Findings on Anger Management for children.

I have been reading up and doing some researches on anger management for children lately.  As it is a fact that my 3 kids  have probably inherited a short fused nature from the mother, myself (Guility as charged). In addition we had probably not  adopted the right disciplinary method that really helped. The recent episode on the teacher's feedback on my elder son reminded me that there is a need that we do something fast! 

Having spent quite sometime researching and consolidating, there are some key points and activities that could help.

1. We need to first help the children retrace some of their daily activities and  varying moments of their emotions. Scenarios that they would be happy? Sad? Or Angry? This would first help them understand that there are in different states of emotions.  Then we could zoom in to Anger.
2. Help the children identify the key thoughts and feelings children would encounter when they are in state of anger, some of the key characteristics they should note might be: confused, shouting, clenching fist, feeling hot/heated up, face expression tightens, feeling impatient, shortness of breath. As these feelings are listed out, children will begin to create a link of these feelings to anger and learn to better identify that state of emotion.
3. Help children to understand if anger is uncontrolled (We may use a scenario to help us on this), the situation will build up to a fight, punishments follows. Also, in the long run, their health will be impaired, and character of the child will remain aggressive and may leads to social issues if there are no efforts to improve the behaviour.
4. Identify ways that children could practise to control and relieve the anger: 
• In many such situations, children are advised to leave the scenario of conflict (If possible). Otherwise, they could temporarily try to distract themselves from the situation with some happy thoughts (Any scenes in their mind that could bring them out of the angry situation, such as a funny image, perhaps a Mr. Bean face, or a joke). These should help the child reduce the heat from the state of emotion.
• The child could then apply deep and slow breathing technic, and counting to 10 while doing so.
• They could also move on to other activities for awhile before returning to the activity or place that had originally triggered the anger. By then, the child would have a clearer mind to manage the situation.
5. If there 2 or more children involved, some team activities would help create situations where a child's anger could surface and allow them to put some of these learnings to practise. One of the most commonly mentioned game is Zenga. You may know of many more activities that could create such practise opporunities for children. Do feel free to list them under the comment tag below, any contributions would be appreciated. Use these activities and opportunities to guide the child to practise breathing and self control technics.
6. Finally, it would definitely help to assure the child that anger is a normal behavior, but it has to be controlled. Adult should also put the same methodology to practise, as it's always a "monkey see monkey do" situation when it comes to parenting.

I do hope these summary is useful (Oh believe me, the list of resources out there is amazing and detailed), and ALL THE BEST to Parenting!

Some mothers are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same, and most mothers kiss and scold together. -Pearl S. Buck