Sec. 4.  METHODS OF DEALING WITH ANGER

It is evident that talking, lecturing, or arguing with the angry infant will not help the case.  He may feel the emotion of your anger but misses any shreds of your logic.  Parents ought first to ask, Why is an infant angry?  With the infant, with whom there are no pretensions or affections, there is commonly a simple cause of his rebellion.  The baby yelling like an Indian and looking like a boiled lobster is neither possessed of an evil spirit nor giving an exhibition of natural depravity; he is lying on a pin, wearing the shackles of faddish infant fashions, or he is trying to tell you of disturbances in the department of the interior.  Furnish physical relief at once and you put a period to the display of what you call temper; try to subdue him by threats and you only discover that his lungs are stronger than your patience; you yield at last and he has learned that temper properly displayed has its reward, that the way to get what he wants is to upset the world with anger.  That is one of life’s early lessons; it is one of the first exercises in training character.

Consider the future. Each family is a social unit, a little world.  Within this world are in miniature nearly all the struggles and experiences of the larger world of later life.  It is a world which prepares children for living by actually living.  The qualities that are needed in a world of men and women and affairs are developed here.  When young children exhibit anger parents must ask, How would this quality, under similar circumstances, serve in the business of mature life?  Anger is an essential quality of the good and forceful character.  Somehow we have to learn to be angry and not sin.  Anger is the emotional effect of extreme discontent and opposition.  For the stern fight against evil and wrong, life needs this emotional reinforcement.  But it must be purified, it must be controlled.  Like the dynamic of steam, it must be confined and guided.  Love must free it from hatred; self-control must guide it.

When children are angry, help them to think out the causes for the feeling.  Instead of denouncing or deriding them, stop to analyze the situation for yourself.  It may be that they are entirely justified, that not to be angry would be an evidence of weakness, of base standards of conduct or conditions, or of weak reactions to life’s stimuli.  Always help the child to see why he is angry.  Perhaps the situation is one he may remedy himself.  Is he angry because the top-string is tangled?  Stay with him until he has learned that he can remove the cause of his own temper.