Life & relationships
When you lose your temper
Every father does. What matters is what happens in the ten seconds before, and the ten minutes after.
You will shout at some point. Most men do, most feel wretched about it, and almost nobody talks about it, which leaves everyone assuming they are uniquely bad at this.
Before
Temper almost never comes from the thing in front of you. It comes from the stack underneath it: no sleep, work, money, the fourth request in ninety seconds. The child is the trigger, not the cause.
Practical, and it works:
- Know your own tells. Jaw, shoulders, the flat voice, the sudden tidying. Everyone has two or three. Learning yours buys you seconds.
- Leave the room. Genuinely. "I need a minute" and step into the hall. A child seeing you manage yourself is a better lesson than a child seeing you never get angry.
- Lower your voice instead of raising it. Physically hard, unreasonably effective.
- Deal with the stack. If you are permanently one incident from shouting, the problem is the sleep or the workload, and no amount of willpower fixes that.
The hard line
With a baby or a very young child: if you feel yourself losing control, put them down somewhere safe and walk out of the room. A crying baby in a cot is completely safe. That is the correct action, not a failure. Never shake a baby.
If you have hurt your child, or you are frightened you might, that needs help today. Your GP, or the NSPCC helpline on 0808 800 5000, which supports adults worried about their own behaviour as well as other people's.
After
- Repair it, quickly and plainly. "I shouted, that was not fair on you, I am sorry." No long explanation, no making them reassure you.
- Do not grovel. Children read guilt as instability. Brief and steady is what they need.
- Do not pretend it did not happen. They noticed.
Repair is the actual skill. A child who has seen an adult get it wrong and then put it right has learned something genuinely useful, which a child raised by a man who never slips has not.
If it is more than temper
If the anger is frequent, frightening, or spilling onto your partner, that is a separate problem and it does not resolve on its own. It is treatable, and asking is the version of this where everyone is fine in a year.