What can be more upsetting to a parent than to have your own kid, who is now living in an adult body, be physically aggressive against you or someone else? Behavior like this is both surreal and frightening. Kids are supposed to be smaller and weaker than their parents so that the parents can protect them. What tables have been turned upside down so that you must now protect yourself from your child?
Defining the Problem
Unfortunately, aggression in teens has become a significant problem. Violence in the form of fighting and bullying occurs in schools, neighborhoods, public arenas, and sports stadiums. Aggressive behavior in adolescents ranges from the not so severe, such as yelling or throwing items, to the extremely severe and dangerous, such as the Columbine tragedy. While boys perform the majority of aggressive acts, girls are also becoming more aggressive. These are not excuses, for not all teens are overaggressive. Rather, these are realities you must be aware of.
The problem is understandable when you look at the factors involved: a body almost as strong as an adult’s; raging emotions difficult to harness; the adolescent urge to push against all limits; and cultural and peer acceptance of violence. It’s like striking a match to kerosene.
A lot of aggression occurs when parents aren’t around, and you can’t monitor your teen when you aren’t around. So, in addition to intervening directly when your teen is aggressive in your presence, you will also need to do as much prevention as possible and to set up workable consequences and helps for those times you find out about the aggressiveness.
Left to their own devices, aggressive teens don’t mature into balanced grown-ups. They risk becoming raging adults, with all the relational and career problems that go along with that. You will most likely have to do some things that your teen won’t like. But the good news is that you can have a significant impact, helping your adolescent resolve and mature past hurtful behaviors.
Handling the Problem
What to do with aggression? You must act. Here are some guiding principles.
Draw a line. You must not be vague about aggression. The aggressive teen is pushing against limits, and often is unaware, or unconcerned, about what is okay and what is not. The more aggressive and out of control the teen, the stricter and clearer you must be.
Be clear with your teen that aggressive behavior is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. For example, you should ban:
 | yelling at an adult |
| | throwing things |
| | hitting and other forms of physical aggression |
| | threatening violence |
| | taking intimidating physical stances (getting in someone’s face with threatening gestures) |
| | carrying weapons |
Establish clear consequences. Most aggressive behavior is impulsive rather than thought out. For that reason, you don’t solve the problem by simply explaining to teens why you don’t want them being violent. They will likely need to experience negative consequences, which will, in turn, build in them a future orientation of “What will happen next time I do this?”
So let your teen know that any aggressive behavior will result in strict limits. Be very frank in your discussion. In general, aggressive teens aren’t highly aware of or concerned about their problem, so they need to know without question what will happen to them when they behave aggressively. For example, you might say, “I know I haven’t followed through on your fighting before, but I’ve changed. The next time it happens, I will ground you, without television, computer, or music, for a month. And there will be no negotiation. This is the only warning you will get. This must stop.”
Deal with retaliation. You will often get the question, “What if someone hits me first? Can’t I defend myself?” This can be a trick question. Is your teen truly asking about self-defense or for permission to fight back simply because “the other guy started it”?
Be sure you clearly tell your teen that she should not let herself be injured. If she is in real physical danger and can’t get away (the other kid is pursuing, she is trapped, other kids won’t let her go, and so on), she should protect herself, doing what is needed to keep the other person away, but not trying to bring that person harm. This is the higher road and will help your teen distinguish between self-protection and revenge.
Barring that, however, tell your teen to walk away from fights. This is important for several reasons. It teaches self-control and helps her experience making individual choices that are probably against her peers’ wishes to see a fight. Most of all, it helps your teen learn that problems can be solved in ways other than fighting.
Normalize grief and loss. Adolescents often feel they are more powerful than they really are. I am constantly amused when I watch movies with teens that involve a character fighting several bad guys against impossible odds. Invariably, one of the guys will say, “I could take those guys on, no problem.” Young kids and adults rarely say something like that. But teens think they are omnipotent and are always testing the limits of their power.
Your job, however, is to help your teen integrate his power with reality. He may be stronger than he used to be as a little kid, but he isn’t strong enough to win every time. If he thinks that, he is not ready for the world of adulthood, where he needs to know how to lose well and grieve well. Grown-ups know how to do their best; yet when they fail or are mistreated, they know how to feel sorrow, let things go, and move on. Sadness, fear, grief, and loss are friends, though the teen often avoids these emotions.
You can help your adolescent develop these capacities by drawing out his feelings of helplessness, fear, and sadness. Say, “It seems like you get angry and aggressive when you are facing a difficult problem or feel disappointed, like the other day when I saw you feel put down by Scott and you just went off on him. I wonder if underneath the anger, you sometimes feel scared or helpless. I certainly have those times. Do you ever have those feelings?” Such words make it normal and acceptable for your teen to experience these less powerful emotions.
You can also give your teen perspective. For example, say, “You don’t have to win or come out on top all the time. Sometimes people have to accept that unfair and wrong things happen and move on. I don’t feel any differently toward you when you feel sad, disappointed, or one down or inferior. In fact, I’d like to know when you feel that way.” Kids who have a safe place to experience these softer emotions stand a greater chance of avoiding anger management problems later in life.
Encourage good aggression. You don’t want to remove all aggression from your teen. Aggression, in its broadest sense, is simply initiative. It is taking active steps toward some goal. God designed each of us to learn to take initiative. Your teen is supposed to take steps to find and maintain good relationships rather than expecting others to come to him. She should learn to solve her own problems rather than waiting for someone else to do it, and to discover her own passions, talents, and gifts and invest them in the world rather than having someone tell her who to be. Aggression can help your teen find her way in the world.
However, she doesn’t need to aggressively intimidate, hurt, or control others. Nor does she need to act out in rage when she is disappointed. This does her no good, now or later.
So affirm and validate good aggression. Be supportive when your teen is full of energy and somewhat goofy, or when she says things off the top of her head that she hasn’t really thought about, or when she takes some risk to solve a problem. Keep helping her develop good aggression, and keep setting limits on bad aggression.
Bring the aggression into your relationship. Aggressive behavior often happens when the teen is alienated, disconnected from others, and the aggression unfortunately serves to alienate him further. Your teen’s aggression needs to be brought out of the darkness into relational connectedness.
Many parents shy away from this because they feel uncomfortable. How do you talk about something so negative and destructive? Isn’t it better to simply encourage the positive?
No, it’s not. Your teen needs for all parts of himself — both the good and the bad — to be connected to you and others. He needs to experience his whole self in relationship with you, because that is what helps him to integrate and mature inside.
So take the plunge. Say, “I want to know what it was like when you got so mad at me that you threatened me. I will not tolerate this from you again, but I do want to listen to your side of it. Were you frustrated? Did you think I didn’t understand? Did you think you had no other option?”
Bring your own experience into the relationship as well. Say, “It scared me when you got so angry at me. I felt cut off from you, like you were a stranger to me. I don’t like feeling that way, so I want us to work on solving this.” Your adolescent needs to be aware that his aggression affects others in significant ways.
Help your teen articulate negative feelings. Some aggressive teens have difficulty putting frustration and anger into words, and thus they act out violently. Like young children, they don’t know how to symbolize feelings, so those feelings come out in actions.
You may need to help your teen develop a vocabulary regarding feelings. Talk to her about saying, “I am mad/sad/frustrated/ashamed/scared.” Tell her when you are feeling these emotions, and suggest them to her when she is upset. When teens see their parents appropriately articulating a range of emotions, they feel more secure in managing their own emotions and in expressing them as words.
Bring in resources. If your actions don’t bring about more relatedness and self-control, you may need to bring in other resources to help. Groups and counselors can be a big help here.
Also, do not rescue your teen from the consequences of his anger. Your school probably has a protocol for aggression, involving detention, suspension, and even expulsion. Don’t automatically assume these are bad for your teen. I have seen positive behavior change in teens whose parents have supported a school’s efforts in this area.
If your teen’s aggression is dangerous to others or himself, he may need to be placed in a residential treatment center or a boarding school that handles aggressive teens. Don’t be afraid to send your child away. A treatment center may save his life.
You Can Do It!
Be the healthily aggressive antidote to your teen’s unhealthy aggression. Take the initiative to help your kid become a balanced and integrated person who can control her behavior, be relational, and also solve her problems.