We sent Josh to his cabin for grossing everyone out in the dining hall during dinner. A 10-year-old little Burgermeister of a kid, new to the school, he did this frequently, but tonight was too much.
After a few minutes, I followed him to his cabin to have a talk with him. What confronted me as I walked in his door was unbelievable.
He had destroyed his room. In a few minutes’ time he had emptied his drawers, overturned his furniture, pulled all his bedding to the floor and broken everything in sight. His posters, and those of his roommate, were ripped to shreds and their mirror lay in slivers.
And in the middle of it all stood fat little Josh, fists clenched, shaking with what certainly appeared to be rage. Surely he was in the throes of anger in the extreme.
I approached him, wondering what to expect next. Would he hit me? I didn’t think so, and so I softly said to him, “Joshua, why are you so sad?”
And suddenly he melted into me, sobbing. He held onto me for fully a minute, unable to speak.
The source of his sadness did not emerge until hours later, and it is not central to this scenario, (except to say that it developed that Josh had plenty to be sad about — stuff surrounding his life at home). Rather, the point of it is what I have come to believe about anger: If we can consider it an emotion at all, it is a secondary one, concealing a deeper, more profound one — very often sadness.
What was the trigger here? The incident in the dining hall pressed a button recalling a similar one at home. Often, it doesn’t take much, though the recalled event may be huge.
While there are always children who are angry about something, we don’t appropriately label them “angry children.” Anger frequently becomes a default emotion children use when a different feeling would have accomplished a lot more. But that part of their brain — the prefrontal cortex, which should make it possible for them to stop short of rage — is not yet fully developed, and won’t be until several years into adulthood. It becomes immensely important, then, to attempt to unearth the real source of the child’s feelings, and sadness is usually where I begin.
Anger is a word we use to mean so many different things that it often means nothing. A child is angry because his new toy broke during assembly, and primitive thinking often leads him to locate someone or something on which to place the blame. In reality, he may be disappointed, frustrated, perhaps sad. Meanwhile his default emotion makes him furious at the man in the toy store who sold it to him, the manufacturer who made this piece of junk and couldn’t even provide understandable assembly instructions, with the child ultimately taking it out on the toy itself, throwing it violently into the trash, “There!”
Josh’s immature prefrontal cortex wouldn’t let him put on the brakes until he could find an appropriate way to express his anguish. Yes, what he did led him to an ultimate solution as he and I worked through it together over the ensuing days, but at what cost? Anger and aggression are inextricably and biologically linked, and what happened with Josh, intense though it may have been, is actually quite understandable, given his tender age. And, yes, although we reached a solution to his anguish, there was a debt to be repaid — collateral damage, as it were.
All the foregoing duly said, we don’t have to play dead until the rage erupts. Kids need to be taught how to recognize the harbingers of oncoming rage such as increased pulse rate, sweating, clenching fists and then move quickly to overcome rage before it becomes full blown, because it can come on mighty fast. Deep breathing, counting to 10 (or 100), refocusing attention to a pleasant diversion, soothing music, noncompetitive exercise, writing a letter and then tearing it up — these will all help, as they would have helped Josh, if only I could have known more before the fact instead of after.
From a Chinese fortune cookie: “Patience in a moment prevents a thousand years of sorrow.”
Robin C. Harris, an 18-year resident of Lake County, is the author of “Journeys out of Darkness, Adventures in Foster Care.” A retired educator, he is a substitute teacher for Lake County schools and has recently completed two works of fiction for children and teens. He is available for tutoring in first through eighth grades. Harris can be contacted at harris.tke@att.net.
