A book can help with
For the child who feels too much, too fast, and doesn’t yet know where to put it.
Anger in a small person can look enormous, and it can frighten them as much as it frightens you. But anger itself isn’t the problem. It’s a real and useful feeling, usually telling a child that something is unfair, or that they’re hurt, or tired, or frightened. What they haven’t got yet is a safe way to let it out, and that is the bit that can be taught.
A book helps because it hands that feeling to a character instead of to them. They get to watch someone be furious, out loud and without apology, come back down again, and still be loved on the other side of it. That is the reassurance a child most needs, and it’s easier to take from a story than from a telling-off.
Here are the ones I’d keep close for the red-hot days. Find your child’s age and start there.
Naming a big feeling
At this age the storm arrives with no warning and no words. You’re not really teaching a lesson yet, you’re naming the feeling and showing them it’s allowed and it ends. Keep these short, and read them when things are calm rather than mid-meltdown.
A little creature wakes up under a heavy grumpy cloud and can’t shake it off, until a friend gently helps it lift. It puts a shape to that out-of-sorts mood a toddler can’t explain, and shows that it’s the sort of thing that passes. Simple enough for the very young, and just the book for a morning that’s started badly.
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A sturdy flap-and-slide book that lets the very youngest push and pull the pages as a little character moves from cross to calm. There’s no story to follow, just the feeling named and a gentle way through it, which is about all a one or two-year-old takes in. Good for tiny hands and short attention spans.
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Ready for a proper story
Now they can follow a proper story, and they’re ready to see a character notice the anger, ride it out, and mend things afterwards. These are the ones I’d start with.
Ravi has had enough of being the smallest and the last, and his temper bursts out of him as a great roaring tiger that sends everyone running. Percival draws the feeling so vividly that a child recognises it at once, and the making-up at the end shows a big loss of temper needn’t be the end of the world. It belongs to the Big Bright Feelings series, all of which are worth knowing.
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Sophie’s rage explodes in hot reds and oranges, then she runs outside, climbs her favourite tree, and slowly the world comes back to its usual colours. It’s a beautiful account of a temper rising and falling, and it hands a child something practical: the idea that you can take yourself off somewhere and let the feeling cool. A deserved classic.
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Working out what helps
Older children can start to work out what sets them off and what actually helps. A story still does most of the work, but at this age a book that hands them a strategy or two earns its place too.
A boy’s bad mood starts as a small thing and, left unswept, grows until it carries the whole town away. It’s a gorgeous, painterly way of showing how a sulk you keep feeding gets bigger, and how you can choose to let it go before it takes over. The pictures do a great deal of the talking, which suits a child who bristles at being lectured.
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More of a friendly workbook than a story, built on the simple idea that anger is a gremlin you can starve by handling it differently. It uses proper cognitive behavioural ideas, but lightly, with activities you can do together at the kitchen table. Good for the child whose temper has become a regular visitor and who’s ready to have a bit of say over it.
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Getting a grip on it themselves
By now the anger can be tangled up with everything else that’s hard about being this age. A proper novel lets them feel real fury on the page and follow it somewhere.
Stanley is sent to a brutal desert camp for a crime he didn’t commit, and made to dig a hole every single day under a merciless sun. It lets an older child sit with real, justified fury at unfairness and follow it all the way to a reckoning, without a word of instruction anywhere. A Newbery Medal winner, and completely gripping.
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Castle calls himself Ghost, and he has been running since the night his father fired a gun at him and his mother. His temper keeps getting him into trouble at school, and a track coach is the first adult who takes that seriously rather than simply punishing it. Worth knowing about the gun and the father’s drinking before you pass it on, because both sit close to the surface.
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Something to do together
A printable you can fill in together, so a child knows exactly what to do when the feeling starts to rise. I’m putting it together now, and it will live here soon.
The aim here isn’t a child who stops getting angry. A child who learns that anger is unwelcome doesn’t stop feeling it, they just stop showing it, and it comes out later in other ways. What these books do is separate the feeling, which is always allowed, from what a child does with it, which is where the guiding happens.
This is the heart of what psychologists call emotion coaching, an approach drawn from John Gottman’s research with families: name the feeling, accept it as valid, and then guide the behaviour. Children raised this way tend to manage their emotions better, not worse. So say ‘you’re really angry, and that’s fair’ before you say anything about the throwing, and avoid ‘don’t be angry’ or ‘there’s nothing to be cross about’, which teach a child to hide it. Read the books when things are calm, not in the thick of it. And if the rage is frequent or frightening, or your child seems angry most of the time, it’s worth a word with your doctor or their teacher.
For you, the grown-up
There’s a companion page for grown-ups over on the main Book Quote Therapy library, with books for adults working through their own anger.
Read the grown-up version →These pages are written for the grown-ups looking after a child: parents, teachers and carers. A good book can sit beside a worried child, though it never stands in for a real conversation, or for proper support when something feels too big to carry alone.