive behavior. Passive-aggressive behavior is an expression of anger that gets back at a person or group indirectly, or “passively.” It is a subconscious determination to do exactly opposite of what an authority figure wants. An authority figure is a parent, teacher, minister, boss, policeman, laws, societal norms—any person or value system that represents authority. Of course, for a child or teenager, the primary authority figures are parents.

Ben, fifteen, is bright, has no learning problems, and is capable of making good grades. He brings home his books most nights and does his homework. But he is angry at his parents, and he is bringing home grades well below his ability. His parents are frustrated. His behavior is a classic passive-aggressive response.

Why Ben Didn’t Do His Homework

There are several ways for parents to decide if they are dealing with passive-aggressive behavior, and a correct identification is important, since there are many other reasons for behavioral problems. First, passive-aggressive behavior does not make sense. This was certainly true in Ben’s case—with his ability and hard work, his poor grades were very difficult to understand.

Second, you can suspect passive-aggressive behavior when nothing you do to correct the behavior works. Because the purpose of passive-aggressive behavior is to upset the authority figure, no matter what action that authority figure takes, it will make no difference. Nothing that Ben’s parents or teachers did improved his grades. They helped him with his homework, they promised to reward him for good grades, and they even tried punishment. Each new method seemed to improve the situation briefly, but in the long run, nothing worked. This is the reason passive-aggressive behavior is so difficult to deal with. Subconsciously, Ben was making sure that nothing would work, since the underlying purpose was to upset the authority figures.

Third, although the purpose of this behavior is to frustrate authority figures, the person acting in this way is the one who will ultimately be defeated and whose future and relationships will be seriously affected.

Passive Aggressive Behavior during the Early Teen Years

There is only one period of life when passive-aggressive behavior is normal: early adolescence, when a child is thirteen to fifteen years old. And it can be considered normal only if it does not cause harm to anyone. It is essential that the child learns how to handle anger in a mature fashion and grows out of the passive-aggressive stage. If he does not, this behavior will become a permanent part of his character and personality for life, used against employers, spouse, children, and friends.

Teens of bygone eras may have acted out this behavior in ways like putting Farmer Brown’s cow on top of the barn or overturning his outhouse. In the city, boys sometimes formed teams to take a Volkswagen bug apart and then reassemble it in the owner’s bedroom. Today teenagers have many more options for passive-aggressive behavior, and some of these are dangerous: drugs, violence, alcohol, crime, sexual activity resulting in venereal disease or pregnancy, school failure, and even suicide. Often, when the teens move out of this stage, serious life damage has been done.

As parents, you need to distinguish between harmless passive-aggressive behavior and that which is abnormal and harmful. For example, toilet-papering trees is a normal outlet during a teen’s passive-aggressive stage. A messy room may be aggravating, but it is harmless. Also, strenuous physical activities can help teenagers to satisfy their desire for excitement and danger. Teens may be helped through this stage by involvement in mountain climbing, rope courses, long-distance biking, and team or individual sports.

Many parents have made the tragic mistake of thinking that all anger is wrong and should be disciplined out of children.

As you seek to help your young teenagers through this stage, remember that your objective is to train them to manage their anger by the time they are seventeen years old. They can’t leave the passive-aggressive stage unless they learn other, more mature and acceptable ways to replace the behavior. Unfortunately, many people never grow out of this stage—passive-aggressive behavior among adults is all too common.

The truth is that most people do not understand anger or the ways in which it can be managed. Many parents have made the tragic mistake of thinking that all anger is wrong and should be disciplined out of children. This approach does not work and it does children no favors. It does not train children to handle their anger in constructive ways; consequently, they continue to mishandle it into adulthood, just as their parents did before them. Passive-aggressive behavior is a primary cause of failure in college, problems at work, and conflict in marriage.

Because passive-aggressive behavior is the hidden source of most of life’s worst difficulties, we as parents must train our children and teens to manage anger appropriately. We can’t discipline it out of them.

Begin Early

Obviously, you can’t wait until the teenage years to teach your children about anger management. You have to begin when they are very young, although you can’t expect them to be able to handle anger with any level of maturity until the age of six or seven.

Anger management is the most difficult part of parenting because children are limited in the ways they can express anger. They have only two options, verbal or behavioral expression, and both are difficult for parents to handle. Parents find it hard to understand that the anger must come out some way—that it cannot be totally bottled up. As a result, many parents respond to children’s expressions of anger in wrong and destructive ways.

As you consider the two options, recognize that it is better for your child to express anger verbally rather than behaviorally. When your child vents anger in words, you are able to train her in the direction of mature anger management. You want to avoid passive-aggressive behavior at all costs.

Until the age of six or seven, you are working primarily to keep passive-aggressive behavior from taking root in your child. The first and most important way you do this is to keep his emotional love tank full of unconditional love. The prime cause of anger and of misbehavior is an empty love tank. Speak your child’s love language clearly and regularly and you will fill that tank and prevent passive-aggressive behavior from taking root. When that love tank is full, the child is under no pressure to display his unhappiness by asking, through his behavior, “Do you love me?” The child whose love tank is empty is compelled to ask, through misbehavior, “Do you love me?”

Next, realize that your children have no defense against parental anger. When you dump your anger on your child, it goes right down inside the child. If you do this often enough, this bottled anger will probably come out as passive-aggressive behavior. Listen to her calmly; let her express her anger verbally. It may not be pleasant to hear her anger, but it’s preferable to her acting it out.

Unfortunately, when children let their anger out verbally, too many parents lash out and say something like, “How dare you talk to me like that? I never want to hear you speak to me that way again. Do you understand?” The children then have only two choices. They can obey and not express anger verbally, or they can disobey. What a corner to be in!

Helping Children Climb the Anger Ladder

Thousands of parents have been helped in their understanding of a child’s anger by visualizing an Anger Ladder (see illustration on page 171). As you work with your children in the coming years, you will always be seeking to help them climb from one rung of the Anger Ladder to the next, away from the most negative expressions of anger to the more positive. The goal is to move the child from passive-aggressive behavior and verbal abuse to a calm, even pleasant response that seeks resolution. This is a long process that involves training, example, and patience.

You will notice that passive-aggressive behavior is at the bottom of the ladder. It represents totally unmanaged anger. Because this behavior is common during the teenage years, you will have to deal with that level at some point, but you should not let your teenage child stay there. If you do, you could be heading for serious problems.

You need to remind yourself that your child can climb only one rung at a time. If you want the process and training to be finished soon, this will be frustrating. You may wait some time before your child is ready to take the next step. This calls for patience and wisdom, but the results are well worth the wait. As you watch your child express anger, you need to identify where she is on the Anger Ladder, so that you will know the next step.

In the Campbell household, I remember one particularly unpleasant experience when my son, David, was thirteen. He verbalized his anger only when a particular event upset him. Sometimes he was verbalizing his anger at me in ways that I didn’t want to hear. I had to do some self-talk. I knew letting him express that anger would help to determine where he was on the Anger Ladder. Inside myself I would say to him, Attaboy, David, attaboy. Let that anger out, because when it is all out, I’ve got you. Of course, I didn’t say this to David.

Another reason I wanted the anger to come out was that as long as it was inside of David, it controlled the house. But once it was outside, he felt silly and I could regain control. He had gotten all the anger out verbally and was asking himself, “Now what do I do?” It was then that I was in a great position to train him.

Letting David roll those words out of his mouth helped in another way. The more anger he expressed verbally, the less there would be to come out in destructive attitudes and behaviors.

That will be true for your child too. Let him or her verbalize the anger and you’ll see where the child stands on the Anger Ladder, and you can limit potential passive-aggressive behavior.

Let Your Child Show Her Anger

Fellow parents, this way of dealing with children is not always easy to accept. Allowing a child to express anger verbally may seem permissive. It really is not. Remember that children of any age will naturally express anger in immature ways. You can’t train them to express their anger in mature ways simply by getting upset at them and forcing them to stop venting their anger. If you do, their anger will be over-suppressed and passive-aggressive behavior will be the result.

Allowing a child to express anger verbally may seem permissive. It really is not.

If you want to train your children to manage anger in a mature fashion, you must allow them to express it verbally, as unpleasant as that may be. Remember, all anger must come out either verbally or behaviorally. If you don’t allow it to come out verbally, passive-aggressive behavior will follow.

When your child speaks in anger, it does not necessarily mean that he is being disrespectful. To determine whether he is respectful, ask yourself, “What is the child’s attitude toward my authority most of the time?” Most children are respectful over 90 percent of the time. If this is true of your child, and now he is bringing verbal anger to you about a particular situation, this is exactly what you want to happen. For once your child has gotten the angry feelings out, you are then in an excellent position to train him.

Isn’t it unfair , you may wonder, to expect me to feel thankful that my daughter is expressing the anger verbally and then to control myself? We acknowledge this is not easy. But as you behave this way, you are forcing yourself to mature. And you are saving yourself and your family from some of life’s worst problems later on.

You may be wondering about children who verbalize anger most of the time, upset or not. It’s true: some children express anger to manipulate their parents and get their own way, and that is unacceptable. Angry verbal expressions motivated by a desire to upset and hurt others are inappropriate and must be corrected. Handle those words like any misbehavior. But in the correction, practice the basic parental parameters: be kind but firm.

This may seem confusing, but letting your child bring his anger to you verbally when he is upset about a particular problem will provide you an opportunity to train him, as we will discuss below. Be sure to control yourself as your child expresses his anger verbally. And always remain kind but firm.

Seize the Moment

After an angry outburst, seize the moment to help your child learn to handle her anger. As soon as things are stable between you, sit down together and do three things. Each will help your child deal with her anger in a positive way.

1. Let her know that you are not going to condemn her. Especially if a child is very responsive to authority, she may feel guilty about what she has done and never express her feelings again. Part of training is to let her know that you accept her as a person and always want to know how she is feeling, whether happy or sad or angry.

2. Commend your child for the things she did right. You may say, “You did let me know that you were angry, and that is good. You didn’t let your anger out on your little brother or the dog. You didn’t throw anything or hit the wall. You simply told me that you were angry.” Mention whatever she did that was right. Anytime a child brings verbal anger to you, she has done some right things and avoided some wrong ones.

3. Help your child take a step up the Anger Ladder. The goal is to move your son or daughter toward a more positive anger response. So you want to give your child a request rather than a prohibition. Instead of saying, “Don’t ever call me that name again!” you say, “From now on, Son, please don’t call me that name. All right?” Of course, this doesn’t guarantee that he will never again say what you have asked him not to. But it does ensure that when he is sufficiently mature, he will take that step. That may be the next day or several weeks or months down the road.

This kind of training is a long and difficult process, but, after you have done it enough times, your child will begin to do right without your reminder. The combination of your training, plus your good example of handling anger in a mature fashion, will help your child do her own self-training after a while.

For more information on helping children to handle anger, we recommend two books by Ross: How to Really Love Your Child and How to Really Love Your Teenager.

Love and Anger

Again, the most crucial element in training your children to manage their anger is your unconditional love for them. When they know that they are loved in this way, when they truly feel loved all the time, they will be far more responsive to your training. Also, you will be much more likely to achieve your goal of bringing them to emotional maturity by age seventeen.

We define love as looking out for another person’s interests and seeking to meet her needs. With this definition, all wrongful words and deeds are actually a lack of love. We cannot be loving a child and at the same time be treating her poorly. To insist that we are still loving her when we are behaving badly toward her is to make the word love meaningless. A child treated this way does not feel loved. Rather, she feels angry, because she thinks that she is unloved.

We all know adults who are angry because they felt unloved by their parents. They may give very valid reasons for their anger, but at the root of those specifics is a lack of love. Their conclusion is, “If they loved me, they would not have treated me the way they did.”

We are not suggesting that children who receive unconditional love, spoken in the primary and other love languages, will never get angry. They will, simply because we live in an imperfect world. Nor are we saying that in order to resolve your children’s anger you must agree with their viewpoint. However, you must hear their viewpoint and come to understand their concern. Then you can judge whether they were wronged or misunderstood. At times you may need to apologize to your children. At other times, you may need to explain your reasoning for a decision you have made about their best interests. Even if they do not like your decision, they will respect it if you have taken time to fully hear and understand their complaints.

Processing anger and then training your children to deal with it in a mature way is one of the hardest parts of parenting. But the rewards are great. Speak your child’s love language, keep his love tank filled, and watch him develop into a loving and responsible adult who knows how to process anger and helps other people do the same.

About The 5 Love Languages of Children

The 5 Love Languages of Children by Dr. Gary Chapman and Dr. Ross Campbell is a groundbreaking parenting guide that reveals how every child has a unique way of understanding and receiving love. Building on the bestselling The 5 Love Languages concept, this book helps parents discover their child's primary love language and learn to speak it fluently.

About the Authors:

Dr. Gary Chapman is a renowned marriage counselor, bestselling author, and creator of the original Five Love Languages concept. His books have sold millions of copies worldwide and transformed countless relationships.
Dr. Ross Campbell is a psychiatrist specializing in children and adolescents, with decades of experience helping families build stronger emotional connections.

Anger and Love