Psychologist Andrey Kashkarov told how to teach a child to cope with anger
There are situations when a child literally "sparks" with emotions, which manifests itself in different ways. In noticeable actions - screaming, setting conditions for the manifestation of whims, excessive gesticulation, "distorted" facial expressions, and some can even come up and "kick" their mother's car with their foot.
At the same time, all this does not yet indicate that the child is bad, has pronounced traits of an abuser or is dangerous. Everything is still within the conditional norm, says psychologist Andrei Kashkarov .
There is such a concept in psychology as emotional lability. Children and adults with its predominant character traits "get going with half a turn", seem to have excessive expressiveness - including well demonstrated (as an option) in correspondence or face-to-face communication, seem unreasonably demanding or "unapproachable proud people", arrogant egoists "to the marrow of their bones".
All this is both true and not. As we have already reported earlier, it is necessary to be careful in judging others and to treat the "labels" that "out of the simplicity of their soul" and generally laziness, lack of education, other people hang around themselves. This is especially true for children. Therefore, several definitions are given in this paragraph not for self-affirmation, but solely for your peace of mind: if someone "here and there sometimes" tries to "write down" your child as unworthy, aggressive and "angry", get up and have this reasoned toolkit for a correct response.
A person (and a child) with expressive character traits, emotional lability and seemingly provocative behavior (and everything is relative and is learned not in general and nominal rules of behavior, but in comparison) is not yet a criminal. He also needs to be understood and, if desired, can be understood from the outside. Another thing is that people, as a rule, are so arranged that they are not very inclined to understand others except for their own interests... But is the child to blame for this? Only conditionally. Because many factors influence situations, including the character, age, desires (preferences) of the developing personality.
There are many ways to teach a child to cope with anger, as well as to solve almost any issue with psychological overtones, and it is impossible to describe them all in a short format. Moreover, there are specialists with enviable regalia, recognized in the scientific community, aware of many methods and... like a shoemaker without shoes, unable to solve these issues in their own social unit with their children. These are the realities of any time, including the latest. Therefore, knowledge is conditional. And the result is not guaranteed. We can only give advice universally, without knowing the specific situation and characteristics of the child, and we should never forget about this.
The founder of the anthropological direction in criminology and criminal law, forensic psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) in his work "Genius and Insanity" not only gave examples of specific people of the previous and contemporary times, including Ampere, Swift, Newton, Rousseau, Schopenhauer and many others, but in Chapter 4 he outlined the influence of meteorological phenomena on the birth of geniuses. One of these phenomena is the ambient temperature.
Psychoanalyst D. A. Olshansky, one of the founders of Lacanian psychoanalysis, based on almost 20 years of research, claims that human behavior is determined by the fact that the brain has made a decision in advance. Actions are the result of a pre-thought-out analysis when the situation is not sudden. One way or another, we constantly play through different versions of certain decisions, and those who do this systematically and professionally become grandmasters in chess.
But here is what can be done to help from the little-known, "off-the-beaten-path" methods. Let's conditionally divide the possible methods into two options - intellectual activities and improving physical fitness. In the second case, the child naturally uses up the accumulated energy in training and at the same time remains relatively calm, receives an additional "bonus" in the form of good physical fitness and a "beautiful" body.
And in the first case - for intellectual occupation - the child needs to be distracted from the already habitual and cyclical attitude of showing anger in response to "anything". That is, distract with something interesting, for example, intellectual work with patterns and sequences, which leads to the skill of analytical generalization (so necessary for scientists), new inventions and discoveries. The creation of new and sometimes complex innovations, tools is characterized by the "if-and-then" pattern. Orient the child to solving such problems, including in the TRIZ format (methods are publicly available).
Here's a hypothetical example: About 40,000 years ago, an ancient man in what is now Germany took a bone and turned it into a flute, which is now the oldest musical instrument in world history.
The components of the action: making a flute from bone, creating a sequence of sounds by blowing air through the bone from the mouth, improving the flute by making new holes in the bone - all this is a mechanism for systematizing the original data. What is typical of the inquisitive minds of children today. It would seem that music is nothing more than a sequence (rhythmic and tonal) of algorithms that can be changed using the "if-and-then" rule.
But ultimately, the impact of a sequence of sounds, music, on a person sometimes acquires colossal significance in art and even gives rise to other arts and inventions. In order to experience creative emotional experience, one must be able to recognize information as a set of patterns. The same systematization mechanism that made it possible for ancient man to create a bone flute is responsible for the invention of text messages and many other successes.
If you engage a child in this logic of behavior using the example of explaining the cause-and-effect relationship “if-and-then” - in the projection of other children’s responses to his actions and discontent, then there is a chance to sow a good seed of critical thinking, incompatible with manifestations of anger.
