Ask BBB

Q:My child has started saying he is going to hit or punch me whenever he gets angry or doesn’t get his way. What do I say to him to calm him down and not threaten me? He usually doesn’t do it, or if he does, it is barely a tap, but I don’t want it to escalate or for him to say mean things like this.

Your issue with your child is certainly not uncommon for a young child. When a young child has not learned how to appropriately express his big feelings, he will often hit or attempt to hurt others. However, you don’t say how old your child is. That makes a difference, a big one!

Learning how to express anger and other “big” feelings is part of growing up, developing social skills and acquiring emotional literacy. It’s a lesson for all growing children. Some adults haven’t even mastered it. Ever known someone who has issues with “anger management?”

Emotional literacy means becoming familiar with a full range of feelings—recognizing the feeling, being able to name it and expressing that feeling appropriately. Like all learning, it is a process, and it takes time, exposure and experience. Children whose parents protect them from experiencing the negative feelings, like sadness, anger and fear, are unlikely to become emotionally literate and competent.

A child being able to handle his big feelings also requires impulse control. That, too, is something that is developed over time. Most very young children have weak, if any, impulse control, so stopping themselves can be a real challenge. After the preschool years is when we can reasonably expect most typically functioning children to have gained a fair amount of impulse control. And, once again, don’t we all know some adults who are still challenged by impulse control!

All people, children included, need to be able to express their feelings. Holding them in, squelching them, does not get those feelings out, which helps you to feel better. There are lots of ways of getting them out, too. Some are legit and others are absolutely not OK … like hitting your parent or teacher or caregiver. Too often a parent will try to stop the child from expressing his feelings because she, the parent, is worried about the child becoming out of control or simply believes that it isn’t OK to have those feelings. But feelings must be expressed lest they fester or leak out in unacceptable ways.

On the road to learning how to express their anger, children need to learn what they should or can do at the same time that they learn what is not OK. And herein lies one answer which will help. Telling a child what not to do doesn’t often work. “Don’t hit Mommy!”  Children need to live with what they are learning. They need to see what to do. Do your children ever get to see you angry? Do they see what you do with your big feelings, how you express them? “I’m so angry right now, I need to go outside and scream!” or “I need to take a few box breaths to feel calm.” You need to model not only that everyone has big feelings, but also how to express them in an acceptable manner.

To answer your question of what to do when your child raises a hand to you but doesn’t really hit, here’s the plan. You say, “Wow, it looks like you are so angry at me. You really want to hit. Let’s go get those angry feelings out!” Then you offer going outside to yell really loudly, or use a big voice to tell you he is really mad, or stomp his feet hard. Get it out! The idea here is to express his anger, and you need to empathize with him. It is OK to be angry; it’s not OK to hit your mom. When a child feels heard and is allowed his feelings, the feelings are far less likely to escalate.

Expressing one’s feelings is not being “mean,” as is your worry above. It is being real. It is our job to help our children to be authentic in appropriate ways that do not hurt other people’s bodies or feelings. The way you react to his faux aggression is a chance to model how it feels to be hit and what you do to get those hurt feelings out. It is also a chance to teach him that all his feelings are real and “legal.”

As your child’s first teacher, you model and teach so many of these lessons. His emotional literacy will grow right along with his developing empathy and his social skills. This I promise you.

BBB is a child development and behavior specialist in Pacific Palisades. She can be reached through betsybrownbraun.com.