Every parent has lived this moment: you walk out of a chinuch class swearing you’ll never raise your voice again, and by dinnertime you’re screaming anyway. A mother once asked Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen exactly that — “How do I get control of my anger? My kids literally tell me, ‘Mommy, you said you’re not going to scream at us.’”
Kelemen’s answer was refreshingly honest: there are two real paths, and you should feel free to start with either.
The first is secular and effective — cognitive behavioral techniques, and specifically Rabbi Shlomo Wickham… no, more precisely, he pointed to Rabbi Zelig Pliskin’s work on anger, which borrows from NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) but filters it through Torah sources. It’s not the “ideal” Jewish method, Kelemen says, but it works, and he’d rather you use something effective today than wait for a slower, deeper fix.
The second path is the Torah method, and it’s harder: joining a va’ad — a small mussar accountability group that meets regularly to work seriously, with standards and checks, on a single character trait. Kelemen is blunt about why this matters more than any parenting technique: you can’t fix your children’s reactions to your anger by working on your children. You fix it by working on yourself, in an organized, structured way, with real accountability.
Here’s the deeper point hiding underneath the anger question. Rav Chaim Volozhiner paskened, over 150 years ago, that we are not permitted to use harsh language — and that this applies with even greater force today, especially with children. The popular idea that suppressing anger causes an “ulcer” is, Kelemen says, simply not supported by research. Expressing anger at your kids isn’t emotionally healthy catharsis. It’s a risk factor for the very outcomes every parent fears.
**What you can actually do this week:**
1. **Pick one tool, not ten.** If you’re drowning, grab Pliskin’s book on anger or any solid CBT resource. Read one chapter. Apply one reframe. Don’t wait for perfection.
2. **Consider a va’ad.** Even two people meeting weekly to report honestly on one middah can outperform years of “trying harder” alone.
3. **Catch the trigger, not the eruption.** Anger management works best in the ten seconds before you raise your voice, not in the middle of the scream. Build a physical pause — leave the room, count, drink water — into that window.
4. **Tell your kids the truth.** If you do scream, name it afterward: “I lost control. That wasn’t right. I’m working on it.” Modeling repair is itself chinuch.
You don’t need to solve your anger by tonight. You need to start today, with one concrete step, in a structured way — and keep checking your own progress the way Rav Wolbe insisted every parent must.
Want more of Rabbi Kelemen’s practical Torah wisdom on raising calm, connected kids? Join the inner circle at lawrencekelemen.com for ongoing teachings you won’t find anywhere else.
This blog was co-written with Artificial Intelligence.