Parental anger and the COVID19 experience.

I have been wanting to address the topic of parental anger for some time now, and considering our current circumstance it seemed like as good a time as any to jot down my thoughts. Before writing this I decided to do due diligence and search for articles on parental anger (or more specifically maternal anger). I started my search on university databases searching relevant journal articles. I was disappointed, but not surprised to find that every article on maternal anger assessed the impact of a mothers anger on their child. Little was written on how parenthood impacts our feelings of anger. I will take a breath to acknowledge the importance of the impact of parental anger on children and nod to the very serious outcomes of anger in the form of aggression and violence that occurs in families. I would also like to point out that I am talking about the internal feeling of anger and am not addressing violence. What I wish to write about is the every day feelings of anger and rage that parents report. The anger that parents feel but manage, squash, suppress and agonise over. In my early years as a clinician parents would outline the behaviours of their children that they found distressing, then with downcast eyes they would tell me that they had yelled at their child. In those days I shrugged it off, assessed for risk and moved on. I understood that sometimes parents yelled, “so what” I thought. Then I became a parent.

Now when a mother tells me that she yells, I stop. I know what she’s feeling and what she’s asking me. She’s really asking if I think that she’s alright. If she’s enough. She’s wondering if she’s doing the wrong thing and if I’m there to scold her. If I’m some mighty authority who will stamp a great big fail on her parental report card. The answers to these questions are remarkably simple, but often not acknowledged. The flip side to my oh so professional university search was a good old google search. It produced similarly disappointing results. Admittedly there was more validation of mothers feelings, but this was quickly overwhelmed by tips on how to quell the anger. Find your triggers, meditate, breathe. These are not the answers to my clients questions. The real answer is that her feelings are normal. This seems to be so rarely acknowledged that it makes parents uncertain about whether they should in fact feel angry because of the stuff their kids do. Its so often written about as something to be quickly managed and overcome that its easy to feel as though anger is a perversion of parental purity.

I find during this era of COVID I’m talking about anger more and more. What I have noticed is that the strategy part, the bit that I keep seeing on handouts and worksheets, actually takes up about 5 minutes of the our session. The what to do bit is easy. We all know that taking time out, taking a breath, meditating, going for a walk, eating well etc. will help us control our anger. What the mothers I work with (and most days myself) need to hear is that their anger is inevitable. It is normal and unavoidable. Especially now. At the best of times the constant demands of parenting, the bickering, the rudeness, the noise, are enough to activate anyone’s anger buttons. Right now it is so much worse. We are exhausted. Not just because we’re juggling work and kids and constant hand washing. But because we’re all going through a protracted trauma and our nervous systems are strained. We’re experiencing new threats everyday, tightly veiled in the normalcy of our homes (unless you’re a health care/essential worker in which case you are experiencing a different level of strain). But for those of us who are hunkering down at home the dissonance between the sense of ever present danger and the familiarity of our home is exhausting. We’re each living our own unique set of stressors, whether they be financial, relational, health or simply existential. Our bodies are constantly in go mode and this is creating a tired and frightened brain that is designed to become reactive. This reactivity is protective and sensible, not aberrant. Our cleverly evolved (or designed) nervous systems hand the reigns of our mind over to the basest parts of ourselves. These parts will activate quickly to fend off danger and will frequently use our strongest weapon...rage. So many parents I am talking to at the moment are describing the lightening fast rise of their own rage. They feel like the space between the surface and their anger is frighteningly thin. To complicate matters our children are similarly reactive. Their rage or sadness comes out in different but relatable ways. They rage in their tantrums or despair in their clingy ness. We are two minds under strain. But unlike our children, we need to hold their emotional load. Sometimes this can feel intolerable.

I am writing this not to inspire doom and gloom but to speak to our anxiety about anger. My point is that you can’t avoid anger and you are not responsible for its existence. You are not responsible for your child’s anger. You didn’t make it start and you might not be able to make it end. Your ability as a parent isn’t measured by how quickly you can stop or divert a tantrum. Nor is it measured by your ability to prevent your own experience of anger. Understand, accept and acknowledge that you will feel angry in the coming weeks. It’s also likely that your child’s temper will worsen as the school holidays end and the full impact of iso hits them. Forgive both yourself and your children for being raw. Anger is derived from a feeling of injustice and many things are unfair right now. Expect anger to be a companion in the coming weeks. I’ve felt within myself that when I give up my prejudice against my experience of anger I’m better able to tolerate it. I feel it but I react to it less. That is what we really want to change, our reaction to our anger not the presence of anger itself. If I can accept and acknowledge both my own and my child’s anger without the concomitant feelings of guilt, overwhelm and burden I can respond to myself and my child with kindness. I can see in the mothers I work with that they feel the same. Feeling anger without shame gives you psychological freedom and subsequently lets you calm anger at its highest points. But you’re unlikely to be rid of it altogether. Only by validating your anger, and your child’s anger, will you feel able to do all the calming strategies that are only a google search away.