Ria: Hi! Everybody, it's Practical Mommy with www.mymommymanual.com, and today I am visiting with Anne Jordan, who is the president of Children and Families Incorporated, they've got camps and weekender treats and summer camps for kids at weloki.com. They are international speakers on parenting and she and her husband have this counseling practice. Today we are talking about anger and now this isn't about your kids driving you to drink. This is just fruit beer of which she has got a great analogy of for us.
Anne Jordan: Alright! So when you are teaching your kids about emotions. One of the main ones that comes up often for all of us is anger. It is the easiest one to be mocked and to blow-off at people. So anger hurts people sometimes, so what I teach kids is when I pour this glass of fruit beer into a glass of fruit beer, what you see happening at the top?
Ria: Foam.
Anne Jordan: Yeah, there is a whole bunch of foam at the top. And if I kept pouring it, whoops! It's going to go over, oh! Look it's all messy and the foam goes over, but underneath the foam is what we call the good stuff, the root beer, right?
Ria: Right.
Anne Jordan: So if you teach your kids and you can do this with them, and show them that the foam is like anger. The top emotion that we express often is the foam. But underneath the foam, underneath anger, there are always other feelings that have created that anger. It's feeling such as sadness, disrespect, hurt, a multitude of things.
Ria: Fear.
Anne Jordan: Fear, absolutely, so many things. It can be the real feelings, the good stuff, the root beer. So when you are talking to your kids, doing this little exercise might be helpful or just drawing it on piece of paper even to show them you are using your foam right now, but I wonder what's happening underneath the foam. What is your root beer? And it could be as simple as that where you stop then when you say, I know you're angry right now. What's the root beer?
Well, I am mad at daddy, because he called me a name. Okay! Well, then, let's talk about that. Then you can get to the real root, the root beer, the root of the problem and find out how to handle that, so that their anger doesn't need to blow over, mess up people, hurt relationships like the foam.
Ria: Very cool. What's nice is its really tangible for them and then they have kind of a vocabulary to talk about some of the more complex things.
Anne Jordan: Exactly. Right, and if you have a child that's doing anger a lot, this would be very helpful to show them your foaming and when you foam, I can't understand you, I can't relate to you, it hurts people, it's not fun to be with you, because it gets messy, just like it got messy. So let's talk about -- and you might need a peaceful time. You might need to let the foam die down as you can see so that then you can talk about the root beer.
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