How do I help my 8 year old son with his anger?

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My boy is a 2nd grader, was recently diagnoses with Asperger's. I always suspected something was different about him. He's struggled with high levels of frustration and anger in response to changes. Lately, he's become more fixated on things. He found old scratch-off lottery tickets on the ground and was thrilled. He got very angry when he realized that there was no more silver to scratch off. He continued to yell and scream and cry for the about 30 minutes. It took a while until he was responsive to me and my attempts to help him calm down. He finally did and thanked me.

Yesterday, after he took out the garbage, he came back angry. I asked him about it and he said he was upset because he had a great idea about something he and I could play--and he forgot it. Again, he blew up, cried, yelled and ripped some of my paperwork. He didn't come out of this one too well. I think he was just overtired, but he stayed angry longer today.

Fill in the blank, but these exact kind of situations are happening often. I'm trying to understand what's really going on so I can get to the root of the problem and not respond to the topical stuff.

What can I do to help my son so his anger doesn't engulf him? He's not in any type of therapy right now.

Thanks for any help.

Jessica Kingsley Publishing has books that talk about dealing with that very issue.

My middle child, who is now 10, has anger issues. Two things that seem critical for him: (1) 1-2 minutes of space to sort it out and (2) that others remain calm. If we can achieve those two things, he can reign himself in. Unfortunately, that isn't how he world works all the time. We hope to find more effective and flexible means for addressing it with the therapist we are seeing soon.

I think that it is important for him to recognize and legitimize his feelings, but also to find acceptable ways of expressing those feelings. I think forcing the child to suppress emotions would be counterproductive, and possibly damaging. I have wondered if a rhythmic litany of what a person does and doesn't do when angry would help. Such as, "I feel angry, but I won't yell. I feel angry, but I will stand still. etc. " Just being able to articulate that he is feeling angry and needs some space would be a good thing -- I can not always be there to explain to other children what is going on.

Good luck to you, and wish us luck.

I was at a parents' group this evening organised by the Speech and Language Therapists and focussing on social communication.

This issue of anger and rage, sometimes expressed violently by hurting self or others, came up this evening. The SLTs said this was related to "grading", that our children often see things in very "black and white" terms, and find it difficult to moderate their reactions.

Next week we're going to be looking at this in more detail, and thinking about different ways in which we can help our children self-regulate their behaviour.

I'll try to remember to come back to this thread next week, and report back!

Have you ever come across the book The Explosive Child by Dr. Ross Greene? Using the approaches in that book helped my husband and me lower the emotional temperature in our home, bringing about fewer situations that made our son angry.

Though we are still dealing with this issue, and the grading, brought up by another poster is very relevant for us too. We try to put things on a scale with him so he can see the relative impact of situations, though not in the moment of a meltdown of course.

I think there is a lot of good information in the posts above, so I'll just add this one thing, and that is that we found moderating the sensory input and other stress factors in the home really helped my son with controlling his negative emotions. Think about it, if you are in a stressful environment it takes a lot less for things to set you off. Reducing the environmental stress, then, puts your child in a better place to keep himself in control.

My son has sensory issues with noise and also has problems with transitions and changes in expectations. Turning off the TV helped with the former; working on better consistency and clarity helped with the later. Those are just examples; quite a lot went into observing and finding the stress factors so we could mitigate them, but the changes are now so integral to our lives that it is difficult to remember what they all were.

Another thing that helped was to stop trying to get him to control certain annoying behaviors like pacing and constantly touching things. While these are annoying to us, they are essential to his self-regulation, and we found him much easier to deal with once we experimented with simply allowing them. The more your child can just be who he is while at home, the more at peace he becomes - pretty logical, when you think about it.

And remember that what seems silly to us, that we would assume can't cause stress, can be very real to our kids. Never stop looking for and learning to understand all the small stress factors. They can be found in the oddest places with ASD kids.