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How to Control Your Anger Towards Your Kids - 10 Anger Management Techniques for Parents
Anger is a natural human emotion. As a parent, there are numerous instances where you feel that your kids are not in control and you feel angry with them. More often than not, parents lash out at their kids in a fit of anger. This is not ideal because, in the spur of the moment, you may say things which you cannot take back later on and feel regretful. It can have a long-lasting negative impact on the children in the long run. Even suppressing anger can lead to problems like frustration and depression in the long run. The key is to understand how to control your anger and channel it healthily rather than suppressing it.
Why is Anger Management Important for Parents?
Although anger is a natural emotion, expressing it by yelling at your kids or anyone, for that matter, is not. Yelling can give birth to very negative feelings in your relationship with your children and even your partner. Lack of anger management would also make you seem like a less approachable person. Anger management helps you as a parent to channel the anger that you feel in a healthy manner. It also helps in letting your children know that you are angry with them, without completely scaring them. This, in turn, can help your children in realizing where they might have gone wrong. Hence, channelling your anger can also impart a more effective lesson to your children than just losing your temper and creating a tense scene.
How Can Your Anger Affect Your Child's Growth?
As discussed above, there are a lot of negative effects of anger on your children’s growth. Firstly, this would create a dent in the relationship you share with your kids and your partner. Secondly, due to the fear of getting scolded, your children can start hiding things from you. This can be a grave issue in the future, where you may not be able to provide help to your children when they actually need it.
Thirdly, every outburst you have affects the personality of your children - angry parents will make the children grow into either extremely subdued personalities or extremely angry people. Both are not good personality types for your child to develop. Physically expressing anger can also cause permanent physical and emotional injury to your child as well.
Recognising Your Signs of Anger
The first important step towards controlling your anger is to understand the signs of anger that your body is showing. Once you become aware that your body is showing one or a combination of these signs, you can be aware that there is a chance that you may explode out of anger. This should be your signal to stop feeling angry and to try to calm down before you react negatively to these stimuli and make things worse. Here are some of the signs that your body shows when you start feeling angry:
You start breathing rapidly.
Your heart starts pounding really fast.
You start getting negative thoughts, such as there is no one to support you and so on.
You clench your jaws and your palms.
Your shoulders start getting tense.
Your stomach starts churning.
You start feeling irritated and sweat a lot.
When these signs start surfacing, hit the pause button and calm yourself down for your sake and the sake of your children and spouse.
Anger Management Ideas for Parents
It is very necessary to follow some good life-hacks on how to handle feeling angry with your children. You can follow these simple yet effective ideas for keeping your anger in control:
1. Take a Few Deep Breaths
One of the most effective ways to control any form of anger is to take deep breaths. When you breathe in and breathe out, it helps you contemplate and think before you act. Since reacting to anger is mostly impulsive, breathing deeply helps in curbing your impulses and keeping your anger in check. Breathing also helps you take some time out to think about how to channel your anger effectively, so that your children learn the lesson they need to learn. This will also create a positive impact on your children as they learn from you to breathe and think before they react impulsively to a difficult situation thrown at them in the future.
2. Seek Counselling for Anger Management
It is never a bad idea to ask for an expert’s help whenever you are having a problem in life. Reaching out for help is the first sign towards improving a problem, which starts with you admitting that you have a problem. Good therapy can help you in a lot of ways. Your problems feel simpler and burdens, lighter, when they are heard by someone, without any opinion or judgement. A good therapist can help you in this regard by listening to your problems and suggesting changes from an unbiased point of view.
3. Do Not Hit or Resort to Violence
One of the most natural responses to anger, as Indian parents, is to hit children to discipline them. This kind of punishment has an extremely adverse effect on the children, affecting their confidence and personality. Moreover, this depletes the relationship capital that parents have with their children like nothing else. When you preach to your kids not to resort to violence, then it is not a good example you set by using violence on your own kids.
4. Picture How Your Relationship with Your Child will Look Like in the Future
When you get angry with your children, it is extremely important to take a moment to draw a mental picture of how your relationship with your children will look like 20 years down the line. It is very important to think about whether such aggression would help in strengthening or weakening your relationship with your children when they grow up. Looking at things from this viewpoint helps in controlling your anger efficiently and handling the situation wisely.
5. Choose the Right Place and the Right Time to Channel Your Anger, if Needed
Shouting, punishing and yelling at kids in public affects their confidence and people skills adversely. This can completely make them rebellious or socially awkward in certain conditions when they grow up. Choosing to show your anger towards your child at the right time and place, if it is very necessary, helps the kids understand the importance of how to behave in public and not to create a scene.
6. Identify What Triggers You
Introspecting on the root cause behind what sets you off will help you in identifying such situations well in advance. When you are aware of what can make you angry well in advance, you can prepare towards creating counter-measures for the same. Moreover, this helps you in identifying your own weak points and helps you work towards improving it. This move towards self-realisation can be a valuable tool.
7. Never Judge Your Children
Judging your children plants a perception of themselves in the children’s minds. This is especially because, for the children, you are their ultimate role model. When you judge your kids based on their behaviour at a certain point of time, it influences them in an extremely adverse manner. Think of this being analogous to this situation - your boss and your biggest mentor telling you that you are an average professional and do not have a lot of potential. You will be heartbroken, won’t you? Moreover, you will start accepting it to be true in the back of your mind. No matter what, you should keep inspiring your children to do good without judgments.
8. Keep Some Slogans and Recite Them
When you feel that your temper is rising, keep a few slogans like “stop”, “calm down”, “control yourself”, “it's not important to get angry” etc., handy. Recite them in your mind to try to calm yourself down. This can help you with a sudden surge of anger. Once again, reason can prevail over your impulsive reaction to anger if you create habits to calm yourself down, such as reciting a slogan repeatedly when you feel angry.
9. Meditate to Find More Peace
Meditating works wonders not just in controlling your anger, but also, in helping with self-realisation and self-improvement in the long run. If you have more control over your thoughts and are more self-aware, you can detect the situations that can make you angry more efficiently. This can help you work towards improving your anger issues and make your life and your children’s life happier.
10. Hug Your Child
A hug can work wonders where thousands of strong words can have no impact. A hug is the strongest form of non-verbal communication to show your children that you care for them. When you hug your child when they irritate you, it can help them think about their mistakes and work towards correcting it. All lessons can be learned without any angry words being spoken. This also strengthens your bond with your child. Not a bad deal, is it?
Your children’s minds are like soft sponges that absorb anything that is in their environment. Expressing anger towards them can cause a lot of damage to them, in terms of their personality, their confidence levels, and their personal growth in general. Although it is necessary at times to express your anger, many times it is more effective not to do so and to control it instead.
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Does Your Voice Change During Pregnancy?
You may be glowing with happiness to welcome your little bundle of joy into this world. Everyone around you may have loaded you with information about the physical and emotional changes that your body may be undergoing in the next few months. However, did anyone mention that you may be experiencing a change in your voice too? Sounds strange or weird, well, many women may actually experience a difference in their voice during pregnancy. What may be reasons for this phenomenon and when should you feel alarmed, find out all this information in this post.
What Causes Voice Changes in Pregnancy?
From the time you become pregnant and until the birth of your baby, you may experience many changes. Where most of the metabolic, physiological and anatomical changes may subside after you deliver your baby, the same may not hold true for your pregnancy voice change. Here are some causes that may change the pitch, quality, perturbation rate of your voice during pregnancy:
1. Swelling of Your Vocal Chords
You may experience swelling on your arms, legs and face, and sometimes vocal folds tissues may swell up too. The swelling may put pressure on the vocal chores and may change the voice quality.
2. Pregnancy Hormones
You may undergo various changes during pregnancy due to the changing hormonal levels in your body. The surge in estrogen and progesterone hormones in the body may affect a pregnant woman's body, and this hormonal imbalance affects the voice quality too.
3. More Bodily Fluids
During pregnancy, your body fluids increase by approximately 50 per cent. The increased fluids in the body may alter or deepen your voice because the excess amount of fluid (mucus) may sometimes get collected near the vocal cords, which may reduce the vibration rate. The slower vibrations may deepen your voice.
4. Change in the Lung Capacity
As your little munchkin grows inside your womb, he may push your internal organs upwards, including your diaphragm. This may make you experience breathing issues, vocal fatigue, decreased lung capacity and a changed voice. This may decrease the ability of your voice to sustain high notes.
5. Changed Voice Range
The blood vessels of your entire body dilate during pregnancy to carry the increased supply of the blood to various parts of the body. This may occur in your vocal cord vessels too, which may make your vocal cord muscles fragile and thus more prone to rupturing and tearing. This may cause the voice to change during pregnancy.
6. LPR or Laryngopharyngeal Reflux
Progesterone may affect the functioning oesophagal sphincter, which is responsible for keeping your stomach’s acid and other content from travelling back into your larynx. This may make the stomach acid to move up to the oesophagus and may result in LPR or Laryngopharyngeal reflux. LPR may alter your voice during pregnancy because it may irritate the voice box.
7. Changes in Nasal Resonance
We have discussed in the above section that pregnancy may lead to swelling in various parts of the body and it may occur on your nose too. The swelling on and around your nasal region may cause hindrance in breathing. The decreased nasal resonance may cause a hoarse voice while pregnant.
8. Changed Posture
Your entire support mechanism undergoes a tremendous change during pregnancy, which may make changes in your voice too. As you enter into your final trimester, you may experience noticeable changes in your back, chest and pelvis. These may lead to changed posture and changed voice too.
It is entirely normal to experience any changes in voice during pregnancy. In most cases, your voice may get back to normal after the birth of your baby or in some cases a few months after delivery. However, you may require to feel alarmed or get your alarm bells ringing in certain situations.
When to See a Laryngologist
Your pregnancy hormones may be the culprit in most cases of changed voice issues during pregnancy; however, if you experience any of the following changes, you should see a laryngologist as soon as possible:
If you experience any loss of voice during pregnancy
If you experience any sort of discomfort or pain while talking or singing
If you feel there is a sudden change in your voice quality after your talk or sing or when you sneeze or cough
If you are experiencing any changes in your voice during pregnancy, it is essential for you to understand that it is a very normal phenomenon. Also, you should not make efforts to strain your voice thinking that it may make it better. Sometimes straining the larynx may damage your vocal chords. You should relax, drink ample amounts of water and do some breathing exercises to reduce any swelling. Very soon you may be singing sweet lullabies to your precious little one.
Also Read: Body Changes in Pregnancy Read more
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When Toddlers Understand Action and Consequences
As toddlers grow up, they might break a few rules and behave inappropriately at times. However, making them understand the relationship between actions and consequences can help curb negative behavior. Stay true to your word and your toddler will fall in line.
You’ve put down some rules for your toddler and want him to follow them diligently. Kudos! This is definitely the right way to teach positive behaviour. But what if he breaks a rule, knowingly or unknowingly?
Consequences for Toddlers - What This Means
When your child breaks a rule or behaves badly, he needs to be admonished and punished for it. This is known as a consequence. Using consequences for behaviour management is extremely important. It’s the only way to instigate positive behaviour in your child.
List of Consequences for Children
1. Positive Consequence
If your child behaves well, it’s important that you praise him and let him know that it’s appreciated. This is when your toddler receives a positive consequence. It can be extremely beneficial in teaching good manners to tots, so don't skimp on rewarding your child for good behaviour. A word of love or a kiss will suffice.
2. Negative Consequence
Sometimes, when your toddler has committed a mistake and has been punished for it he might remember the consequence. It may compel him not to behave in a similar way next time, which means your toddler avoids a negative consequence. Whenever you see him doing this, make sure that you praise him and convert it into a positive consequence.
3. Negative Consequence Turned to No Consequence
There will be times when you punish your toddler for bad behaviour by giving him a time-out. This is a negative consequence. However, if the time-out happens to be standing or sitting in a place that he enjoys, it won’t seem like a punishment and will work against toddler behaviour management. Instead, he may deem it a blessing in disguise and engage in the behaviour again.
Defining Appropriate Consequences for Toddlers
1. Give a Clear Picture
Just defining the rules and consequences may not be enough. Make sure that your little darling understands them properly. It’s also important that you lay down the consequences along with the rules so that he knows what to expect. However, if the rules are followed diligently, don't forget to reward your child for good behaviour.
2. Keep It Short
Long drawn-out punishments don’t work. They only upset kids and don’t accomplish the goal. The consequence for young children should be short and to the point. Give your little one a second chance after some time. If you call a time-out for fighting, let it be only for about 15 minutes.
3. Stay True to Your Word
Just spelling out the consequences may not be enough. It’s important that you stick to them as well. It’s the only way your toddler will realise you mean business. Since consequences play an important role in toddler behaviour management, not acting at the right time may lead him to repeat his mistakes. Read more
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Sarika gupta has added a new answer
1 hour ago
Q. why can't I add child details in my profile
Sarika gupta
Mom of 2 children
1 hour ago
A. Hello there ma’am please do not worry about it too much and please add in your profile aftwr login and still is you find any difficulty then you should contact first cry customers service department.
Take care
Rayan has added a new answer
Expecting Mom due this month
1 hour ago
Q. right now I am 39 week pregnant but never feel any type of pain is it ok my due date is 5/5/24
Rayan
Mom of 2 children
50 mins ago
A. Hello mam, It's normal mam. don't worry a lot.Since your due date is near, eat healthy and sip your drinks. Keep yourself hydrated. Happy parenting and welcome new mom!!!
Indhumathy Ravikumar has added a new answer
Guardian of 0 children
1 hour ago
Q. #asktheexpert my newborn baby girl breast is hard n feel like lump
Indhumathy Ravikumar
Mom of 2 children
49 mins ago
A. please give gentle massage on breast before bathing.. and then squeeze the curdled milk in it.. after that keep pumping the breast from time to time.. it will cure with in two weeks..
Dr Ghouse has added a new answer
Trying To Conceive
1 hour ago
Q. after c section when we start physical relation?
Dr Ghouse
Paediatrician
1 hour ago
A. after 8 weeks or after proper healing of the wounds. if there is no relief it is better you see your doctor for proper examination particularly physical examination if there is need for doing investigations to find out the problem and treatment ok
Rayan has added a new answer
Guardian of 0 children
1 hour ago
Q. #asktheexpert
good morning Ma'am..
My son is 4 months old. He gets stomach pain/ gas everyday at any time.. He cries for long when he gets pain.. I am giving him Colic aid everyday from last one month.. Only after giving colic aid he stops crying... what should I do to avoid his pain and medicine??
Read moreRayan
Mom of 2 children
46 mins ago
A. Hello mam! If it is due to colic pain /gas, it is common in newborns. Make sure that you burp your baby after every feed. Don't feed just before your baby is to sleep. Make a routine like feed, play and sleep. Burp inbetween feedings. Colic pain will stop automatically at 5 or 6 months. So don't worry. Happy parenting!
Dr Sameer awadhiya has added a new answer
Guardian of 0 children
10 mins ago
Q. #asktheexpert
baby having nose block.. sleeping problem
what should I do?
Dr Sameer awadhiya
Paediatrician
8 mins ago
A. nasal blockage can be relieved by using nasal saline drops like nasoclear saline drops in thecg nose followed by nasal aspirator to take out the secretions very ghently
steam inhalation can also be helpful in this condition
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