How is it that so many teens are depressed and angry? I believe that teen anger is often a grief response to losing one’s childhood. Kids in a high-risk neighborhood often have no childhood as they are forced to pass from toddler to adolescent, maybe even adulthood, in order to survive. They have plenty to grieve. In a more affluent atmosphere, very young kids are often given everything any adolescent or adult could want and are left without any goals to pull them into adulthood. They, too, have missed childhood. Neither group of teens has had the time nor the opportunity to just be kids. They are either ducking bullets or drug dealers in the ghetto or they’re busy playing adults in supervised team sports, music lessons, dance lessons, and every other kind of distraction helpful adults can plan for them. Not that all structured play is bad. It isn’t. But in excess, it can squeeze out childhood and cause its participants to miss being kids. In short, kids need to do kid things! Dr. Meg Meeker addresses this in her book, Boys Should be Boys. Although neither group consciously recognizes the loss, it is present subconsciously and causes grief to set in. Grief, as Dr Kubler-Ross taught us in her classic book On Death and Dying, leads to anger. Yet I believe this anger, if properly directed, helps to overcome grief. It’s nature’s way of dealing with loss.

Regardless of its cause, anger has some uses related to defense. Kids and adults alike often use anger to project superior knowledge. They forget (or don’t know) what Bertrand Russell said about anger: “The degree of one’s emotion varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts: the less you know the hotter you become.” They strike out when they feel cornered by lack of knowledge or lack of protection and like a trapped squirrel or other wild animal, they attack when threat¬ened. Just knowing that they will get in more trouble if they get angry is often not enough to prevent it.

Anger does not need to be eliminated; as a matter of fact, it cannot be eliminated. Getting angry at social injustice or in defense of liberty is what made our country free and has propelled justice throughout all of history. There are many places in every community where righteous anger is needed and should, perhaps, be used more often. Substandard schools in the inner cities, starving children, hazardous work places, oil wells leaking barrels of oil into the gulf, lying politicians, outrageous salaries for company CEOs readily come to mind; but there are many other causes where anger, rightly used, can be beneficial to individuals and to society. Many of these causes are championed by teens and young adults but these are not the usual challenges most of us face when we become angry.
Our challenge then is not to try to eradicate our kid’s anger, but to direct it toward a positive goal. We’ll talk about that and other ways to control anger Friday.