Can I handle my anger like a kindergartner?

Dear EQuipped Leaders,

Hi! I didn’t write to you last week over the break, and I found myself really excited to be back writing to you this morning.

How are you? How was your fall break? How is your holiday season?

I hope you’re well. I hope you’re letting yourself feel all of your feelings.

I find that during the holiday season, I sometimes try to inhibit mine and my kids’ emotions more. I think I have a picture in my head of how holidays are “supposed” to look–mostly so I can feel like a good parent. When my family and I are all inevitably human and don’t fit neatly into my expectations picture, I have to remember to breathe and be kind.

I find this is especially true of anger.

I don’t know why this happens, but I notice my 5-year-old often has a big blow-up of anger during events when I feel like I’m crushing it as a parent, and he “should” be nothing but blissfully happy and grateful.

Can you relate with your students?

or your children?

or yourself?

I do this with myself all the time: I should be happy. Why am I mad? This is supposed to be the most WONDERFUL time of the year. Not the most frustrating!

The more I make space for myself to just feel angry before taking action, the kinder I can be to myself and others. I also did not realize the toll that suppressing my anger was taking on my energy level until I stopped suppressing it. Pretending not to be angry all the time was sucking the life out of me. Learning to feel my anger and grow my awareness of it has been transformative for me.

Same with my son. We just went to a theme park in our town called Santa’s Wonderland. It’s one of my favorite traditions, AND I know that every year we go, my son is going to have at least one big outburst of anger. We’ve gone four years in a row now, so I’m learning how to better ride the waves of extreme excitement to sudden anger back to joy all over again. I don’t get so nervous now when he gets really upset. I think one major shift is we’re starting to practice behaviors to regulate anger when we’re NOT in the middle of a meltdown.

This sounds so obvious, but we haven’t really been doing it until now. Which brings me to our Kindergarten curriculum lesson for today: “Knowing My Emotions: Anger.”

We all need anger. It is not bad. We all also need to figure out how to slow ourselves down when we are angry, so we can learn from it without being overcome by it.

So let’s start talking to kindergartners about their anger BEFORE we are in a moment when they are already angry. Because they don’t have a fully developed prefrontal cortex yet, and when they’re really dysregulated, they are totally offline. Same goes for us as adults actually even with our fancy prefrontal cortex. When we’re flooded, we can’t show up kindly either. Honestly, I’m learning how to practice healthy behaviors to calm but not suppress my anger for the first time now too. And if I wait to practice when I’m in the middle of a really hard situation, it’s probably not going to go well. It’d be like trying to learn how to swim when you’re already drowning–not the right moment for new skill building.

So when we are ALL calm, we can start practicing helpful behaviors together. Behaviors that leave space of us to feel our anger without suppressing it and without getting destructive.

Here is the teacher guide for today’s lesson:

I love this lesson SO much. I love that it reminds teachers to talk about a time when we feel angry. Instead of vilifying anger, we can model that we ALL feel angry, including adults. We’re not above it. We’re all human.

I actually think the thing that has helped my son the most is seeing my husband and me learn what works for us when we’re angry. When I get flooded, I go for a walk to cool down. When my husband gets flooded, he goes and plays disc golf. My son pointed this out the other day, so he’s starting to notice us trying to practice what we preach.

We’ve also been practicing breathing exercises like the one in today’s lesson, and he has started taking deep breaths when he’s angry without me having to prompt him. It makes me feel so proud that he is practicing behaviors like that.

And when I get dysregulated at Santa’s Wonderland because my son is feeling something inconvenient, I can remind myself that this is actually exactly what I want our holiday to look like: my son feeling safe to feel ALL of his feelings, and me being able to coach him through how to handle them. We have his whole childhood to learn how to respond to anger, so it’s actually really healthy that our holidays don’t meet the perfect picture in my head. Maybe it’s the most wonderful time AND the most infuriating time of the year. And that’s okay. We can handle all of it. We’ve got space for all of it.

Where does this land for you?

What’s making you angry this holiday season?
When do you see your students getting angry?
What tools do the kids in your care have for regulating their anger? Have they practiced these behaviors when they’re calm? Do you think it might help them?
What do you do to calm your body when you’re flooded?

Stay angry AND soft, Elizabeth