“Anger isn’t allowed at school.”    ~ 4th Grade Student

I’ve heard students identify themselves as “angry” or “bad” before they’ve even made it through elementary school. It got me thinking about the messages they’re receiving. Over the years, it’s become clearer to me how often kids confuse anger with the consequences generated when they act out of anger and rage. They haven’t learned to separate anger from their reactions to it. The assumption is that anger is “bad” because they “got in trouble”. Early on, we can develop a negative relationship with anger.

It’s a lifelong practice to be with the difficult energy that we call anger. It’s an emotion we often don’t like because of how it feels and because of how we find ourselves acting out of it. Anger itself is not a problem. As challenging as it is, we can develop strategies to work with the energy, to settle ourselves down before responding in triggering situations. We see kids struggle with reactivity and we know adults struggle too. It’s part of the human condition. As strange as it may sound, we can get to know our anger and actually befriend it. What does it look like? What does it have to say? It’s not easy, but we can practice ways to support ourselves in making more skillful choices when we’re angry or upset.

With my 4th grade class, I recently taught a lesson highlighting parts of our brain that relate to emotions and decision-making. I’m not a neuroscientist so I made my best “ish” drawing of the brain. I labeled the prefrontal cortex, amygdala and hippocampus. We talked about the role of each and how we can see their jobs manifest in our daily lives. I love bringing this topic to light because kids start to see that everyone gets triggered sometimes and may react out of fear, anger and frustration. Our “security guard” is trying to keep us safe and sometimes we overreact. We can use strategies to settle down our stress response and give ourselves space to make more thoughtful decisions.

When our “thinking brain” can see more clearly, we’re available to make skillful choices and take responsibility for our actions. Through sharing, kids listen to each other and see they’re not alone in experiencing anger. We come together as a community as we practice strategies to support mindful responses to challenging situations.

Here are a few book recommendations that support working with emotions:

Anh’s Anger

Steps and Stones

Visiting Feelings

Be well!

xo