First, the Bible: “A fool always loses his temper, but a wise man holds it back” (Proverbs 29:11).
You might say one of the essential qualities someone needs in order to go to heaven is the quality of self-control. One of the challenges parents have is to help children learn how to control their emotions as well as their behavior. Parents, of course, have to start by controlling themselves.
But how can you train your children to engage in self-control? Emotions can be so hard to control sometimes, especially for children who do not have the experience. When children experience emotions, what they are feeling is energy welling up inside of them. That energy might come out in uncontrollable energy, or anger, or something else that might not be productive. If you teach your children that this emotion is energy inside of them, it could help them learn how to control it. What are they going to do with that energy?
Of course, children have to learn how to handle little frustrations in life as well as the big challenges. Little frustrations can produce little energy; big frustrations, big energy! With small things, a child can be trained to take deep breaths, even count to 10 or so. They can walk away from the frustration; they can sit down and close their eyes. They might start doing something different. Either way, we are teaching our children that we can respond to our emotions. We might not be able to control whether we get emotional, but we can certainly control what we do with it.
Whatever you do, don’t get into a yelling match or a power struggle with your child. It seems to be that when a parent gets into a power struggle with their child – even a teen – he or she has already relinquished their authority as the parent. It is better to calm down, slow down the interaction, so that everyone has time to think and process what they are doing.
If you train your child to catch the “cues” that suggest an emotional episode is developing (especially relative to anger), you can train her or him how to channel it properly before it is displayed improperly. With older children, you can train them to start communicating with themselves or others about the proper response to make. And, as always, if they do something wrong against someone, they have to be trained to apologize.
Paul Holland
