What Set That Off?

Big reactions usually have a small cause hiding behind them.

Lesson: 1
Time: About 12 minutes

What Set That Off?

Big reactions usually have a small cause hiding behind them.

2 situations to decide. There is often more than one good answer: pick one and see what happens.

After school

You get home and everything anybody says is annoying. Your brother has done nothing unusual and you want to shout at him.

What do you do?

In class

You got an answer wrong out loud and somebody laughed. Ten minutes later you are furious with a completely different person.

What is actually happening?

What That Was

Sometimes a small thing gets a huge reaction. When that happens, the small thing was not really the cause.

The usual four

Hungry. Tired. Rushed. Embarrassed. Most oversized reactions have at least one of these underneath.

Look for your pattern

Everybody has a time of day and a kind of situation where they are easier to set off. Knowing yours is genuinely useful.

A reason, not an excuse

Being tired explains why you snapped. It does not undo the snapping, and you still have to sort that out.

Try It

These ones do have right answers.

What Was Underneath?

Match each blow-up to what was probably really going on.

The small thing set it off. What was underneath?

Tap a card on the left to start.

Quick Check

Question 1 of 1

You snapped at somebody because you were exhausted. What now?

Your Life Mission

Something to do away from the screen. Nobody is checking.

Find your hour

For three days, note the time whenever you get properly annoyed.
Look for the pattern.
Tell somebody in your house what you found.

Why: Three days is usually enough. The pattern is almost always more obvious than people expect.

What You Learned

A huge reaction to a small thing means something else was underneath.
Hungry, tired, rushed and embarrassed cause most of them.
The reason explains it. It does not repair it.

For the grown-up

This is the most practical lesson in the chapter for family life, because the four common triggers are largely under adult control. A great deal of what gets labeled behavior is a schedule problem.

Naming your own out loud — "I am short with everyone before dinner and it is not about you" — does two things at once: it models the skill and it removes the child’s reasonable suspicion that they caused it.

Keep the reason-versus-excuse line visible. Children pick up the vocabulary of triggers quickly and can start using it as an exemption if the repair half is not insisted on.