When your child gets aggressive: behaviour is communication

Hitting, screaming, slamming doors. Aggression makes you feel helpless and ashamed, and it often triggers the reflex to crack down harder. Yet it's almost always a signal, not a character flaw.

There's hardly anything that pushes parents, and educators too, to their limits like a child who becomes aggressive. It hits the siblings, it hits you, sometimes themselves. The first reflex is understandable: crack down harder, consequences, a clear word. But in children, aggression is usually a sign of overload and dysregulation, not of “bad character”. And that changes what really helps.

The child psychologist Dr. Ross Greene sums it up in a simple, almost revolutionary formula: children behave well when they can. When they don't, a skill is missing in that moment, or a need is unmet. Aggression is then not malice, but the only way an overwhelmed nervous system can find right now.

Behaviour is the tip of the iceberg

Beneath the visible behaviour there's almost always something else. Overstimulation, hunger, tiredness, fear, overwhelm, the feeling of losing control, or the inability to put a feeling into words. What you see, the hitting or screaming, is only the tip. The actual mountain lies beneath it, invisible.

That's why the helpful question isn't “How do I stop this behaviour?” but “What is this behaviour trying to tell me?”. That sounds like a subtle difference, but it's a completely different starting point. The first question leads to a fight. The second leads to a solution.

Especially relevant in ADHD

In children with ADHD, something is added: emotional dysregulation, the difficulty of steering intense feelings, is regarded in the literature as a central, not a minor, feature of ADHD. Such children often feel faster and more intensely and at the same time have less of a brake. What looks like an overreaction from outside is, inside, a real, overwhelming feeling. Knowing this takes the moral charge out of the situation.