Ginger Whitson on Helping Kids Experience & Express Anger in Healthy Ways

Debbie:

Hey Ginger, welcome back to the podcast.

Ginger Whitson:

Hi, thanks for having me back. I’m so happy to be here again.

Debbie:

Yeah, I’m excited to talk about anger. I’ve never been so excited to talk about anger before. And last time you were on the show, we talked about bullying. And in the back of my mind, I wanted to get to your work on anger management skills for kids, but we didn’t get there. So actually, as I started preparing for this, I’m like, my gosh, there’s so much we can talk about here. I’m so glad we’re dedicating an entire episode to it.

Ginger Whitson:

Yeah, me too. It’s a big subject and it’s super powerful in the lives of, I was going to say our kids, but everyone, but especially for kids to learn how to manage something that’s so powerful for them.

Debbie:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, would you just take a few minutes to introduce yourself specifically in the context of this work that you’ve done on emotional regulation and anger management for kids?

Ginger Whitson:

Sure. So my name is Signe Whitson. My books are all titled with my actual name, but most people who know me and work with me call me Ginger. It’s because my hair, it’s still a little red, but in my younger years it was very red. I am someone who has spent my career working in mental health with children, adolescents, and families. For the last 12 years I’ve been working in schools. So right now I’m in a Dean of Students role at a K -8 school in Massachusetts. But I’ve always been working with kids that are struggling with either mental health or behavioral health issues. Often the two are linked and intertwined. And just working to help kids know how to deal with all of these overwhelming feelings that come from things as deep as trauma with a capital T or as everyday and routine as a ball hit me in the face at recess today and I don’t know how to deal with the pain or the hurt, the embarrassment, you know, whatever it is. So from all the different things going on in young people’s lives, just helping them gain the skills to deal with all of those emotions. And often the most problematic of that, those emotions when it comes to how to handle them is anger. So that’s become a big focus of my work.

Debbie:

And I would like to, as I said, I don’t think we’ve ever done a conversation on the show about anger. Certainly it’s come up in other topics we’ve explored. And it’s an emotion so many of us see in our kids, so many of us experience in ourselves. So I have what might be kind of a ridiculous question, but is there a definition of anger? Like, how would you, just so we’re on the same page here. What are we talking about?

Ginger Whitson:

Yeah, yeah, no, it’s a really good question. So I have lots of different ways I like to frame anger, but I think the most basic thing is that it is a normal, natural, physiological experience. It is one of the most basic emotions that human beings across the globe experience. You know, when a baby is born, they have the capacity to feel mad, sad, glad, and scared. So, I mean, we are born with a capacity for anger. And the reason that’s important is because I think a lot of young kids get the message very quickly that being angry makes them bad as a child or it’s bad to be angry. So I like to make sure that kids know at the very beginning, anger is a perfectly normal, natural, human way of feeling and that it’s what we do with our anger that counts. And that’s where the skill building comes in. But the other way I would define anger is to say that it sort of ebbs and flows in our lives. And also that what might create feelings of anger for one person might be completely benign or neutral to somebody else. So it’s not the actual event that causes the feeling. It’s how the person perceives the event. But for that person who is angered by the ball hitting them in the face, that anger is very real and can be overpowered.

Debbie:

And so would you say that some people are more wired for anger and is that related to the way their nervous system responds or yeah, is it some people’s kind of natural tendency or personality to be more angered easily?

Ginger Whitson:

Yeah, I mean, that’s probably a really deep nature versus nurture question. And there’s probably scientists that would argue one way or the other. My guess is that there’s a temperament, an inborn temperament, right? And I think we see it in really young babies. Some babies can self -soothe easily from the very beginning. Some babies have immense difficulty calming themselves down from the very beginning. And then I think those experiences, those sort of natural temperaments are nurtured over time, right? I think when a young person experiences anger when they’re very young and they have consistent, reliable, trustworthy adults who help co -regulate them, or when adults lend their calm to children, kids create these neural pathways that lend them the ability to deal with their anger in helpful, constructive ways. For other kids who don’t have a consistent adult that’s able to sue them, maybe it’s an adult who punishes them for expressing anger or who’s not there to sue them at all. I think those neural pathways are going in a whole different direction. Those kids might become more and more reactive over time. So I think it’s both. I think there’s some nature. I think there’s some nurture.

But I think that we’ve all seen that in kids and in adults that some people just are cool as cucumbers and everything rolls off their back, right? To kids, I call those people ducks, right? They can let it all roll off their back like water. They just shake their feathers and they keep swimming. And then there’s other people that are just sponges, right? They absorb all the anger. They become weighted down until maybe they explode or they just need to get rung out. Yeah. That’s one of my favorite metaphors for kids is to be a duck, not a sponge, which is easier said than done, but it’s a helpful sort of metaphor for kids.

Debbie:

Yeah, for sure. For sure. And I, you know, in terms of anger, like I feel like it gets a bad rap, you know, I feel like it’s always been, I don’t know if I should generalize like that. In my personal experience, I have seen that anger was responded to even in little kids much differently by teachers and sports coaches and other adults. It seems to be just, even if it’s an expression of frustration or dysregulation, it was viewed and responded to very differently than maybe a child who cries or who crumbles to the ground or who is experiencing kind of the same shutdown feeling, but they’re expressing it in a different way. So why do you think that it has such a bad rap?

Ginger Whitson:

Yeah. So I’m okay with your generalization because your experience is my experience also. It’s really what drove me to write my book, which is called How to Be Angry, which is based on a quote. And the quote is, do not teach your children never to be angry. Teach them how to be angry. But I think the world is changing and we are moving toward honoring anger more, understanding that it’s a normal part of life. But I think a lot of us grew up in a world where anger was regarded as bad. I think little girls especially had and still have more pressure to never show that they’re angry, right? A grown woman, right? We know the whole thing about if you’re a man in a business setting, you’re assertive, you’re powerful. If you’re a woman in a business setting who behaves the same way, maybe you’re bitchy, right? And we’re trying to work beyond that. But yes, I think there is still a stigma associated with being angry. And I think it’s a really important message that it’s not the anger that’s a bad thing at all. It’s how you choose to express that anger that counts and that makes the difference. And one of the most valuable things we can do is teach kids skills to express that anger assertively, instead of aggressively, or even instead of being passive or passive aggressive.

Debbie:

So it occurs to me that we also might just want to differentiate, if necessary, you know, when we hear anger, especially, you know, maybe with neurodivergent kids who can have really big, more explosive reactions, should we distinguish between anger and kind of destructive physical rage? Or do you see them as all fitting under the same umbrella in terms of how we want to support kids?

Ginger Whitson:

No, I think there is an important distinction and some people might say it’s just words, just semantics, but I think it’s really important to say anger is the feeling, aggression is the behavior that comes out or that it’s driven by the feeling. Violence is the behavior that’s driven by the feeling of anger. What we want to do is give kids alternatives to aggression or violence or tantrums. We want to help them learn how to put language to the emotion of anger and to express themselves in words and calm non-destructive behaviors.

Debbie:

Okay, great. So everything that we’re going to talk about today, including some of the skill building that all applies, regardless of the behavior that is coming out as a result of the feeling. 

Ginger Whitson:

Yeah. Yeah. And usually, you know, kids come to our attention as adults because they’re having problematic behavior, right? It’s coming out as anger. I mean, I’m sorry, as aggression or violence or tantrums or explosions. Kids who are sort of have that natural duck mentality and always can let things roll off their back or can express their anger. You know, they don’t they don’t get our attention in that same sort of red flag way they’ve got, they’ve just developed those skills in a more natural way, whereas other kids just need help with it. And I guess one of the things I always say is, because I work in a school setting, if a child doesn’t understand math, we reteach them, right? And if they don’t understand or they’re not catching on with how to read, a teacher goes over the lesson again, and again and again, if necessary. But oftentimes, if you have a child in a school setting who is aggressive. The automatic response from an adult is punishment. What kids who are aggressive need is an adult to teach them the skills that they need to manage their anger as opposed to just rote punishment. So that’s not saying that there’s never limits or consequences on destructive behavior. But I am saying that there’s tremendous value in teaching kids how to express their anger in constructive ways instead of just punishing them when they make a mistake because of lagging skills.

Debbie:

So you just mentioned punishment is often what happens. And yeah, of course, I’ve seen that. I’ve experienced that as a parent of a kid who had emotional regulation challenges as a little in school settings. And I’m imagining there are lots of harmful or ineffective responses that well -meaning adults or maybe just perplexed or adults who feel like they have no other options engage in when they have a child who’s really angry. So I’d love it if you could kind of share some of the other maybe ineffective ways just so we kind of know what we’re trying to pivot away from.

Ginger Whitson:

So I think one of the most human things, but also one of the most ineffective things that an adult can do is to mirror a child’s anger. We are emotional creatures, right? We have these mirror neurons in our brain where it makes it really easy for us to sort of catch someone else’s emotional state. But what an angry child who’s about to explode needs is a calm adult. They need a calm adult who will lend their calm and help regulate their nervous system. What they don’t need is an adult who also raises their voice, who also becomes aggressive. What they also don’t need in the heat of the moment is an adult who’s lecturing them. Because brain -wise, when a child is dysregulated, they are living in their amygdala, right, in that emotional part of the brain, which means they’re not connecting very well to their cortex or the language centers of their brain. So when adults are giving them a lecture about blah, blah, blah, this is what you should have done. It might be a great lecture, but in that heat of the moment, kids can’t hear you. They hear you, but they’re not able to process what you’re saying. So in the heat of the moment, matching a child’s anger or giving them lectures or giving rote punishment are all super ineffective. What kids need in the moment is a calm adult who will just work on helping them drain off all that intense emotion. And then when they’re calm, then you can give a great lecture. Then you can spout off your wisdom. Then you can even explain the limit or the consequence. But kids aren’t open to any of that. All that stuff is just ineffective and it’s gonna make the issue worse during the heat of the moment.

Debbie:

Right, right. And I, this is the point where I will share that when I was a parent of maybe a very angry six year old, a friend suggested, cause I was trying all kinds of stuff and nothing was working. She said, Debbie, what if you just really let them know how angry you were? I was like, all right, I’ll try that. It did not go well. I wrote about this in Differently Wired – it was like pouring gasoline on the fire. And I, you know, I distinctly remember as a young girl getting that that’s how my father would react to me when I was angry and I would re I would clam up and be quite like I shut down. So I guess like on the surface, it stopped the angry behavior. But I guess when I internalize now I’m realizing this is turning into a therapy session for me, but I’m realizing that I internalize this idea that I can’t ever be angry or express anger.

Ginger Whitson:

Right, well, I’ll just join you here and we can both have therapy together, but you know, I had a dad who also matched anger with anger. The biggest thing when I was a kid was, if you don’t stop crying, I’ll give you something to really cry about. And that meant a spanking, right? And I have an older brother. We both sort of had that same kind of discipline from my dad. My older brother, because he was a male, because temperamentally he was different than me. He and my father would just match each other’s anger and escalate and escalate and escalate. I was the opposite. I didn’t want something to cry about. So I did what you did. I just clammed up. But I also grew up thinking girls aren’t supposed to be angry. Anger is bad. I’m a bad girl. If I get this angry, I would deserve this punishment where my brother went the opposite and like he struggles with anger more to this day or you know he’s still someone that’s always going to escalate things so there we both had our therapy session.

Debbie:

Interesting. All right, I feel so much better. But that banks the question, do you think it’s important for us, for parents and other adults who are supporting kids to kind of reconcile their own relationship with anger in order to be better first responders with an angry kid? Because probably a lot of us are walking around with this kind of baggage surrounding anger.

Ginger Whitson:

And escalated adults can never, ever de -escalate an escalated child, right? A child who’s escalated, whether it’s anger, fear, anxiety, whatever it is, we’re talking about anger today, but any heightened state, they only are gonna calm down in the presence of someone else who’s regulated. And so, yeah, I mean, parents sort of reckoning with their own emotional state and ability to deal with anger. It’s a prerequisite, right? We’re either going to break old patterns or we’re going to continue them.

Debbie:

Yeah, and just thinking about being that calm presence for an angry child, I imagine for some people would sound, would feel like we’re okay with it. Like it’s an endorsement of this dysregulated humans outsized reaction if we are calm. So what would you say to an adult who is feeling that way?

Ginger Whitson:

I love that you asked me that. It’s a really fair point and a really good question. Being holding space for a young person who’s dysregulated, lending our calm doesn’t have anything to do with accepting their bad behavior. All it is doing is accepting the child for who they are, that they’re having this overwhelming emotional experience, that their immature brains haven’t figured out how to manage this thing called anger yet. And they need us to be calm in the moment. When they are calm again and their frontal lobes are engaged, then that’s a great time for us letting them know that that behavior was not acceptable. That’s a great time for letting them practice other skills like talking about their anger instead or having a glass of water or some kind of sensory engagement. But yeah, there’s always, lending a child our calm doesn’t have anything to do with condoning the behavior. It’s just the prerequisite. The only way we’re gonna get them to calm down is to hold space for them. And then when they’re ready, we can be very clear that we’re not accepting the bad behavior, but we are accepting the overwhelmed, vulnerable little human.

Debbie:

That’s great. Okay, thank you for clarifying that. I have one other question and then we’ll pivot to getting into the strategies in your book. But I’d love it if you have any insights to share about some of the residual effects or impact on kids who have been shamed over time or gotten in trouble perpetually for their anger. Like what does that look like as they get older? Do you have any research or information on that?

Ginger Whitson:

I think what we see is kind of the two patterns we talked about. Well, I’ll give you three patterns. I think some kids become much more passive, right? Kind of the model I was describing where you learn that anger is bad, expressing anger is bad. I better stuff that inside. I’m still gonna feel that way, but I better hold it in tight, right? And those are people who tend to become much more passive, they think that their emotions are not valid or not worthy of being expressed. Sometimes that also looks like depression in adults when you feel like your wants and needs are not as worthy as the wants and needs of other people. So that’s one choice. I think another choice is that people don’t deal very well with guilt and shame, right? Those are really horrible emotions. And kids, those type of kids never, they never learn the skills they need to deal with the anger. So it just sort of is always bubbling in them. They’re always kind of near a point of rage. And maybe they even learn that, you know, I might not have a lot of friends or close relationships. I might be in trouble all the time, but people stay out of my way, right? At least that feels like power to me. And then I think the third choice that people learn, third bad outcome would be people who are really passive aggressive. They have sort of figured out, all right expressing this anger openly isn’t getting me anywhere. But I’m not just someone who’s going to stuff it inside. I’m going to find these covert ways to sort of get back at you. And you won’t even know what hit you because I did it under the radar. So hopefully the fourth choice in all this is that people learn assertiveness skills. But I think those are the three bad outcomes when people are sort of shamed for their feelings of anger.

Debbie:

Yeah, thank you. As you were describing that passive aggressiveness, like Dwight from The Office popped into my head as someone who operates in that zone. Okay, so the book that we’re going to talk about, which is actually how I first found you, and then we pivoted to talking about bullying in the last episode, but it’s called How to Be Angry: Strategies to Help Kids Express Anger Constructively. So can you tell us a little bit about that book, how you organized it and how you hope it’s used by educators, by parents, by anyone who’s working with kids?

Ginger Whitson:

Yep, absolutely. So the book is really written for parents or professionals, anyone who lives or works with young people that are struggling to manage their anger. And it is filled with sort of like structured guided either conversations or activities, starting with teaching kids a lot of what I’ve talked about already, sort of the idea that normal anger is a normal natural part of life. You’re not bad because you feel angry in the first place. We go through some basic neuroscience with kids, but at a level, you know, really young kids can understand. And it’s basically just, here’s what’s happening in your brain when you start to feel this powerful thing called anger. And then very specifically, here’s how you can soothe and calm and deescalate that part of your brain. So we talk a lot about mindfulness and breathing strategies. And we talk a ton about sensory strategies. So the book is chock full of ideas for parents and kids on how to use their sense of touch, how to use their sense of taste, their sense of smell, their vision, you know, their ability to notice things in their surroundings. How to, you know, listen sort of mindfully, but how to engage in all these sensory ways of calming the brain. And then, after we take that neurological perspective on helping kids understand anger, then the second and third parts of the book are much, I don’t want to say more practical, it’s all practical, but it shifts to traditional things like teaching kids I messages, how to use I statements, how to disagree without arguing. That’s a big one that I use with kids. How to problem solve, how to find win-win solutions to typical conflict situations so that everybody gets a little piece of something that they want instead of there having to be someone who’s treated unfairly, right, or unjustly and then becomes angry. And then I think one of the other big things that I focus on in the last section of the book is teaching kids how to respond to someone else who’s angry. So it’s not just about teaching kids what to do when they’re angry, but it’s a really important skill to know what to do when someone else is coming at us with their anger. For a lot of us, that feels really scary. So giving kids some hard and fast skills for what to do when someone is, when they’re receiving someone’s anger.

Debbie:

Yeah, yeah, I love the structure and some of those pieces like that, how to respond to someone else’s anger, as well as how to disagree, how to give someone a compliment, like there are things in there that were unexpected to me. And I was like, but this makes so much sense to include this in there. So I really appreciated that. So one of the lessons in your book is called becoming an anger detective. This to me, as I read that, that is where I think so much of the critical work happens. And, and I feel like that’s where a lot of parents get stuck because it can feel like I feel like I’m still learning what anger feels like in my body and learning the skills to kind of catch it right before it flares up. So how do you help kids kind of really connect with that and learn that skill of getting curious about their anger so that they can be proactive.

Ginger Whitson:

So it’s sort of in two parts. One of the parts of being an anger detective is helping kids understand what the triggers are in their environment. So just making lists of things like, you know, and like I said before, the things that might make you angry wouldn’t make me angry at all and vice versa. So you can’t have this universal list for kids like these are the 10 things that would make you angry. So with individual children, like sitting down and helping them sort of identify, you know what, one of the worst things for me is when my sister comes in my room or my brother takes my stuff or my teacher tells me to stop working on something before I’m really done with it. So having kids just brainstorm a list. And then the second part of that is having kids go through the list and sort of rank. actually, the thing that’s the worst of all is when I’m hot and I’m hungry and then someone tells me that I can’t do something and.

The thing with my sister taking my toys, yeah, that bugs me, but I can deal with that. So that’s only two on a scale of one to 10. So there’s those situational things that I want kids to discover about themselves because when you can anticipate that you’re going to become angry, you’re in a much better position to take steps right away to keep your calm. And then the rest of the anger detective, as you started to say, is really about knowing what anger feels like in your body and what are those early signs that you’re starting to be irritated. So you can catch it and use calming strategies before you have already blown your top. And so it’s the same thing. We have little drawings, outlines of the human body and different exercises where we have kids sort of identify, I feel clammy or sweaty hands. I feel my heart beat really fast. I feel my head starting to sweat. I feel like I can tell that I’m breathing really fast as if I’ve just run. Some kids are able to identify that when they get angry they feel their hands ball up to fists immediately or they feel their muscles start to get tense. So it’s really just sort of a, I want to say a creative conversation. It’s not, it’s creative because we sort of have the body map and the different colors that kids can use and then they create this visual where they can start to just get more familiar with these early signs of anger.

Debbie:

I’m thinking of a conversation actually as the day we’re recording this, I released an episode this morning with Dr. Megan AnnaNeff and Dr. Debra Brause about therapy modalities and neurodivergent kids. But one of the things we talked about was how some neurodivergent kids and people can struggle with that interoception and really kind of understand what’s happening in their body. So I’m wondering, How do you work with kids who have a harder time identifying what’s actually happening? Like the fist clenching feels very like we can see that and feel that, but do you have any other strategies for helping kids who are a little more not attuned with what’s happening inside?

Ginger Whitson:

Yeah. I think one of the most effective things is sort of when you’re in this trusting relationship with the child, they know that you’re not someone who’s going to punish them for being angry. They are someone who genuinely wants to help you figure this anger thing out. They become open to you sort of noticing for them. I’ve noticed that when you are starting to get angry, you start to talk really, really fast. Or I’ve noticed that if you pop up out of your chair and start pacing, that’s a sign to me that you’re starting to get really angry. Have you ever noticed that about yourself? And as you said, it’s amazing that kids don’t, you know, it seems so obvious to the observer, right? But to the child in the heat of the moment, a lot of times they will say, no, I never noticed that about myself. And that’s equally true for adults. So that’s basically what I try to do is sort of be a mirror and a gentle observer for the child and help them increase their own awareness.

Debbie:

Yeah, that’s great. It makes total sense. And I wanted to just spend a minute talking then about the way you broke down anger and you touched upon these earlier in terms of expression styles. There’s aggressive, there’s passive, passive aggressive, and then assertiveness. And you’re kind of steering kids towards trying to build up their assertiveness muscles when it comes to anger expression. So could you talk a little bit about what that means in the context of the other styles, which may not lead to the results that the child wants?

Ginger Whitson:

Yeah, absolutely. So in the context of teaching kids that anger is normal and natural, that sort of the next step for me is to say, but the good thing is you have choices, right? You don’t have to be aggressive every single time. You don’t have to withdraw every single time. There are other choices that you can make. And that’s when I’ll sort of teach them. In general, we have four choices in anger expression: to be passive, to be passive aggressive, to be aggressive, or to be assertive. And assertive is the one we want to get to. But I like to let kids sort of play around and really experience and explore what aggressiveness looks like, sounds like, feels like, what their impact on other people is when they behave aggressively, what they’re, if they’re able to get their needs met when they’re passive. So within the structure of their book, we really focus for a while just on aggression. We focus just on passivity before we get to the real learning in assertiveness. My favorite activity and what kids always gravitate to or tell me they want to repeat is there’s an activity that off the top of my head, I think it’s called Say What, but it’s basically, I have a list of 10 sentences and it might be, I’d like a peanut butter sandwich or please pass the bread or I’d like to go shopping with you. But I’ll have kids, if I’m working one -on -one or in small groups, you know, you get someone and you have them read each or take turns reading the sentences in four different anger styles. So if it’s, you know, I’d like a peanut butter sandwich, kids have fun being like, I want a peanut butter sandwich in a really aggressive, angry tone. But then also to be like, you know, a passive tone… peanut butter sandwich if it’s okay with you? And to sort of exaggerate, and I don’t really know what the passive aggressive way would be, maybe a sarcastic, I want a peanut butter sandwich if it’s not too much trouble. And then the assertive way, which is good eye contact, a clear voice, polite tone, may I have a peanut butter sandwich, please? So again, basically saying all the things, but having kids really dive into what, how different these choices really are. And then we also can tune in, like, how did that angry thing feel in your body? Did you feel when you said that that your fist clenched also or your brow furrowed? How did you feel when you were so passive about it? So anyway, it’s a media activity. Kids get a lot of laughs out of it. But there’s a lot of learning in there, too.

Debbie:

Yeah. And I imagine too, a lot of people don’t realize how others are receiving their messages. So if you’re doing this with a group, you can notice how you feel when someone says, when someone yells, I want a peanut butter sandwich. And what does that feel like for you? So I love that. So how would you, you know, for listeners who want to engage with your book and who see the value and want to kind of make some movement in terms of their kids having a better relationship with anger? How would they use your book? Is it something you’d want them to kind of sit down and go through chapter by chapter? What does that look like?

Ginger Whitson:

So I am, as I mentioned, I’m a dean of students right now, but I was a school counselor for years. So I kind of wrote this book for me as a school counselor, what I would need if I was running small groups with kids who struggled to manage their anger. I’m also a parent. And actually, in writing the first edition of this book, I was doing lots of workshops. And I had parents that would come up to me and say, How do I adapt to this as a parent, as opposed to doing this as a school counselor or as a teacher in schools? So in the second edition of the book, it’s adapted that at the end of each chapter, there’s a how to adapt this for one -on -one use, how to adapt this for younger kids, how to adapt this for older kids.

Debbie:

That’s great. And what would you say the sweet spot is in terms of, and knowing that neurodivergent kids are often developmentally a different age than their chronological age, but who do you see the book kind of aimed at?

Ginger Whitson:

So I’m in a K to 8 school. And I can tell you, very honestly, I can use the same book with K to 8 students. The examples that I use are different from my kindergarten students, my five -year -olds than my 14 -year -olds. And I go at a much slower pace with my kindergarten students. Maybe it would take me a year to get through the whole book if I wanted to get through all the concepts. Whereas with my older kids, maybe we would spend sort of eight weeks going through the different activities. But I think any user would actually find it pretty easy to just sort of adapt it for the group they’re working with, whether it’s age or developmental level.

Debbie:

I would agree with that. I would agree with that. It’s super helpful that activities seem very interesting in the way that you wrote them. And I love just kind of seeing how it would play out and the way that the learning would happen from any kid who’s in a group or one on one learning this stuff. I could see how it is relevant for all different ages and even me as an adult dealing with my own anger, you know, relationship and dynamics, I got something out of it. It is a very useful resource. So just as a way to wrap up for a parent who’s listening to this again, who has a child who might have bigger emotions, might have challenges in staying regulated and have kind of bigger anger outbursts. Any kind of words like hard -won wisdom or advice or hope for them that you would want them to take away from this conversation.

Ginger Whitson:

I think I already hit it pretty hard, but it’s because I’m really, I’m committed to this idea. I see this as the prerequisite, like an escalated child needs a calm adult. That’s the only way to it. And it’s a challenge for a lot of adults. It is hard to stay calm when you are already exhausted, tired, hungry, or receiving anger from someone that you’ve given your all too, right? You’ve done everything. You have been so kind, so compassionate, and you but you’re their safe place, right? So you are still on the receiving end of anger that you don’t deserve. It is human to mirror the child’s behaviors or an emotion. But it’s destructive. What a dysregulated child needs desperately, and before anything else, is a regulated adult who can hang in there with them, not take it personally, do their own breathing activities to keep themselves calm and just be that solid calm object for a young person. And again, because it can be such a challenge for adults, like tap out when you need to, use your support, don’t feel bad when you blow it inevitably, because you will, but there’s always time in moments of calm to apologize to a child and say, hey, you were really upset. I was really upset. It was a bad combination. We didn’t bring out the best in each other. But I think when parents blow it and they use that as a learning opportunity for how to keep their calm with the child next time, that’s a great learning experience too.

Debbie:

Yes, I can attest to that. I have had that learning experience many times in my home. So absolutely, the repair is so powerful. And just for listeners who want to dive deeper into the staying calm piece, I’m going to just throw out three recommended episodes. I’ll have them in the show notes page. But definitely check out Hunter Clarke-Fields, mindful mama mentor. We talk a lot about staying calm and difficult moments in Dr. Mona Delahooke’s conversations on Brain-Body Parenting, a lot about co -regulation. And then also, I know that Dr. Lori DeSautels wrote the foreword for this book. We’ve had her on the show twice. And I would say listen to the episode on connections over compliance. So there’s great stuff in there too. But Ginger, I just want to say thank you so much. This has been such an interesting conversation. And I’m so grateful for the resources that you’ve created for all of us and all the work that you do, not just in anger management, but in supporting our kids. So thank you so much.

Ginger Whitson:

Thank you right back to you for having me back and providing all this information for parents. It’s such a hard job. So all the tools we can share and the grace we give each other for this hard job is critical. So thank you.