What Do You Do With the Mad That You Feel?

Review by Jennifer Coleman, Ph.D., Child Clinical Psychologist

What Do You Do With the Mad That You Feel? is a packaged workshop training produced by Mister Rogers Neighborhood Child Care Partnership to help child care providers teach young children to deal with their angry feelings and to develop self-control.  This packaged training module includes a guide for the workshop facilitator, background material for the facilitator to read, a master set of helpful handouts for participants, a short series of video segments to illustrate some of the main points, and a description for the facilitator on how to conduct each segment of the 150 minute workshop.  The most important messages of this workshop are that anger in children is normal and that self-control develops in stages over time as children develop.  A strength of the workshop is that participants learn ways they can support and promote the development of self-control in young children.  Some of the information may be too basic for some child care providers, but there are some very useful segments in this packaged training module that can be incorporated into more comprehensive workshops on anger management in young children.  I believe that the most useful segment of the workshop is the discussion of the four developmental stages of self-control.  With each of these stages, there is a very useful handout that provides activities that teachers can use to promote the development of self-control at each level.  I also like the printed song for young children to learn that Mr. Rogers sings about angry feelings and constructive ways to deal with them.  The video segments are not as useful as many I have seen, but there are four scenes from child care sites of children losing control of their anger.  These four scenes are useful for generating discussions among participants on how to help children when they do lose control.

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