Healthy Anger: How to Help Children and Teens Manage Their Anger  by Bernard Golden Ph.D.
Oxford University Press, 2003 325 pages
Review by Troy L Parrish

          Parenting children can be a joyful challenge, it can also be taxing and worrisome.  Of the many challenges parents face, dealing with your child’s anger can be one of the most disturbing.  This book tries to help you as a parent be better equipped to help your son better manage and express their own anger.
          The book is not written specifically about boys but I believe that it has much to offer in terms of helping children deal with anger.  It begins by educating the reader about the nature of anger, what makes us angry and why we react to anger the way we do.  This is a completely secular work so Dr. Golden’s perspective on what makes us angry depends almost exclusively on psychology.  Despite this fact, the book has a great deal to say of value in helping you understand why people get angry and why anger gets expressed in the variety of ways that it does.
          The author then takes this base of understanding and begins to help you as a parent begin to understand your own anger and challenge you as a parent to examine how you manage and express your own anger.  This principle is significant because you will certainly be an important model for child in the attitudes and behaviors you exhibit.  An important first step in helping your child learn to manage their anger is for you to have better control over your own anger.
          The book then discusses the various ways that anger may manifest in children and teens.  This is significant because anger can and often is expressed in a variety of ways and may not always be readily identifiable as anger.  As a consequence, if we misidentify an emotion, our reaction to that emotion or the behavior being driven by that emotion, our response may be inappropriate to the situation or worse yet, may inflame the situation or serve to entrench problem behavior.
          Of course, no book on anger would be of any value if it did not provide concrete ways of dealing with the anger.  The author does provide a number of chapters on various ways to teach our children how to manage their anger.  The book does seem fairly thorough in its discussion of methods of managing anger, from examining and challenging expectations and self talk to the important stage of forgiveness, the author really does provide things that parents can do to help their son manage his anger better. 
          I will say that if you are looking for a book that will give you solutions to quickly deal with temper tantrums or teen disrespect and outbursts, this is not the book for you.  You will only get value out of this book if you are committed to a longer term solution to your child’s anger problem.  As you begin to read the book you quickly realize that the way the author advocates for you to teach healthy anger management is more of a teaching process than a quick set of consequences or ideas to immediately get your child’s anger under control.  As if anticipating that some situations could require more immediate or more drastic measures, the author does provide a section of the book that discussed anger that may need special consideration.  With some checklists as well as certain behaviors to look for, the book does provide some broad guidelines to help you ascertain whether or not you need some form of help in dealing with your child’s anger.
          There were a few points of objection I had with the book.  The first objection was the suggestion that it is imperative that school have anger management programs and the subtle suggestion that leaving the training of children to manage their anger to parents alone would be insufficient.  The primary concern with such an attitude is the inevitable values that would be included in anger management programs.  I am convinced that parents, when committed to training their children, that they can do a much better job than a school program can do.  The second suggestion that I had difficulty with was the use of meditation as a way of dealing with anger.  I am not opposed to having children meditate on God’s word as a means of calming themselves, but the author suggests meditation that is clearly based in eastern religious practices and this I can not endorse.  The final objection that I had is the suggestion of the construction and use of a behavior modification system.  While I am a strong advocate of behavior modification programs, typically, when a child needs a behavioral modification program, the situation is becoming rather uncontrollable.  I have yet to see parents be able to really construct and utilize a well designed behavioral modification program which in turn usually leads to some failure in the program and everyone feeling a little more hopeless about fixing the problem.  If you are feeling the need to really use a true behavioral modification program, getting some help constructing and implementing the program would probably be a good idea.
          In conclusion, I thought the book had a tremendous amount of really good information to offer.  Again, if you are looking for a quick fix to an anger issue with your child, this is not the book for you.  But I believe that a real solution to dealing with anger will not be a quick fix.  If you would be offended by elements (such as meditation) that are inconsistent with Christian principles you may have some difficulty with this book as well.  However, if you can take the lion share of information from this book that is really good and discard the minor amount that is problematic you may find this book very informative and beneficial.