Imagine your child is being physically aggressive with a classmate at school during recess. How does it feel to be the parent of the child everyone perceives to be a schoolyard bully? Embarrassed? Defensive? Shocked? Angry?
Now, imagine what it feels like to be an adopted child who is being aggressive to friends and classmates? What led to this intense feeling of anger that needed to be lashed out? Self-defense? Rejection? Feeling different? Frustration? Being adopted?
When a crisis situation arises, it is up to the adoptive parents to decipher whether the root of the situation is a typical kid issue or an adoption issue. Unfortunately for most adoptive parents, it is not clear cut and all emotional situations with adopted kids require both parenting hats to be worn at the same time.
Sherrie Eldridge, author of Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew (Dell, 1999), says that anger is not uncommon with adoptees and in many cases, feelings of anger may surface throughout life due to something she calls “primal fear of abandonment”. What this means is that the adopted child’s angry reaction to a very typical statement, “I’m not going to be your friend anymore”, could be a manifestation of the child’s feelings of rejection by his birth mother.
With the understanding that adopted kids may be dealing with adoption issues at the same time as regular friendship drama, adoptive parents can help develop anger management strategies and also work on preventing angry episodes in the future.
Helping Adopted Children Manage Their Anger
The best thing parents can do to help their kids handle anger is to role-model appropriate responses to frustrating and anger-producing situations. Other strategies recommended by child development researchers include:
- Creating safe places to display anger in non-harming ways
- Developing self-regulatory skills
- Talking about angry situations and identify other words that describe anger
- Using books and stories to validate a child’s feelings of anger
The above strategies help to demonstrate that anger is a normal emotional response to some life situations, but also encourages the child to find appropriate ways of expressing the feeling.
Strategies for Helping Kids Handle Adoption-Related Anger
For situations in which adoptive parents suspect an adoption issue is underlying the angry feelings, additional strategies are helpful in encouraging the adoptee to work through the emotion. Eldridge suggests the following:
- Reassure the adoptee he had no role in the plan for his adoption
- Give permission for an adopted child to be angry about his adoption
- Seek help from a therapeutic professional who has worked with adopted children
It is important for adoptive parents to remember that anger is an appropriate response to a child’s grief over his adoption situation, so it is wise to be prepared for helping the child handle grief issues as well.
Tips for Preventing Anger Issues in Adoptees
Despite anger being a normal response to some situations, in the process of self-regulation, it is effective to have some strategies in place to help prevent the child being provoked in such a way. One way to do this is to encourage on-going emotional expression to help the child understand that it is okay to express both positive and negative feelings by exploring creative activities such as:
- Parent-child journaling
- Role-playing
- Sand play and art therapy
- Allowing the child to take an item to school to help cope with stressful times
- Mutual activities that foster a connection between parent and adoptee
If anger is affecting relationships with classmates, such as the bullying situation above, it is also important to talk to the child’s teacher about appropriate interventions when a difficult situation arises.
Even though a child may direct his anger to classmates, siblings and even his adoptive parents, the anger is not aimed at anyone in particular. The anger is a sign that the child is working through some tough emotions and needs his adoptive parents to help find ways of working through the anger in effective and healthy ways.
Sources:
Marion, Marian. Helping Young Children Deal With Anger. Athealth.com Website. (accessed February 8, 2011).
Eldridge, Sherrie. Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew. NY: Dell Publishing, 1999.
Angela Krueger - As an adoptive parent and PRIDE adoption trainer, Angela uses her insights to help others on their adoption journey.
