Why is my child so angry?
Your child's anger is not the real problem. Not knowing what it means is. Spend an evening with me and I think you'll start to see your child, and yourself, very differently.
- You ask them to put the phone down, and the whole house goes up.
- Doors slam. Words come out that you'd never have dared say to your parents.
- You hear yourself shouting, and you don't recognise the person doing it.
- And later you lie awake wondering whether you've lost them.
If any of that is familiar, you are not a bad parent. You may well be a very good one. Most of the parents I work with are capable, loving people who are quietly confused that what works everywhere else in their lives doesn't seem to work at home. And the harder they try, the worse it gets.
Managing the behaviour was never going to work.
Modern parenting tells you to manage the anger. Stay calm. Give a consequence. Offer a choice. Name the feeling. Be consistent. And if that doesn't work, try harder.
They don't work. They really don't work. Not because you're doing them badly, but because they're aimed at the wrong thing.
Think of a fire alarm. The alarm tells you there's a fire somewhere. Put the fire out and the alarm stops, because it's no longer needed. And yet with children we spend all our energy on the alarm: its volume, its timing, the way it disturbs the peace. It rarely occurs to us to look for the fire.
Children don't come into the world wanting to fight you. They just don't.
A child's anger is a signal. Something their biology expects isn't arriving. And once you can read the signal, I've found that the anger often begins to settle by itself, without a single consequence.
Parenting has become a performance.
I trained as an actor at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and spent ten years in the business. So I know a performance when I see one. And I see one in almost every family I meet.
When we become parents, most of us become somebody else. We pick up a script from our own childhood, from books, from other parents, from the culture around us, and we start playing the part of the parent we've been told to be. I call this informed conditioning. It's exhausting, and it quietly separates us from who we really are.
Every actor learns early that the line is never the whole story. What sits underneath it, the subtext, is what the audience actually receives. And at home, the subtext is everything. You can play calm beautifully. You've probably done it in rooms where far more was at stake. Yet your child seems to see straight through it, and the calmer you perform, the angrier they get. I don't think that's a coincidence.
Here's the thing. Your child doesn't receive your words. They receive you. They read what sits underneath the performance, far more precisely than any audience ever could. And I wonder if it might be that a great deal of the anger in our homes is a response to the performance, not to the person.
Don't you want to know what your child is actually responding to?
Behind the Anger
A live, private evening for parents whose homes have become a battleground. Seventy-five minutes with me, online.
We'll look at what your child's anger might be telling you, why the usual responses so often make it worse, and the five innate expectations every child arrives with. We'll look at the performance too, and what changes when you put it down.
You won't leave with a list of tips. I don't give them, because tips are more of the same. You'll leave seeing your child differently, and in my experience that is where everything starts to change.
There's time for questions at the end, and you can ask them anonymously.
Behind the Anger
- Date
- Thursday 12 November 2026
- Time
- 8pm to 9.15pm UK
- Where
- Online, from your sofa
- Seen by
- No one. Cameras off.
Secure payment by card. Your private link arrives by email straight away.
