When parents are angry, children feel the blame

Let's face it. We all get angry at our children. "It's the other side of the intense love we also feel for them," says lecturer and parent educator Nancy Samalin, author of the best-selling book "Love and Anger, The Parental Dilemma" (Penguin). "I didn't even know I had a temper until I had children," she says.

Most of us know not to act on our rage. Rather than spank, hit, berate, or otherwise abuse our children, we count to 10, take deep breaths, bite our tongues, or, as Samalin is fond of saying, "Use a four-letter word that ends in I-T: E-X-I-T."

But what about those lesser moments? What about when it's not fury we're expressing but simple annoyance and irritation brought on by accumulated stress that we've come to accept as normal life? It can come from such diverse corners of our lives as having bored kids on our hands now that school is out, the high cost of gas, or how the Democratic National Convention is going to screw up traffic this summer.

"Just as some people get sunburnt while others tan, some children go into a tailspin just because Mom or Dad expresses mild impatience," says psychotherapist Claudia Luiz of Westwood.

This has a lot to do with temperament; some children just are more sensitive than others. But Luiz, a clinical researcher at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis in Brookline, thinks there is more to it. She says parents are under more stress than most of us realize and that it leads to less patience, more resentment, and potentially more children who think their parents are angry with them, even if they aren't.

"Parents aren't aware of how insidious stress is to family life," says Luiz, who specializes in emotional education.

Samalin agrees. "The busier and more stressed we are, the more it makes us critical and impatient. Even if we don't think we are coming across as angry, that's how it can seem to children," she says.

Let's be clear: It's not that we can never be angry. The expression of negative feelings is important in parenting; it's how children learn right from wrong and how they learn to regulate and cope with their own unhappiness and frustration. "Getting angry isn't what ruins a relationship," says Samalin. "How you express it, that's another story."

Here's the problem: Children of all ages feel responsible for parents' anger. They tend to take it personally and blame themselves. Some children are thick-skinned, but the more often even those children are left to interpret a cranky mood, a snappish voice, or a pressured command, the more likely they are to feel it as anger. The child who is sensitive to it absorbs it in bigger doses, says Chicago psychologist Bernard Golden, a specialist in anger management (angermanagementeducation.com). He is author of "Healthy Anger" (Oxford Press).

"The more that happens, the more it affects the way children feel about themselves," he says. Most typically, they become angry ("What's wrong with me?") and act on that anger, sometimes getting into trouble, sometimes withdrawing from their parents. What's more, over time, parents' reaction to stress becomes the model for how children deal with their own stress and anger.

You're late for your 9-year-old's doctor appointment, you're sitting in a long line of traffic at a major intersection, and you've missed the green light for the third cycle. Your daughter is flipping through radio stations. Suddenly you snap at her. "I can't stand that noise! Shut it off!"

Surely that's irritation born of stress. But does a 9-year-old know that?

Only if you tell her, says family support specialist Diane Clarke Delehanty of the South Boston Neighborhood House, a multiservice family agency. "If you say, `Whoa, I didn't mean to snap like that. I guess this traffic is getting to me,' you've offered a positive role model of how to handle stress and anger," she says, and you've removed any chance for her to misinterpret what you said. If your irritation passes without your interpretation, there's potential for ambiguity or worse, especially if your comment was less benign. ("How could I raise a daughter who would listen to such stupid music?")

Parents typically are good about being remorseful or offering an explanation for anger when their blow-up is out of character. Even when it's not, Golden advises offering an explanation ("I was so frightened that you ran out in the street, it made me angry. It's a very dangerous thing to do.") and instructions for next time ("I'm going to help you remember this rule: Never run into the street.").

The problem with anger that's the result of stress is that most parents don't even realize it's happening. "It takes a lot of self-awareness," says Delehanty.

Which is why Luiz says it's not enough to recognize how our anger affects our children. In addition, she says, "Parents need to learn to de-stress."

She isn't talking yoga and exercise, although there's nothing wrong with either. She wants parents to allow themselves to meet their own emotional needs, starting when children are infants, and she offers herself as an example:

Until recently, she would wake up at 7 a.m. on Saturday with her daughters, Miranda and Zoe, now 4 and 7. "I felt too guilty to let them sit in front of the TV," she says. It took her years to see that this was backfiring and causing family stress.

"This was my one morning to chill. I resented that they wanted to sit in my lap and talk to me and kiss me when all I wanted was to drink my coffee and stare into space," she says. It wasn't until they stopped wanting to be in her lap that she realized they were distancing themselves from her, a classic sign that they perceived her as angry with them. "My guilt produced stress that caused crankiness they saw as anger," she says.

Now there's a new Saturday morning routine.

"I get them a bowl of cereal, they watch TV, my husband and I drink our coffee and read the paper. If I want to stare into space, I can. If I want to go back to bed, that's OK, too. When we come together at 9 o'clock, everybody's in a good mood," she says. P.S. Just because Luiz was letting go of the guilt that led to her stress didn't mean she abdicated parental responsibility. "We have parental controls on our TV. My kids can only watch limited channels and videos," she says.

Contact Barbara Meltz at meltz@globe.com.