Why Do Kids With ADHD Have Anger Issues?
If you are the parent of a child with ADHD, then odds are high that you have faced difficult moments involving intense anger. Maybe you face it daily. And perhaps you are left wondering how so much volatile emotion can live inside such a small person.
So do kids with ADHD have anger issues? Those explosive moments are usually not bad behavior, and they are not a sign that your discipline is failing (no matter what “helpful” friends or relatives may be saying). For a lot of kids, big anger is part of how ADHD affects their brain’s ability to manage emotion. The feelings arrive fast and hard, and the mental brakes that would normally slow them down aren’t fully developed.
That one change in how you see it, from “my child is being difficult” to “my child is struggling to regulate,” can reshape how you respond to everything that follows. If intense anger is something you deal with regularly, read on.
Why Kids With ADHD Have Angry Outbursts
One of the key ADHD facts to know when parenting ADHD kids is that they struggle with emotion regulation and impulsivity. And once the anger train has left the station, they have a more difficult time calling it back or steering it in a positive, productive direction.
Although angry outbursts are often associated with impulsivity, that factor alone is not the problem. Researchers increasingly point to basic emotional dysregulation as the culprit. By that I mean the brain’s ability to feel a strong emotion and then manage it, dial it down, and choose what to do next. For a lot of kids with ADHD, those emotional regulation skills develop more slowly than they do in many of their peers without ADHD.
Russell Barkley, a leading ADHD researcher, refers to this phenomenon as Deficient Emotional Self-Regulation (DESR). And he argues that DESR sits at the very core of ADHD. Interestingly, this emotional piece is not part of the official checklist doctors use to diagnose ADHD, though many experts think it should be.
Managing ADHD Anger: Strategies for Parental Calm
Parenting a child with big, unpredictable emotions can be genuinely hard. That’s a simple truth. So when every resource tells you to stay calm, hear it as support rather than one more thing to get right. Your steadiness is not a nice-to-have. When you keep your own emotions regulated, you are doing some of the work of calming your child. When we remain (or, if necessary, regain) calm, we can draw out calmness in others around us. This is part of what child psychologists call co-regulation, and it is one of the most practical reasons to put your own oxygen mask on first.
There are a variety of strategies for channeling calmness. Find one that resonates with you and that you can reach for without having to think too much about it. For me, singing the ABC slowly in my head works well. Repeating it as many times as necessary. In addition to helping channel some inner peace, it provides a built-in pause before speaking.
Check out these articles for other ideas that may work for you:
- Calm Voices, Calmer Kids
- ADDitude Asked: What is your best strategy for not overreacting?
- 4 Rules for Taking a Mom Rage Break
- Self-Care Ideas & Resources for Parents
- The Calm Parent’s Secret Weapon
- Effective Parenting: 7 Calming Strategies
What Parents Should Avoid Doing With An Angry ADHD Child
Sometimes our natural, in-the-moment responses to an angry episode turn out to be exactly the wrong thing to do. Some common missteps that are easy to fall into: losing your own temper, reacting without a plan, giving up too soon, and failing to actually listen. That last one can be especially easy to lose sight of.
“Your child’s feelings are no less valid than any other person’s, even if he sometimes acts ‘out of control.’ Don’t get so busy trying to control your child’s outbursts that you forget this fact and end up silencing your child. After all, his thoughts, feelings, and observations can provide valuable insight into what drives his anger—and who he is as a person.” 8 Strategies to Use When Your ADHD Child Is Angry
It is worth connecting this back to the bigger picture. The outburst is your child’s brain overwhelmed, not a performance aimed at you. Don’t assume your kid is trying to push your buttons. Try to listen for the feeling underneath.
I’ve also found this article about “5 Don’ts When Your Child Is Angry” to be helpful. It reframes each “don’t” as a “do”: don’t lose your cool, breathe instead; don’t react, respond with a plan; don’t dictate, discuss; don’t demand, encourage; don’t give up, stay committed. If you tend to remember advice better as concrete swaps, this one is worth a read.
Top Strategies for Restoring Calm With Your Angry Child
When your child is deep into angry mode, that’s not really a teaching moment. It’s safe to assume that the thinking part of their brain has essentially gone offline. They are flooded, running on the emotional brain.
When one of my sons was in the 6-7 age range, he would periodically have very intense rages. He could not communicate anything that actually made sense. Nor could he absorb anything. It was like I spoke a completely foreign language. Afterward, he was sheepish and embarrassed, and we could have a real conversation. But in the moment? It was the eye of the storm.
Ross Greene, the child psychologist who wrote The Explosive Child, describes people as being “at their worst in the heat of the moment.” When a child’s emotions are running high, Greene recommends concentrating on de-escalation and returning to any real discussion later.
If you face the same situation, short, simple phrases you have practiced ahead of time work better than anything that requires reasoning.
What Can You Say?
When you are in the middle of an explosive moment, you want a few “go to” lines ready so you are not searching for words while your child melts down. Try to practice something in advance so it comes out naturally when you need it.
Some of the best advice I’ve gotten over the years that actually worked for me:
- Naming the emotion. “I see that you’re really upset right now.”
- Reflecting back what’s being said. Meaning, repeat it. It’s not that you are agreeing; it’s letting them know that they are being heard.
- Child yelling, “I TOLD you I don’t want to go to the park!”
- Mom, in a calm voice: “You told me you don’t want to go to the park.”
- “I’ll be waiting over here for you when you’re ready to ____.” [fill in blank as appropriate: have a hug; try again; start over; let me help you; help figure something out; etc.]
If you want fuller lists to pull from, this Lemon Lime Adventures’ article 13 powerful phrases proven to calm an angry child leans into reassurance and safety (“I love you,” “You are safe,” “I’ll be here when you’re ready”). Pick two or three that sound like something you would actually say, and rehearse those.
What Can You Do?
In addition to some reliable verbal cues, you can also have one or two actions mentally lined up to fall back on to help defuse explosive situations. These are things you can do reflexively to help you maintain calm.
For instance, taking 3, 5, 7 or more deep breaths before speaking. Having a resonating mantra that you can repeat in your head. Or, a simple song.
And, don’t underestimate the power of a hug.
Preventing and Minimizing Angry Outbursts
For best results, you’ll need actual data on what’s going on to devise an effective plan, strategy, or toolkit to avoid or minimize angry outbursts.
Don’t fall into the trap of relying on your memory of what your child’s potential triggers are. Make a plan to keep notes for a specified number of days and record what’s happening.
Tracking Outbursts
This period of observation could be focused primarily at home, in the evenings and on weekends, as an initial matter. Or, if your child has problems with angry outbursts at school, you could enlist their teacher to help keep track for a few days.
This record can provide you with important insights. And it can help you when consulting with professionals or other parties.
Basically, you want to track when the outburst occurred, what happened immediately before the episode, and what the result or consequence of the episode was.
And you should also note the intensity if it varies (e.g., a fit of yelling and crying vs. throwing things or other destructive behavior). This will help you see what patterns may be taking place that are not necessarily obvious.
Here’s something worth knowing: this is essentially what the professionals do too. They call it a functional assessment, looking at what comes right before the outburst (the trigger), the outburst itself, and what happens right after (the consequence). You are doing the same thing at home.
Next Steps
What helpful information could be gleaned from this exercise? You could discover that certain events or states tend to trigger outbursts. Like being hungry, overly tired, and/or engaging in certain overstimulating activities. Or after unhappy transitions, such as stopping a fun activity.
You may also discover some unintended patterns have developed. Like when they erupt into tears and yelling with caregiver A, they often end up getting something they want or a desirable substitute.
In other words, you may discover that certain results are happening that are actually reinforcing the negative behavior when you didn’t realize it.
You should also consider that unaddressed sensory issues may be playing a role.
Teaching ADHD Kids To Manage Their Own Anger
When researching effective strategies for managing anger in a child with ADHD, some recommendations pop up repeatedly. These are ones that seem particularly easy to implement:
- Daily rigorous exercise
- Martial arts
- Being mindful of overstimulating screen time, and easing the hard transitions off a preferred game or show
A quick word on that last one, because the old advice to “limit violent media” has not aged well. The evidence that violent shows or games actually cause anger in kids with ADHD is somewhat mixed. What does hold up is more practical. Screens are stimulating, and being pulled away from a favorite game or show is a classic meltdown trigger. (The Child Mind Institute lists “time to stop playing” right alongside homework and bedtime as predictable flashpoints.)
But one of the best long-term strategies for managing anger is helping your child develop their own techniques for managing it.
This article, Anger Is Important, But Only When It’s Managed, explains ten strategies that families can use to help teach kids how to manage their own anger.
In some circumstances, it may be necessary to enlist professional help to assist with managing anger. This could involve traditional one-on-one therapy with the child. Or, some families may find a structured behavioral therapy program beneficial.
For instance, Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, which involves real-time parental coaching from a professional. Or Parent Management Training, which is also a parent-centered program.
Another approach worth knowing about is Ross Greene’s Collaborative and Proactive Solutions (CPS), the model behind his book The Explosive Child. Instead of rewarding or punishing outbursts, CPS treats them as a sign of lagging skills and works with your child to solve the underlying problems together. Research suggests it can be about as effective as traditional parent training, and for a lot of parents the reframe alone is a relief: your child is not giving you a hard time, they are having a hard time.
It is also worth remembering that treating the underlying ADHD can ease the emotional side too. For some kids, the right medication makes them better able to reach for these skills and slower to boil over. That is a conversation for your child’s prescriber.
This article from the Child Mind Institute provides a good overview of these options, including PCIT, PMT, and CPS.
What Happens After An Outburst?
After the storm is over and everyone has had time to embrace the calm, have some sort of a debrief. A period when both you and your child can reflect together on what happened and plan strategies for the future.
There is a reason to save this for later. You teach and problem-solve during the calm because that is when your child can actually reach for those skills. In the heat of the moment, they simply cannot get to them.
One strategy that may be particularly helpful with younger children is to sit together and read a relevant book. Use the story told in the book as a jumping-off point for discussing what happened in real life.
These are books that have been particularly useful in our household:
- Sometimes I’m Bombaloo, by Rachel Vail
- Anh’s Anger, by Gail Silver
- Moody Cow Meditates, by Kerry Lee MacLean
Is It More Than ADHD?
Something else to keep in mind and investigate is whether there are other factors besides ADHD that are intensifying your child’s emotional outbursts. A frequently occurring culprit could be Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD).
ADHD and ODD frequently occur together. And when they do, it may call for different strategies than what is typically recommended for a child who has ADHD alone.
Children with ODD show a marked pattern of angry, defiant, and disruptive behavior, often directed at authority figures like parents, caregivers, and teachers. Behaviors can include being short-tempered, argumentative, hostile, and resentful, actively seeking to agitate and annoy others on purpose.
With ODD, it’s easy to focus on the “defiance” aspect, which typically takes and holds center stage. But ODD really has two sides: an argumentative, defiant side, and an angry, irritable side (quick to lose their temper, touchy, easily annoyed, resentful).
Defiance and irritability tend to start with primary caregivers and can spread to other authority figures over time. ODD behaviors can have a particularly hard effect on family relationships, so it helps to identify and address them early.
Could It Be DMDD?
There is a newer term worth knowing: Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder, or DMDD. Some children run angry or irritable almost all the time, most of the day and nearly every day, with frequent, intense outbursts that go well beyond the everyday frustration you may see with ADHD. Since 2013, there has been a specific diagnosis for that pattern.
Although ODD and DMDD can sound very similar, note that a child cannot be diagnosed with both. When a child meets the criteria for both ODD and DMDD, only the DMDD diagnosis is given.
DMDD is still a relatively new and debated diagnosis, and researchers are candid that they are still learning about it. It is not something to self-diagnose. If your child’s irritability is this constant and this intense, the useful next step is a conversation with a qualified professional who can sort out what is really going on.
Other Factors That Could Be Magnifying ADHD Anger
Finally, even though angry outbursts often follow a child with ADHD, you should consider whether there are other factors making the situation worse than it has to be.
As noted earlier, treating the underlying ADHD can also alleviate some anger issues. But in some instances, medication issues can potentially be a magnifier. For example, the medication may be wearing off, and you need a bridging strategy in place. (This is an instance when records and tracking can be helpful.) Or it could be an actual side effect of the current medication. Raise any suspicions and concerns with your prescriber.
Intense anger can also be a manifestation of depression, anxiety, or frustration with ongoing learning differences. And sensory processing issues can result in angry outbursts too.
Atypical reactions to the environment can trigger intense negative emotions, such as feeling uncomfortable in “scratchy” clothes that don’t feel right or being aggravated by lights and noises.
Closing Thoughts
An early step in making a plan to manage your child’s anger is making sure you can consistently maintain, or quickly regain, your own calm first. And plan to keep a record of what happens during angry episodes, since that can help you develop an effective strategy.
Any plan for managing your child’s anger should also include taking time, after the dust has settled, to reflect on what happened and strategize together for the future. This helps your child develop their own long-term strategies for managing anger.
Finally, remember that your child is not choosing these outbursts. ADHD affects the brain’s ability to manage emotion. You can help them build the skills to manage that anger over time.
