Teaching Children to Deal With Anger

“His anger . . . it scares me,” I read in the email.

I understood exactly what she meant because we have all experienced the wounds of reckless words.

God says, “Reckless words pierce like a sword,” Proverbs 12:18.

Wow! There is tremendous devastation as a result of angry, irresponsible, thoughtless words.

God has quite a lot to say about our tongues. In Proverbs 18:21 He says, “The tongue has the power of life and death.”

I always talk to my kids about how our words can either break or build . . . life or death. But today we were already going to do a volcano experiment so I equated our angry outbursts to volcanoes.

We erupt, we spit out burning lava, we wreak, we devastate, and we even often blow away a piece of the other person . . . and ourselves.

Every one of us carries around parts of us that have been mortally wounded by something someone said to us in anger.

We know how it hurts. We know the lasting damage it can do.

They may have forgotten it; we never have.

Just like Mt. St. Helens here in our home state, volcano eruptions leave scars.

So why do we do this to other people, and why especially do we do it to the people we love the most?

God gives a huge complement to the person who’s under control.

“Better a patient man than a warrior, a man who controls his temper than one who conquers a city,” Proverbs 16:32.

Now, that’s strength! Controlling your temper; displays more power than conquering a city.

So I talked to the children (and myself J) about some things we need to take to become an extinct volcano and not would anyone with our volcano scars.

1. Confess your anger and reckless words as the sin that they are. Bring them to Jesus’ cross and treat it as some of the ugly sin that killed our Savior.
2. Don’t let the lava build up. Deal with issues right away.
3. Make yourself listen; make yourself ask questions before you speak. James 1:19 says, “Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger.” If you listen, if you hear the whole thing, if you understand it, you’ll be slower to anger.
4. Don’t say anything at all until you’re under control.
5. Make Jesus Christ the Lord of the raging animal inside you.

Volcanoes can’t think but we can. If we control ourselves and think before we blow we can ask ourselves, “Yelling makes me feel better for a minute and awful for hours. Is it worth blowing away a part of myself and of another person I love?”

If you think about it, we know it’s not worth it.

P.S. If you want to do this along with the simple volcano demonstration look here.