Helping Youth With Trauma Manage Anger: Practical Tips and Training Resources

When a child is angry, it can be easy to focus on what we see. We see the yelling. The arguing. The name-calling. The hysterics. The door slamming. The defiance. Sometimes, we see a child who seems to go from calm to explosive in an instant, and we wonder how things escalated so quickly.

But what if the anger isn’t really the beginning of the story? What if it’s only the part we can see?

For Cindy Bisacca, one of our trainers who spent more than 28 years working with the Missouri Division of Youth Services, understanding what lies beneath a child’s anger has been an important part of her career. Over the years, she has seen firsthand how trauma, grief, and loss shape a child’s behavior and how those emotions can result in anger. That expertise made her the perfect trainer to teach others how to understand and manage anger in youth in foster care.

“Anger is a secondary emotion,” Cindy explained. “Children don’t feel anger first. Before the outburst comes sadness, fear, hopelessness, embarrassment, or a deep sense of loss. The anger is simply the emotion that rises to the surface.”

For children in foster care, that sense of loss can be especially complicated. It’s more than a change of address. They may have been separated from their siblings, family members, pets, toys, and favorite places. They may have had to change schools and lost the comfort of trusted teachers, friends, and classmates. While these losses may not always be visible, they can have a profound impact on a child. Even the small things that once made life feel predictable and safe are suddenly gone.

“Everything they know and everything that was familiar has been removed from them,” Cindy shared.

When a child lashes out in anger, the behavior is often about much more than what is happening in that moment. It’s about grief, fear, confusion, hurt, loneliness, or feeling as if they don’t have control over what is happening to them. When a child has all these big emotions brewing beneath the surface and doesn’t know how to express them, anger is the emotion that most easily surfaces.

Trauma can make those emotions even more difficult to understand and manage. “When children experience severe trauma early in life—whether through physical abuse, emotional abuse, neglect, or other adverse experiences—their emotional development can be disrupted,” Cindy explained. “Although they continue to grow physically, their social and emotional skills remain at a much younger developmental stage. A child may be 14 years old but emotionally have the skills of a 5-year-old.” This developmental gap often creates feelings of confusion, frustration, and anger that children struggle to understand and manage when they become overwhelmed.

All of this can make their anger seem unpredictable. But what looks like a sudden explosion usually isn’t as sudden as it appears. Most people, including both kids and adults, show signs of becoming overwhelmed long before an outburst occurs.

“People don’t typically just explode,” Cindy said. “Their anger builds up.”

The problem is that adults often miss the build-up because the signs are subtle. The key is to identify a child’s warning signs and intervene before the situation escalates. These signs may include fidgeting, swearing, pacing, becoming more agitated, speaking more loudly, or many other noticeable behavioral changes. By the time the yelling starts, the anger has been building for a little while.

To the adults around them, the reaction may seem to come out of nowhere. But for the child, it is connected to something much deeper. That’s why Cindy believes the most important de-escalation tools caregivers can have are trust and connection.

“Children are far more likely to listen to adults who have invested time in building a genuine relationship with them,” she explained. “You can’t talk to a child when they’re angry. It’s about having that relationship and talking to them when they’re not angry.”

Building that relationship takes time. It means getting to know the child when things are going well and having conversations with them when they are calm about what makes them angry, what helps them feel better, and how they want you to respond when they begin to lose control. Because when that moment of crisis arrives, that relationship matters.

“Nobody’s going to listen to what you say until they know that you care,” Cindy said.

The same principle applies when teaching teens. If a teenager insists that nothing works to help them de-escalate, that just means that the right strategy hasn’t been found yet.

“Maybe it’s going outside or taking a walk,” Cindy suggested. “Maybe it’s drawing, coloring, doing crafts, or putting together a model. Any hobby can be a de-escalation tool. Anger is energy, and sometimes that energy needs somewhere safe to go. Physical activity can help. A safe object to hit or punch, like a pillow, can help release some of that energy without hurting the child or anyone else. It’s about finding a healthy way to give the child time and space to move through what they are feeling. The key is to find what works for that individual child, and the best time to figure that out is before the child is angry.”

Children should be involved in creating their own calm-down plans. When the youth is calm, caregivers can ask questions like: What helps you when you’re angry? What do you want me to do? What are three things you can try to do to calm down when you feel yourself getting upset?

Giving children a voice in that process can make a calm-down plan feel less like a punishment and more like a tool they helped create. The same is true for communication. Cindy encourages caregivers to use “I” and “we” statements instead of language that can escalate a power struggle. Rather than saying, “You need to stop yelling,” a caregiver might say, “I want to hear what you’re trying to tell me, but I can’t understand what’s being said when you’re yelling.” Rather than, “You need to sit down,” try, “I need you to sit down so we can be safe.”

Though the difference is small, it changes the message. Instead of putting the child on the defensive, the caregiver is communicating what they need while keeping the focus on safety and connection.

Of course, staying calm in the middle of a child or teen’s outburst isn’t easy. In fact, one of the biggest challenges caregivers face may be managing their own emotions. When children’s emotions rise, caregivers often become agitated too. This back-and-forth escalation in which both the child and caregiver continually react to each other’s emotions can quickly turn a difficult moment into a full-blown confrontation.

Breaking that cycle requires the adult to regulate their emotions first. Deep breathing and other de-escalation tools, stepping away to cool down, and maintaining good self-care to keep emotions in check are essential tools for staying calm during challenging situations. In two-parent households, “tag-teaming” is encouraged, allowing one adult to step in while the other steps out. And if an adult escalates, letting a child see you de-escalate is an important teaching moment. Children learn by watching the adults around them. “You cannot expect a child to do something you would not do,” Cindy shared. “If you expect a child to regulate, you have to regulate.”

That may be one of the hardest lessons for caregivers to remember, especially when they are exhausted, frustrated, or feeling like nothing they are doing is working. But change doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, Cindy compares the work to a marathon rather than a sprint. There will be setbacks. There may be moments when behaviors get worse before they get better. There may be days when you wonder whether anything is making a difference at all.

But beneath the anger is still a child who is trying to communicate something. That child may not be able to say, “I’m scared. I miss my family. I’m hurting inside. I don’t know what to do with all of these feelings.” So instead, they become angry.

The work, then, isn’t to stop the anger. It’s to help the child calm down, understand what is underneath it, and give them healthier ways to express what they are feeling. That takes patience, consistency, self-awareness, and, most of all, an honest connection. Because before we can expect children to manage their emotions, we must be willing to understand them. And before we can help children process their feelings, we must earn their trust.

While Cindy’s training focuses on managing anger in youth in foster care, the lessons extend far beyond the foster care system. Any parent, caregiver, teacher, or adult who works with children can benefit from learning to look beyond the behavior and ask a more important question: What’s really going on underneath? Because behind every angry outburst is a child trying to communicate something. And many times, anger isn’t the whole story. It’s just the part that we can see.

To learn more or register for this or other trainings we offer, view our training calendar.