Having just spent two full holiday weeks with my kids, it occurred to me this morning that raising young children is the ultimate test in anger management.
You know the lines. Address the situation, not the other person. Bring change to yourself first, not to the other person. Easy on paper, very difficult in practice.
With adults, it is often easy to blame it on the other person. After all, he/she is a full-grown adult, why can't he/she be more mature, rational, have a good grounding in the facts etc.?
With children, you can't pin the blame on them anymore! They are what they are at this age. You can't expect them to be mature or rational! But we still lose our cool, and that's a perfect reflection of our own emotional management skills.
Therein lies the ultimate test in anger management. We have to change ourselves to address the situation, and that ain't always easy, because being human means we resist change with all the might we could muster.
Failure to manage our anger eventually leads to child abuse. The male gender is more frequently associated with such behaviour, but it seems the female gender is sometimes not spare such emotional rampage too.
Our children grow up with us, but we grow up with our children too. Good luck to all the parents traveling on this amazing journey together!
You know the lines. Address the situation, not the other person. Bring change to yourself first, not to the other person. Easy on paper, very difficult in practice.
With adults, it is often easy to blame it on the other person. After all, he/she is a full-grown adult, why can't he/she be more mature, rational, have a good grounding in the facts etc.?
With children, you can't pin the blame on them anymore! They are what they are at this age. You can't expect them to be mature or rational! But we still lose our cool, and that's a perfect reflection of our own emotional management skills.
Therein lies the ultimate test in anger management. We have to change ourselves to address the situation, and that ain't always easy, because being human means we resist change with all the might we could muster.
Failure to manage our anger eventually leads to child abuse. The male gender is more frequently associated with such behaviour, but it seems the female gender is sometimes not spare such emotional rampage too.
Our children grow up with us, but we grow up with our children too. Good luck to all the parents traveling on this amazing journey together!
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