Teaching Your Adolescent About Anger. The question essentially was: “What can I teach my teenager about anger, now that he seems angry more of the time?” It’s a complicated issue. What follows are a few rambling thoughts that you might want to include in your “home schooling” about anger. Start with explaining the function of anger, parental history with anger, why adolescents can have additional cause for anger, how anger can be entrapping, characteristics that can foster anger, and a variety of ways for calming anger. Because this blog is so long, you may just want to read the topics of interest, and skip the rest. THE FUNCTION OF ANGER. In like words, so speaks the teenager to her serious boyfriend after his recent lies. It’s important for parents to understand that although having an adolescent who gets intensely angry with them from time to time may seem like a problem; it can be less of a problem than having a teenager who is unable to experience or express anger.
PARENTAL HISTORY WITH ANGER. ANGER AND ADOLESCENCE. The Mixed Bag Buddy [And Other Friendship Conundrums] Shane Shaps remembers the day her friend Claudia* pushed her to climb the monkey bars when they were little girls in Louisville, Kentucky. Terrified of heights, Shane fell and broke her wrist. That type of pressure from Claudia was typical. But they had been companions since they were infants, and Claudia continued to be an important—yet on balance negative—figure in Shane's life. "Our parents were close friends," says Shane, now 40 and a social-media consultant and mother of two. "It was a codependent relationship: She bossed me around, and I let her do it. " During college, the two lived together for a few summers, and they moved into the same building after graduation. When Claudia later hosted a bridal shower for Shane, their relationship had become so awkward that Shane tried to demote her from bridesmaid to guest.
Since "friendfluence" is so powerful, our pals can just as easily have negative effects as positive ones. The Problem of Drift The Mixed-Bag Buddy. Big Bad Bully. No, it's not just boys being boys.
It takes a special breed of person to cause pain to others. But the one most hurt by bullying is the bully himself—though that's not at first obvious and the effects worsen over the life cycle. Yes, females can be bullies too. They just favor a different means of mean. On the first day of spring in 1993, honor student Curtis Taylor took his seat in the eighth-grade classroom he had grown to hate in the Oak Street Middle School in Burlington, Iowa. That night, Curtis went into a family bedroom, took out a gun, and shot himself to death. Months later, in Cherokee County, Georgia, 15-year-old Brian Head grew tired of the same teasing and deeds. Just over a decade earlier, in late 1982, a nearly identical series of events unfolded in the northern reaches of Norway. The difference between the American and the Scandinavian experience could arguably be summed up in four words: . "They even encourage it in boys," observes Gary W.