In support of removing the stigma around anger and replacing it with a toolkit

Haley and I often discuss how to interact with emotions as parents (ours and the boys'). At least in my world there have been strong proscriptions against the legitimacy of expressing anger. It's taken sustained effort for me to support rather than stigmatize - often with zero conscious thought - "negative" emotions in our family.

Obviously, as an adult, we can't throw tantrums or scream at others and expect to thrive. I'm not saying that we do or should cultivate this in our boys. On the other hand, anger and sadness happen regularly. That doesn't stop with age. So I try to do better than shaming emotions as disallowed, or telling them, effectively, to shut up and get over it. This category of response isn't strategy; it is a demand for an outcome without guidance for how to achieve it. When I realized that, it became obvious that silencing and shaming were failures of parent-as-teacher and therefore of my own understanding of how to deal with anger. The impulse to silence Odin's anger arose from not knowing how to interact productively with this emotion.

So, this passage in a 2014 Slate article stood out to me:

The violence that is a part of anger disorders is fueled by chronic repressed rage that has found no socially acceptable outlet. It is fostered by families in which adults behave in violent, intimidating ways or in which anger is tightly repressed. In either situation there is no appropriate model for the safe or constructive expression of anger.

Adding that, in the absence of productive strategies or support around emotional education, you obviously do better releasing your children into the wild with some ability to modulate the expression of rage. I assume that repression is more functional than for example throwing punches and screaming in the workplace.  Here I just wanted to highlight that better tools than repression exist.