Getting to the Point of Issues in Teen Arguments
Teenager's Rage Often Needs to Focus to be Changed
Jun 10, 2009
Often during the course of parenting, parents will experience periods of anger from their teenage sons. Teenage boys' anger can especially be frustrating, even more so when it is becoming more frequent without an obvious reason.
Finding the Root of the Anger
A general increase in the levels of a teenage boy's anger may increase because of a tendency to generalize emotions from one event to other things in his life which are completely unrelated to the issue at heart.
Adult minds are able to experience emotion and make logical connections to the cause of the emotion. Adult minds are also capable of challenging the issue and considering other alternatives. However, teenagers are not developmentally capable of taking such steps without outside help.
One approach to a general increase in expressed teenage boys' anger is to intervene as a team. Either both parents, or a parent and a significant other, may wish to employ this family systems intervention. Harold Hackney's "Defining Strategies and Selecting Interventions" [The Professional Counselor, 2001] suggests an intervention strategy including the following concepts.
An Anger Intervention
First, both parents or team members need to sit down and talk with the teenager and address the teenage boy's anger. Specific examples need to be given such as, "I have seen you knock you papers off your desk three times this week" or "I heard you yell at your sister and you continued until you made her cry". The results of these actions should be emphasized.
Next, the intervention team members need to state how this behavior is an unusual expression of the son's anger and why they are unacceptable expressions of anger within the family. Before continuing, the teen should be given the opportunity of responding.
The team should bear in mind that the idea is to find a specific experience or situation which has caused the generalized anger to begin. It will be necessary to help the teenager to discover when the behavior began. Once the timeline can be identified, parents should help their son review the events of the specific day.
Parents will need to apply plenty of patience in helping the teenager identify different events which happened during the day. The teenager's emotional reaction to the situations of the day may also give intervening parents a clue as to where to further explore.
Eventually, the teenage boy's anger will be expressed toward some situation or action in which he will become angry and may not be allowed to express the anger, or he will not fully appreciate the impact of the emotion.
Once the incident is identified, parents should help the teenager express the full feelings of anger at the event. If the event was within the control of the teenager, parents should help the teen generate ideas for solving similar situations in the future. If the situation was outside of the teenager's control, intervening team members should point out the fact that no action could have been taken by the teen. The teenager's anger is understandable, but parents should strive to help him identify other emotional outlets.
Parents should allow the teen to fully express his anger even if it has to do with the one of the team members. However, once expressed, the parents should make it clear that further acting out will result in discipline.
Family Systems Theory
Family systems theory brings understanding to how one part of the family can easily affect the whole of the family's functioning. Because a teenage boy's anger is both typical and highly disruptive, intervening by helping the teen understand the source of the anger is beneficial to the whole family.
An intervention provides a time for focus, with specific examples of the teenage boy's anger being inappropriately expressed. The focus may help the teenager identify the source or event of the increasing expression of anger. Once identified, the issue or incident can receive the appropriate attention and, hopefully, the boy's anger will be reduced from a generalized state to being specifically focused on the event. Regardless of outcome, a commitment to discipline future behavior should be expressed to increase the chance of bringing an emotional balance back to the family.
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