Child and Adolescent Anger

Although expressions of anger are frequent and normal in childhood, the prevailing attitude is that anger is destructive and must be controlled or eliminated to avoid negative consequences and outcomes. However, anger is a universal human experience and plays an important role in helping individuals and groups to reach goals, address injustices, and approach difficult and onerous tasks. Particularly in childhood, anger is often confused with aggression and this conflation has contributed to the belief that anger is always destructive and should be discouraged. In fact, aggression is only one of several possible outcomes of feeling angry and can also be elicited by many emotions other than anger, including fear, sadness, shame, and jealousy. Although managing children’s anger is one of the most salient parenting challenges—it has inspired thousands of books for parents and children of all ages providing advice and help for dealing with children’s anger—no textbooks, anthologies, journals, or reference works are currently dedicated to the topic of children and anger. Thus, this article aims to provide an overview of the development of anger, with an emphasis given to the distinction between typical and atypical anger and on the functional role of anger during childhood and adolescence.