Is This Amount of Anger Normal?

Almost every page ranking for this question has a reason to answer no. Treatment centres, residential programmes and clinics all answer “is this serious” from a position where serious is the profitable answer. This site sells nothing, so it can say the ordinary thing out loud.

Most of the time, this is normal. Not pleasant, not acceptable, not something you have to live with, but inside the range of what adolescence does.

That is the answer. The rest of this page stops it being a blank cheque, because a page cannot see your kitchen and should never be treated as clearance.

Why will nobody give me a number?

Because there is not one.

We went looking for a published figure for how long a teenage outburst lasts, or how often is too often, and there is no primary source for either. There is also no research ranking what sets teenagers off, by prevalence, despite how many lists of triggers you will find. Every one of those lists we found sat on a commercial page with nothing behind it.

The nearest real data is about emotions in general. In a 2015 study, over 200 high school students with an average age of 17 reported how long recent episodes of 27 different emotions had lasted. The variation was enormous, and what predicted duration was how important the event was and how much the young person kept turning it over. There is no characteristic length. There is no clock this is supposed to run against.

Here is the part worth knowing about the pages that do answer. Asked how long is too long, and with no number to give, a site tends to reach for a condition instead. That is not because your child fits one. It is because a diagnosis is the only thing left to say when the duration data does not exist. This site will not do that, on any page, for any reason.

What is actually worth looking at?

Three things, and none of them is a behaviour you can tick off a list.

Cost. Not how loud it was, but what it is taking away. Is this anger costing your teenager things that matter to them: a place at school, friendships that were working, sleep, being able to be in a room with a sibling, the trust needed to be given any freedom at all. Anger that is loud and costs nothing is a different picture from anger that is quieter and is dismantling things one at a time.

Recovery. The episode matters less than the afterwards. Does it come down, and does it come down within a few hours rather than colouring the following day. Is there a version of your teenager available in the evening, or has the anger stopped being an event and become the weather.

Direction of travel. The most useful question of the three. Compare now with six months ago rather than now with an ideal. NIMH’s own guidance sentence about warning signs makes the same point: get help as soon as possible, “particularly if the behavior is new or has increased recently.” New and increasing matters more than large and steady.

None of the three gives you a verdict. They give you the terms in which someone qualified can answer, and they are more use in a ten minute appointment than an account of Tuesday.

What do the professional bodies say the threshold is?

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry publishes guidance on violent behaviour in young people. It lists a set of behaviours and, separately, a set of risk factors, and the part that matters is how it joins them: its concern arises where a young person shows several of the risk factors together with the behaviours. Where that is the case, its instruction is to arrange a comprehensive evaluation by a qualified mental health professional.

This site is deliberately not reproducing either of those lists here, and the reason is worth stating. Split apart, the behaviour list becomes a symptom checklist that every parent of every teenager on earth would tick, and it would leave you diagnosing your own child at midnight on the strength of a web page. The threshold is the two lists together, held by someone qualified to weigh them. The guidance is short and free and linked at the bottom of this page. Read it whole or not at all.

What does an evaluation actually involve?

This is the thing parents are most frightened of and least told about, and the answer is unglamorous.

AACAP’s position is that evaluation by a child and adolescent psychiatrist is appropriate for any child or adolescent with emotional or behavioural problems. What it consists of, in its own list of components: a description of the present problems and symptoms; information about health, illness and treatment, including current medications; parent and family health and psychiatric histories; information about the child’s development; information about school and friends; information about family relationships; an interview of the young person; an interview of the parents or guardians; and, if needed, laboratory studies such as blood tests, x-rays or special assessments.

The output is what AACAP calls a formulation: a description of the difficulties, explained in terms the parents and the young person can both understand. Note what that is not. It is not a label handed over at the end of an hour. Asking for one commits you to nothing.

Where does anger sit next to real danger?

One thing has to be said plainly on a page about how much anger is too much.

NIMH publishes a list of warning signs of suicide, and one of the items on it reads “Extremely sad, more anxious, agitated, or full of rage.” Rage is on the federal list, alongside things nobody would argue with. A partial list is worse than none, so here it is whole, in NIMH’s own groups and wording, with nothing added and nothing promoted to the top.

Talking about: wanting to die; great guilt or shame; being a burden to others.

Feeling: empty, hopeless, trapped, or having no reason to live; extremely sad, more anxious, agitated, or full of rage; unbearable emotional or physical pain.

Changing behavior: making a plan or researching ways to die; withdrawing from friends, saying goodbye, giving away important items, or making a will; taking dangerous risks such as driving extremely fast; displaying extreme mood swings; eating or sleeping more or less; using drugs or alcohol more often.

NIMH’s own guidance sentence is: “If these warning signs apply to you or someone you know, get help as soon as possible, particularly if the behavior is new or has increased recently.” The document is short and free and linked at the bottom. If anything you have read here has been sitting alongside a worry about your child’s safety, that is the question to answer first, and the services at the top of this page are staffed around the clock.

Anger is not evidence of danger. It is also not evidence against it, which is the assumption that does the harm.

What this looks like in an ordinary house

Freya is fifteen. This is an illustration rather than a real family.

Over the past year: three doors slammed hard enough to hear from the street, one broken phone that was her own, a great deal of shouting, and two arguments that ended with her walking out for an hour without saying where she was going. Her mother has been awake at one in the morning reading pages that all end at a treatment enquiry form.

Run the three questions instead. Cost: her school place is fine, her friendships are intact, she is sleeping. Recovery: it comes down within an evening and there is a version of her available by breakfast, most days. Direction of travel: this is roughly where it was last winter, and possibly slightly better since she stopped travelling with one particular group.

That is not a diagnosis and it is not clearance. It is a picture, and it is the picture she takes to a fifteen minute appointment with the family doctor, who can ask what a website cannot. The doctor may well say wait and watch. That is a real answer, reached properly. Had the three answers gone the other way, they would have got her there sooner and with better information than any list of warning signs.

What if I am still not sure?

Start with the paediatrician or family doctor. That is the escalation route the professional guidance itself points at: when what you are doing is not working, that is who to talk to first.

Two things are worth holding onto while you decide. Being unsure is not negligence, and a great deal of what gets sold to frightened parents is sold in the gap between noticing something and being able to name it. Does anger management actually work sets out what the treatments have actually been measured to do, so that whatever you decide is decided on the numbers rather than on a brochure.