Anger is written in our DNA

When my oldest manchild – now 32 but forever 11 in my head – was turning 12, I famously cancelled his birthday party.

The reason? I found a gun in his bed.

Sure, it wasn’t the shoot-up-the-school semi-automatic kind favoured by a worrying cohort of American teenagers, but it was a weapon nonetheless, and one I’d banned, a BB gun.

And yet the little muggins had bought one and hidden it. I methodically broke it apart.

This was the child who worried me with his brushes with anger, with his desire for violent toys, for guns, knives, and weapons of all varieties. Every stick was a sword, every elastic band a catapult, every pile of sand a fort, and that was fine until the fantasy turned to reality.

I worried because surely a propensity for anger needed to be corralled, quashed, shut down.

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We laugh about the cancelled party now, but we didn’t at the time.

“One thing, mom,” he tells me, handing me a perfect G&T (proof that he turned out okay regardless), “I always knew you meant what you said. You kept your promises.”

“And my threats,” I say, wondering how my 11-year-old grew a beard and got a wife.

But my work here isn’t quite done. There’s one more thing I need to say to him, an important thing I missed: son, sometimes it’s okay to be angry. Sometimes it’s necessary.

It’s taken me a lifetime to realise that anger isn’t inherently bad. What one does with one’s anger might be – hurting others, hurting oneself – but you’re allowed to rage, to kick up.

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Every single person on the planet has an aggressive side inbuilt, just like a propensity for joy, love, or sadness. Anger is written in our DNA. Yet as parents, as teachers, we raise children to squash down the “bad” feelings like sadness and fury – the ones that scare us, that we can’t cope with – and to big up the good ones.

“Don’t be angry,” we say. “Smile for mommy.”

What we should be doing instead is acknowledging these feelings, and then helping our children, and ourselves, to work through them, to direct them constructively without doing harm.

God knows, there’s enough in the world to be angry about. Sometimes – right now with an election looming – anger is how we get things done.