🦁 Lenny’s Letter - When your child’s anger feels too big

Hello kind grown-up,

Few things are harder to sit with as a parent than your child’s anger.

It is loud. It can feel personal, even when it isn’t. It can arrive without warning and leave just as suddenly, like weather.

And often, our own instinct is to shut it down quickly — not because we don’t care, but because it is uncomfortable, and we want it to stop.

But anger is not the enemy.

Anger is information.

It tells us that something mattered. A boundary was crossed. An effort was undone. A sense of fairness was broken.

The goal is not to eliminate a child’s anger.

The goal is to help them learn what to do with it.

A few things that help:

Separate the feeling from the behaviour.
“You’re allowed to feel angry. You’re not allowed to hit/throw/shout at people.” Both things can be true at once.

Name it without judgement.
“You seem really angry right now.” This alone can lower the temperature. Children, like adults, often calm down once they feel understood.

Offer the safe outlets in calm moments, not heated ones.
Teaching a child to stomp, squeeze, or push against a wall works best when practised before the big feeling arrives — not in the middle of it.

Resist the urge to lecture mid-storm.
A child in the grip of anger cannot access the reasoning part of their brain. Wait until the storm passes before talking about what happened.

Repair afterward, gently.
Once calm has returned, you might ask: “What happened for you just then?” This helps a child build understanding of their own patterns over time.

Anger handled well in childhood becomes a tool, not a threat, in adulthood.

You are not raising a child who never gets angry.

You are raising an adult who knows what to do when they are.

With warmth,
Lenny 🦁

---

🔒 For supporters

Your own anger, and what it taught you

Before your child’s anger ever arrived, you had your own.

Think back. How was anger treated in the home you grew up in?

Was it allowed? Punished? Ignored? Exploded without warning?

Most of us inherited a relationship with anger long before we became parents — and most of us are working that relationship out, in real time, in front of our own children.

If anger was frightening in your childhood home, your child’s anger might feel frightening to you too — even when it’s developmentally completely normal.

If anger was punished in your childhood home, you might find yourself wanting to shut your child’s anger down quickly, the way yours was shut down.

If anger was never modelled safely, you might not know what a “safe outlet” even looks like for yourself, let alone for your child.

None of this is a failure.

It’s simply the pattern you were handed.

This week, notice your own anger.

When it arrives — at your child, your partner, the printer that won’t work — pause and ask:

What does my anger need right now? What would it look like to feel this without it controlling what I do next?

You don’t need to have this perfected.

You just need to keep practising — out loud, in front of your child, when you can.

“I’m feeling really frustrated right now. I’m going to take a breath before I say anything else.”

That sentence alone teaches more than a hundred lectures ever could.

With warmth,
Lenny 🦁