Your Child’s Irritability Has a Reason

By Maude Le Roux, OTR/L, SIPT, RCTC, DIR® Expert Trainer at A Total Approach 

Learn the three origins of irritability in children, three reasons your child won’t tell you why they feel irritable and three ways to help them cope with their irritability. 

The Summer of 2020 is unlike any summer we’ve seen in a long time. Many summertime activities that kids and parents look forward to are curtailed due to ongoing precautions against COVID-19. Those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer life as we know it will be different. 

Families are indeed struggling through stressful times right now, and these stressors are affecting everyone in the family. As a parent, you not only may be experiencing frayed nerves and anxiety, but you may have to calm your child’s irritability as well. 

Irritability in children is closely related to anger and aggressive behavior and can be defined as increased proneness to anger. According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), irritability includes both behavioral and mood components and manifests as inappropriate temper outbursts and sullen, grouchy moods. Developmentally, irritability peaks during a child’s preschool years and is associated with developmental delays later in adolescence. 

Make no mistake: Your child’s irritability has a reason, and it won’t simply go away without a little investigation and a lot of love.

Three Origins of Irritability in Children

Children are often irritable when they’re hungry, tired or not feeling well—they have an upset stomach or they’re coming down with a cold or a fever. 

Once you’ve determined that the irritability is not a sign of illness, however, you’ll need to consider other origins, such as the following: 

1. Your child may be struggling with emotional self-regulation, their ability to effectively respond to environmental stressors in the moment and how efficiently they recover from the effort. 

Sometimes children are irritable because something is bothering them inside. They’re reacting emotionally to something that’s happened in their lives, such as a huge change in their routine, a parent being away from home or a death in the family. They may be worried about being lonely this summer without their friends or if they’ll be able to go back to school in the fall. This may emotionality manifest as irritability.

The challenge for you as a parent in helping your child learn how to regulate their emotions is understanding why certain levels of stress stop them from responding effectively. Learn more in my article, “Emotional Regulation and the Importance of Early Developmental Experiences.”

2. Your child may be struggling with unexpressed anxiety. Typically kids don’t run to their parents and say, “I’m feeling anxious right now.” Mostly they try and suppress their anxiety, masking it with a smile—to appease and satisfy you. They recognize something is wrong, and they don’t know what that is. Because they think their anxiety is “wrong”, they don’t want others to witness it due to a sense of shame. As they try to hide their anxiety, it increases their irritability and tendency to exhibit outward frustrated behavior. As they grow older, this may lead to performance anxiety or lack of executive function—mental skills like working memory, flexible thinking and self-control that we need to learn, work and manage daily life. They may find it hard to focus, follow directions or regulate their emotions due to this hidden anxiety, which shows up as irritable behavior. 

If your child is irritable, look at whether they may be harboring some anxiety and the reasons for it. It’s actually good that you’re getting this sign earlier rather than later. 

3. Your child may be struggling with a central nervous system sensory issue. Sensory processing disorder (SPD) occurs when the brain does not organize and respond to the sensory signals received from a child’s body. If their autonomic nervous system (ANS) does not develop to the best capacity, they may struggle with developmental delays such as dyspraxia or lack of sensory modulation, the ability to regulate the activity between the sympathetic (arousal) and parasympathetic (inhibition) systems. Learn more in my article, “How Sensory Modulation Contributes to Behavior in Children.”

Three Reasons Your Child Won’t Tell You Why

1. Your child does not know why they’re feeling irritable, so they can not tell you why they’re feeling this way. They will become increasingly more irritable if you insist on discussing it with them.

2. Your child may not want to admit to doing “wrong”. Often children think what they’re feeling is something that’s wrong or undesirable. Therefore, it’s a taboo subject even to talk about.

3. Your child is living their own “fantasy”, which is their reality and they are not prone to share it. Their internal working model could be that they think they should be perfect in everything they do, which is not possible, of course. When they disappoint themselves with an imperfection like irritable behavior, they don’t want to further the feeling by telling their parent and risk disappointing you as well.

Three Things You Can Do About It

1. Don’t over-talk your child’s irritability with them, which can increase the frustration they are feeling inside. Simply validate your child’s emotion and allow them to recognize that the emotion they are feeling is OK with you. If you don’t show them it’s OK, then your child may continue to think it is wrong to feel this way.

2. Try not to solve the problem for your child. In typical development, children learn to figure out their own solutions to problems, so you want your child to do the same. As a parent, one of the ways you can help shape this behavior in your child is by modeling. 

Your children are always watching what you do. They see how you handle stress. They watch how you treat other people and observe how you deal with your feelings, even when you think they aren’t paying attention, and they emulate it. 

People learning by watching others is called social learning theory. Kids repeat what they hear, and they imitate what they see, especially from their parents. When you use good modeling behavior, such as showing your kids healthy ways to calm down, pointing out good sharing behavior among a group or telling them how you feel, you’re modeling the kind of behavior that you want to see in them and that it’s OK with you. 

As a result, your child is gaining self-acceptance, self-awareness and self-identity from the way they view how you are viewing them.

3. Contact us! If you’d like to learn more about how to help an irritable child, schedule a free phone consultation with one of our therapists, who can give specific insight into our approach.