RECIPE FOR SUCCESS:Anger needs more productive management

It seems that everywhere you look, anger is an issue. In traffic you witness all sorts of angry gestures and aggressiveness. I watched the angry exchange between Newport Beach City Councilman Keith Curry and Mayor Steve Rosansky at the last council meeting as they discussed the park and city hall issue. Tempers flared. Reality TV — you have to love it. Maybe they need a muscle man like Steve from Jerry Springer’s show to break up these heated exchanges at future council meetings.

Sure would be a ratings booster.

But why are we not dealing with our anger issues in a more productive way?

“Anger is a good thing,” according to www.anger.org. “It is a defense mechanism — it signals us when we are getting into physically or emotionally unsafe situations. The real enemy is the reactions we learn to anger that have unfavorable consequences to ourselves and others …. The key to coping with anger is to learn how to respond to it instead of reacting to it.”

The American Psychological Assn. says that “people most prone to anger were almost three times more likely to have a heart attack than those with low anger in a recent study of 12,986 participants,” according to its website, www.apa.org.

Angermgmt.com has a helpful questionnaire to measure your anger. It touts itself as a site to help people build better relationships and offers an “Anger Toolkit.”

The other day I saw a child throwing a temper tantrum. The mom hauled off and spanked the child. It suddenly occurred to me, was she spanking her child to get control of him, or was she spanking him as a way to deal with her own anger?

Some would say that the mom was disciplining her child. Others would say that spanking should be outlawed. On April 17, anti-spanking bill AB 755 passed out of the public safety committee in the California Assembly. Assemblywoman Sally Lieber (D-Mountain View) earlier this year proposed to make it illegal for anyone, including parents, to spank children 3 or younger.

If this bill passes, California will become the first state to make the corporal punishment of infants and toddlers a misdemeanor punishable by a year in jail and a $1,000 fine.

Sound wacky to you? Not necessarily. The town of Brookline, Mass., successfully passed a resolution against spanking in 2005. Twenty-seven states have banned corporal punishment from their public school systems.

In Sweden and about a dozen other European countries, spanking bans already exist. Parents receive a fine and attend mandatory parenting classes on discipline.

Where do we draw the line between good parenting and child abuse? Have we become a society that handles our anger with violence rather than reason? And what does spanking really teach a child?

One thing I do know is that as a society we need to manage our anger more productively, especially in public. As adults we need to stop acting like spoiled children who probably needed a good spanking way back when.