Why do I get so irritated with my kids?
Irritation rests on an expectation, anger on a demand. The best advice I've ever been given came from the radio. Here it is, along with what the research says you can actually expect of a child at four, nine and fourteen, and the four ways of dealing with irritation.
The best advice I've ever had about irritation came from the radio: If you're irritated, there's an expectation underneath. If you're angry, it has become a demand. At home the expectation is often set at adult level, and your child can't reach it yet. You can try to change the child, change your expectation, leave the room, or stay irritated. The second one is the strongest.
The best advice I've ever been given
I heard it on a radio programme years ago, and I've still never met anyone who had heard it before: If you're irritated, there's an expectation underneath. If you're angry, it has become a demand.
You get irritated with the driver ahead who's doing something odd. Your expectation is that everyone in traffic drives perfectly, which is a slightly odd expectation. You get cross with your phone when it freezes. The expectation is that a phone always works flawlessly. Nearly every irritation has an expectation under it, and once you start looking for them it's quite good fun.
At home we live closer to each other than anywhere else, so home has the most expectations per square metre. And most of them we've never put into words, not even to ourselves.
The staircase from wish to demand
There's a staircase here, and it goes up. At the bottom is a wish. Then an expectation. At the top, a demand. Each step comes with its own feeling: A wish that isn't met gives disappointment. An expectation gives irritation. A demand gives anger.
Say you'd like your nine year old to put her plate in the dishwasher. The first time, it's just a wish: “It'd be nice if you put that in yourself.” Not cross, not irritated. The next day the plate is on the counter, and maybe you're a little disappointed she didn't remember. So you say it again. Day three, day four, day five. After a few rounds the wish has become an expectation. Now you expect her to do it, because you've told her, and the disappointment has become irritation. And if you've said it forty times in three weeks and you're having a bad day on top, you're on the top step. “Forty times I've said it. Now you do as you're told.” Now you're angry.
Same plate, same child. The only thing that has moved is you, three steps up a staircase you didn't know you were standing on.
The useful thing about the staircase is that you can see where you're standing. If what you feel is disappointment, you're on the bottom step, and it's still just a wish. If you feel irritation, the wish has become an expectation. And the expectation is the interesting part, because it's yours.
Why it boils over most at home
The psychologist Theodore Dix summed up the research on parents' emotions in a review in 1991, and his model looks a lot like the advice from the radio. Our feelings as parents are set off by how our child's behaviour lands against what we want and expect. And the same behaviour gives a different feeling depending on what we think the child could have done. A plate on the counter from someone who can't manage better yet is a fact. A plate from someone who “knows perfectly well” is a provocation.
That's the key, I think. With other adults we set the expectation by what we know they can do. With our own kids we often set it by what we can do. We expect her to remember the plate because we remember the plate. We expect him to put the phone down when we say so, because we would. And then we get irritated when a nine year old doesn't behave like an adult.
Irritation rarely says anything about your child. It says where your expectation is set.
What a child can actually do
So what is reasonable to expect? Here the research has fairly clear answers, and they are more patient than we are.
The brain matures from the back forwards. Researchers at the US National Institute of Mental Health followed 13 children and young people between 4 and 21 with MRI scans every two years for up to ten years, and the areas that finished last were the ones at the very front of the frontal lobe. Those are the ones we use to plan, hold back an impulse and switch from what we'd like to do to what we have to. Psychologists call them the brain's executive functions, and they develop right through childhood and well into the teens.
Working memory, what you hold in your head while you do something else, grows steadily year by year. Susan Gathercole and her colleagues tested around 700 children between 4 and 15 and found an almost straight line upwards through the whole of childhood. And remembering to do something later, like putting the plate in after dinner, is a skill of its own. Researchers call it prospective memory, and the review of the field shows it tracks closely with how far the executive functions have come. In other words: The dishwasher is one of the hardest jobs you can give a nine year old, precisely because it has to be remembered unprompted, at a different time, while something else is more interesting.
The same goes for screens. When you say “Turn it off now” to a ten year old in the middle of a round, you're expecting him to break off something his brain is fully absorbed in, on command, using the part of the brain that finishes last. That's an adult expectation. A child who knows when the round has to end, and gets a small buffer on top, often manages the same thing without anyone getting irritated. The full recipe is in the gaming guide.
The child psychologist Ross Greene has a line I keep coming back to: “Kids do well if they can.” When a child doesn't do what you've asked forty times, it's rarely because they don't want to. Something is missing, maybe just a few years.
Expecting things of adults and expecting things of children
With an adult you can expect what you've agreed. If your partner says she'll do the dishes, you can expect it to happen and be disappointed, maybe irritated, if it doesn't. A promise is something you can be held to, and an adult has the equipment to keep it.
With a child you can adjust your expectation to fit the age. A four year old can tidy up with you, not alone. A nine year old can remember the plate when she gets a reminder, and now and then without one. A fourteen year old can remember it herself, but not every day, and least of all on the day she's had a test, a row and an hour straight on a screen. Perhaps the most honest way to think of it is this: Until your child does it unprompted, the reminder is part of your job, not a sign that your child has failed.
That doesn't mean you stop saying it. Repetition is how children learn. It means you can say the same thing for the fortieth time from the bottom step of the staircase, as a wish and a reminder, without anything in you having escalated.
Four ways to deal with irritation
There are four ways of handling irritation, and most of us go for the one that works worst.
- Try to change the other person. That's what most of us try first. People have a way of not changing, and children change at their own pace, not yours. If you do manage to get someone to do things differently, wonderful.
- Change your own expectation. The strongest of the four. If you expect people in traffic to drive a bit oddly, maybe you stop getting irritated. If you expect the plate to be on the counter, and that you're the one reminding her until she's twelve, the plate is suddenly just a plate.
- Remove yourself from what's irritating you. Fairly effective and a little drastic, depending on the situation. If it's a job and colleagues you can't stand any more, and nothing else helps, changing jobs is an option. At home it means something milder: leave the room, breathe, come back. Your child isn't going anywhere, but you can take a walk to the kitchen.
- Stay irritated. Possibly the most common of all. Walk around irritated and angry because the world and the people in it won't do what you want. It's always available, and it costs the most.
My aim is the exact opposite: to use the other strategies to keep irritation to a minimum, and most of all by changing my own expectations.
One example of adjusting my own expectation: In an earlier relationship, the person I lived with hung things on every hook and handle in the house, so you couldn't open a cupboard without something hanging in the way. It irritated me properly, for a long time. Until I decided to expect that this is how it's always going to be. She wasn't doing it out of any disrespect for me when I said something, these were just actions she quite clearly had no conscious, controlled relationship to. This is part of my life, live with it. It was like a light switch in my head: From the moment I decided to expect her to carry on doing it, I actually stopped being irritated.
Irritated? You can try to force a change in the other person, which mostly works badly, or you can change your own expectation.
The dialogue with the kids
Children learn this best by hearing you use it on yourself, about the driver who drives like an idiot or the app that freezes. But the day you actually did get cross is the best opportunity of all:
“I got irritated earlier, and it wasn't your fault. I expected you to remember the plate all by yourself, and that's maybe too much to expect of a nine year old. So I'm going to remind you, without being cross, until you do it yourself. And next time you get irritated with your little brother, you can try the same trick as me. Think about what you were expecting, and see if it's something you can change yourself.”
One thing should be completely clear, for you and for your child: This is about small things and everyday life. If someone is being unkind to your child or hurting them, no expectation gets adjusted. Then you speak up.
The children's version of exactly this advice, with Lego and a three year old little brother as the example, lives under the Visdom section of Balanseby, in Norwegian: Irritert eller sint?
We always explain why: “Because I say so” only lasts until you leave the room.
Your expectation is the one thing in the room you control
I think that's why the advice has held up so well. It doesn't ask you to be more patient, and it doesn't ask you to lower the bar for your kids. It points to the one thing in the room you actually have control over: your own expectations.
And children grow into our expectations when we set them where the children are in their development. The nine year old who gets the reminder without the irritation becomes a twelve year old who puts the plate in herself, and who one day stands in her own hallway thinking “I was expecting…” when she gets irritated with something or someone.
The toolbox
Three moves that ask nothing more of you than noticing.
Know a parent who has said the same thing forty times this week? Send them this.
Sources
- Dix (1991): The affective organization of parenting. Adaptive and maladaptive processes, theoretical review, Psychological Bulletin ↗
- Gogtay mfl. (2004): Dynamic mapping of human cortical development during childhood through early adulthood, PNAS ↗
- Diamond (2013): Executive Functions, Annual Review of Psychology ↗
Show more sources (3)Show fewer sources
Comments
No comments yet. Be the first to say what you think.
TikTok
Roblox
Snapchat
Minecraft
Fortnite
YouTube
Mudita Kompakt
Kindle Scribe
Smiling Mind
Opal
Balance
Homie