July 5, 2024

What Our Child Experiences When We Lose Our Cool

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A preface first

None of us are perfect, and we’re all trying our best (see “The Most Important Premise of All”), and sometimes we lose our cool with our kids. We all know this is normal enough, but still we often feel guilty or ashamed for what we say or do in these moments when our anger gets the better of us. For now, let’s put aside that shame or guilt. The point here is to better understand our child’s response so that we can not just repair things with our kid, (see “Ruptures and Repair: the 4 Steps You Need to Know”) but do a good job of it. Only when we fully understand how our kid experiences us can we speak to and repair what’s happened.

I also want to make a distinction here between anger that’s controlled and reasonable—and therefore not overwhelming to our kid—versus anger that causes a deer-in-the-headlights response from our child. When we move into this kind of red-hot anger—which I’ll call fury—harmful narratives start to develop in kids. This is the anger I’m going to be focusing on so that when fury happens—and it will for even the best of the best parents—we’ll know how to fix things.

Fury overwhelms children

When we get furious, kids feel overwhelmed. Our fury is simply too much for them and it triggers their innate panic response. It puts them in a fight, flight, freeze, or fawn state. They move into survival mode. Their own emotions flood their head, and they can’t figure out how they feel, why they feel it, or what’s literally happening around them. In this way, our fury creates a small trauma for them. If this regularly happens, these small traumas become significant and life-changing.

When parents become furious, we essentially are losing control of our emotions. Our kids see and feel this, and they, too, start to lose control of themselves because they are so overwhelmed. A child in this state doesn’t think, she only reacts; her behavior may seem extreme because she’s having an extreme, emotional response.

Some kids greet our fury with their own fury, others try to run away, while some kids will freeze up or try to placate us. Again, they are in a kind of primitive survival mode, and their response can’t be held against them.

They hear only the fury, and not a word we say

Because kids are overwhelmed by a parent’s fury, their thinking shuts down and they don’t hear anything we say. They are only focused on our rage and managing their response to our rage.

If parents expect kids to hear important things the parent is saying—such as how dangerous it is to run into a busy intersection—the child will be unable to process any of this until both the child and parent have calmed down.

A child’s murderous feelings

Because young kids see things with a black-and-white, all-or-nothing perspective, they frequently have murderous feelings towards others. This is normal, and it’s not murder per se that they’re after. They just want someone to disappear—more or less forever. (Yes, they’ll change their mind after a few minutes and that’s expected: they’re not into long-term planning here.)

However…they also assume that if they have these enormous, extreme, aggressive desires to destroy, then obviously everyone else does too—including their furious parent. And here, the parent actually has the power to carry out what the child fears: that he can be destroyed.

Now the parent takes on a new degree of scary.

Fury harms trust

By definition, when we become furious, we have lost some control of ourselves. Our feelings dominate our thinking, and we end up saying or doing things we regret. Our child also experiences us as out of control, which mimics his own experience in which he feels out of control because he’s so overwhelmed.

With everyone being out of control, the child’s world starts to crumble. The parent he’d trusted has turned into a monster.

After the fury and terror have died back, when things are calm again, the child is left with a residue of distrust. He will worry that his parent could transform into a monster again. How can he explain this and still think of his parent as all-good? His inner-conflict and confusion creates an environment where an unhealthy narrative can start to form.

Guilt, shame, and badness

How does the child explain the parent’s fury? Inevitably, the child concludes that she must be to blame. After all, that’s frequently the message of the parent’s anger: the child was misbehaving in some serious way.

The child will often feel guilt at her actions, but she may take it one step further and feel not only does she behave badly, but that she is bad—hence the formation of shame. It’s a very small leap from here to the creation of a running narrative that the child is simply a bad kid, that she’s bad at her core.

This is one of the most harmful, toxic narratives a child can develop, plaguing and consuming the child throughout her life.

Does she still love me?

Can we still love someone who we are super mad at? In the moment, it may not feel like it, but our love isn’t gone. It’s just inaccessible.

For adults, we can hold two contradictory ideas in our head. Young kids, however, can’t do this because their brains are still uncooked and need a few more years—a total of 25, to be exact—baking in the oven.

In another words, children have trouble believing that we still love them when we’re angry at them. Whether we remind them (if we can) while we’re angry or after we’ve calmed down, kids need to hear that we can both love them and be angry at them.

At the heart of their experience, kids frequently feel a rupture in their relationship with us when we’re angry, and especially when we’re furious. For kids, our anger breaks the connection we have with them, especially if our fury causes them to emotionally distance themselves from us so as to be safe from our fury. It means that when everyone is calm, we’ll need to both reestablish our connection and acknowledge how our child may have felt lonely, alone, separated, and/or disconnected from us.

Modelling

In the end, we’re always modelling for our kids, and when we are furious and lose our cool, we are demonstrating in real time how our child should handle his own anger. Clearly, when we lose our sh*t, we don’t want our child imitating us. Which means a repair is necessary to help our child recognize that we make and can own our mistakes, that we’re not perfect, and we’re trying to do better.

Understanding how children feel and respond to our fury allows us to accurately and empathetically speak to our child’s feelings. It may be hard to acknowledge screwing up, but it’s an incredibly powerful, nurturing, and bonding experience for our child—and it often feels just as good for parents.

(For more, check out “Ruptures and Repair: the 4 Steps You Need to Know.”)