Teaching your toddler about anger management can be one heck of a challenge. Anger is a relatively difficult emotion to deal with, even in adults. So how can we exactly guide a toddler to proper anger management? Here are some techniques!

1. Teach your little one to label their feelings. Watching educational videos about anger management, reading stories, and singing songs are just a few ways on how to teach your toddler to label their feelings. They need to be able to differentiate feeling angry from being sad, and being just happy to being excited. Aggressive behaviors and frustration can come from a place of confusion on your toddler's part. Helping him learn that he is entitled to feeling a number of different emotions and being able to distinguish them properly actually helps them be more emotionally intelligent.
    
2. Make sure they are able to differentiate between feelings and behaviors. While feelings are inevitable hard to control, actions are more manageable. We can feel angry and still not act angry. We can feel sad and still be able to function. This ability to choose appropriate actions despite extreme emotions is something that will prove helpful to your little one in the future and must be learned as early as now. It's important to validate their feelings and listen to them but to make sure that they never act impulsively and haphazardly because of their emotions.
    
3. Model appropriate anger management skills. Whether you like it or not, you are your kid's idol! One #SweetBabyHack that we love giving moms is to model how to properly manage anger. If your kid sees you unable to stabilize your own emotions especially when you get frustrated, chances are they are also likely to be unable to manage their own emotions. Communicating anger even to your little one is a good step to both teaching your child about anger management and also calming your self down.
    
4. Create calming anger rules. While anger is a very intense emotion to navigate, establishing rules can bring you and your toddler back to safe ground. Some families that develop very intense anger cultures stem from not being able to pave a clear path through it. We cannot stop our toddlers from getting angry and feeling frustrated, but we can set rules so that they do not establish unstable anger patterns. Addressing problems such as hitting, mean words, throwing, breaking things, and even spitting food by making sure your toddler avoid doing these things is definitely an amazing start to you and your little one's anger management journey.
    
5. Establish healthy anger coping skills. Sometimes, the only way to get rid of an angry state is a good healthy distraction. Grounding techniques such as counting, enumerating what you see around you, or even touching any near surface are just a few techniques that you can teach your toddler so that the next time the anger bug bites them, they know exactly how to calm themselves down without your help!