Angry Kids, Angry Parents Understanding and Working with Anger in Your Family

Psychologists Anne Hilde Vassbø Hagen and Joanne Dolhanty explain everything you need to know about your child’s anger and how to manage it.
 
Anger can be normal and healthy when it enables us to stand up for ourselves and defend against injustice. However, it can also lead to aggression—even violence—while also hiding other, more vulnerable emotions. For instance, an angry child may be hiding embarrassment, shame, disappointment, sadness, loneliness, or fear. As a parent, it is your job to help your child understand their anger, express it in an appropriate way, and address the underlying need.
 
In Angry Kids, Angry Parents you will learn how to respond to your child’s anger in a sensitive and productive way that validates their feelings, addresses their needs, and teaches them to manage their own anger. It can be nerve-wracking to watch your child explode in rage. This book will teach you how to stay calm and protect your boundaries.
 
Supported by years of psychological research and therapeutic practice, the strategies in this practical, compassionate book will help any parent who struggles with their child’s anger.
 

Anne Hilde Vassbø Hagen is a psychologist and leader of The Institute for Psychological Counseling and Norwegian Institute for Emotion Focused Therapy. She is the mother of 8-year-old twin girls and just welcomed a baby boy to her family. She has further education in emotion focused skills training for parents (ESFT), emotion focused individual therapy and couples' therapy, clinical adult psychology, and work with children. IPR's work includes therapy, training, and supervision of therapists, expert work, research, and conferences, as well as the dissemination of the emotion focused approach. Hagen is the writer, creator, and producer of the popular Alfred & Shadow educational film series which were made in collaboration with Council for Mental Health. The films are produced in Norwegian and English and can be found on the YouTube channel #aboutemotions and the films have about 1.8 million views and are widely used in teaching and therapy. Hagen has written three books and received two book scholarships from the Norwegian Association of Authors and Translators.

Joanne Dolhanty, PhD, CPsych, is a supervising and consulting clinical psychologist and the mother of two young-adult sons. She has a doctorate in clinical psychology from York University in Toronto, Canada, and has extensive training in the emotion focused approach. She is a certified supervisor with the International Society for Emotion Focused Therapy, and provides trainings to individuals, parents, professionals, and organizations through the Emotion-Focused Therapy Clinic at York University and through institutions in countries around the globe. With Dr. Leslie Greenberg, Dr. Dolhanty developed the application of Emotion Focused Therapy to Eating Disorders. She is the developer of EFST, an Emotion Focused Skills Training program that brings the benefits of Emotion Focused Therapy to the broader population in a simplified format. EFST promotes transformations in difficult feelings, in relationships, and in stubborn behaviors via short-term experiential learning of emotion focused skills. Dr. Dolhanty is known for her ability to reach, relate to, and have a positive and lasting impact on hugely diverse populations of parents all around the world with her delivery of EFST, online, or in-person.

Preface
Introduction
Part 1: What is Anger?
Chapter 1. The power of anger
Chapter 2. Hard-wired for an anger style: Personality and temperament
Chapter 3. The anger speedway: Brain, body, and anger
Chapter 4. When anger messes up - four challenges
Part 2: The Art of Validating Anger
Chapter 5. What is validation and how on earth can I do it with anger?
Chapter 6. Validation: The challenge
Part 3: But I'm not a robot: Parents have feelings too
Chapter 7. Feeling traps
Chapter 8. Climbing your way out of a feeling trap
Part 4: The magic of apology
Chapter 9. Radical responsibility... say what?
Chapter 10. Apology works
Part 5: Boundaries Without Judgment: Effective Limit-Setting for Aggressive Behavior
Chapter 11. What is your boundary style? Boundaries to protect the parent's well-being
Chapter 12. The home you want to live in: Limits, rules, expectations, and values
Chapter 13. Healthy, protective boundaries
Afterword