Help me deal with my son’s anger

I am the mother of a teenager and I’m very worried about my son’s anger towards his foster father. When I watched the news on the 17-year-old, Form Three student from Kisii High School, who stabbed two teachers, I couldn’t sleep because of the fear that he could do the same to his father. The Kisii High School incident occurred after a teacher questioned him for getting to class late. The teacher escorted him to the staffroom and asked him to kneel, but the student turned against the teacher and assaulted him and his colleague who had come to his rescue. 

Your worry regarding your son committing acts of violence is justified because he has been angry with the father. Your son seems like he has unresolved issues regarding his stepfather or inadvertently his biological father. You can create an enabling atmosphere for him to open up and deal with such issues, thus resolving his resentment. Such issues are also handled better in counselling for the good of everyone. You may also be the one hindering the resolution of such issues by making them a ‘no go zone.’ If that is the case, you would need to invest in dealing with such issues to free your son to resolve his.  

Erratic behaviour is common among teenagers and is manifested in two major ways: self-centeredness and entitlement. The self-centred nature of the adolescents come from their underdeveloped brains which makes them process information inadequately without factoring the consequences of their actions. Equally, teenagers have a sense of being entitled; a strong desire of yearning to be treated in favourable ways even when they do not reciprocate that goodness. They behave as if the world revolves around them— a trait psychologists call adolescent egocentrism. Also, extremist behaviours are a sign of a mental illness which makes an individual hurt and aggress others. 

Teenagers cannot also regulate their emotions, thoughts and behaviours, hence they plunge themselves into regretful situations. They are also more eventful and action-oriented than introspective. They love to prove heroism and by doing so, they lose logical thinking as regards the impact of situations they put themselves in. The student may have attacked the teacher as a show off to other students. Eventually, he might have been very disappointed to realise that the cheerers were nowhere to be found when he was surrendered to the courts for committing a felony. 

Before the year 2000, the accepted standard of disciplining children in Kenyan schools was corporal punishment. But in a gazette notice in 2001, the then Minister of Education, Stephen Musyoka, scrapped the law. Education Act, 2012 Article 35 offers that “no pupil shall be subjected to torture and cruel inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in any manner, whether physical or psychological and that a person who contravenes these provisions commits an offence.

The action of the boy may have been informed by this law which did not explicitly offer solutions for conduct disorder in schools. As such, he might have looked at the action of the teacher as being unjustified and unwarranted. However, his actions were discourteous, lawless and damaging to the teachers and hampered his academic pursuit. After the incident of the assault happened, teachers decried their vulnerability in the face of hostile students who are geared to harm them. 

American Psychological Association (APA) refers to teacher victimisation as a serious problem that demands the immediate attention of researchers, school administrators, community leaders and policymakers. Indeed, parents have a role in getting children respect and honour teachers but some parents talk ill of teachers in the presence of their children. Thus, making children have contempt towards their teachers. You need to scale up your parenting by training on functional parenting which equips you with knowledge and skills to detect and respond well to your child’s abnormal behaviour and/or problematic behaviour.