It can make them behave badly or get physically sick. Children react to angry, stressed parents by not being able to concentrate, finding it hard to play with other children, becoming quiet and fearful or rude and aggressive, or developing sleeping problems.
How Anger in Parents Affect Children
Children can be severely affected by seeing their mom or dad being mad at each other or with them. Especially when it is a common event.
What happens is that children often blame themselves. The high stress emotions that are associated with this behavior will affect the child’s brain development and will increase the likelihood of mental illness later on in life.
Feelings of worthlessness can evolve out of a parent yelling at their child. Verbal or physical abuse directly leads to a high stress home environment where a child can’t feel safe, calm and protected.
This scenario tends to cycle into the child responding in anger back to a parent out of aggression, rudeness and hurt. The back and forth will result in an unintentional reinforcing of negative behavior where it seems no one is responsible. Children become withdrawn, sick and have difficulty sleeping.
There is research that demonstrates that if parental anger escalates into physical violence like, shaking or hitting a child then the affects can last later in the child’s life. Thus leading to:
* aggression
* antisocial behavior
* other mental health concerns
* low self-esteem
* poor relationship development
How an angry mother affects a child?
