How to Take the Grr out of Anger

Elizabeth Verdick and Marjorie Lisovskis' How to Take the Grr out of Anger is a straight-talking guide for 9 year olds about what to do when you are absolutely furious.

What happens

It isn't a story. It's a book that talks directly to your child, in their language, about a feeling nobody enjoys having.

It opens by asking them to imagine a thermometer that reads their anger level all day long. How high would it go? How often would it hit the hot zones?

From there it gets practical very fast. Go outside and run. Shoot some hoops. Squeeze a pillow as hard as you can. Make two fists and then fling your hands open, as if you're throwing the feeling away. Breathe in for five and out for five.

It's honest about what doesn't help, too. Punching a door. Kicking the fridge. Even football, if getting rough tends to wind you up further.

Then it widens out. There's a whole section on the quieter kinds of anger, the dirty looks and the silent treatment and the rumours, which grown-ups often never spot. And there's a lovely image for bottling it up. Anger is a beach ball. Push it under the water and it comes straight back at you.

The bit your child will actually enjoy is the four true stories of daft things furious children have done. A family photo torn in half and slid back into its frame. Grapes trodden into the carpet. One girl who slammed her bedroom door so often that her parents took it off its hinges and wouldn't give it back.

Then five steps for taming a temper, including the one that does most of the work. Anger is often a mask. Underneath it there may be jealousy, or shame, or fear, and those are harder to say out loud.

Two things a parent should know before handing it over.

It's American, and it shows. The help pages point at the Yellow Pages, the White Pages and a United States phone line, none of which are any use here. If your child is upset enough to want that page, you'll want to have a British number ready yourself.

It also goes to some serious places. Bullying, swearing, drink and drugs, weapons, and children who think about hurting themselves are all named plainly, with the same advice each time, which is to go and tell an adult you trust. That's the right advice. It may still prompt questions at bedtime, so read it alongside your child rather than leaving them to it.

What to read next

If your reader gets something out of that plain-spoken tone, Cliques, Phonies, & Other Baloney does the same job on the other great misery of the school day. Its author is very funny about his own attempts to fit in, including the time he told everyone he lived in a mansion with a heated pool and they turned up to look.