Most parents are looking to avoid anger or moodiness in their kids and these are unavoidable emotions. Every child is going to feel sad or snarky or angry or aggressive a 100% of the time. During puberty kids go through this. So what I want parents to do is to anticipate it and to build in strategies to help their kids. Most of the time what kids need is acknowledgment – so they need to know what’s normal and okay and then they need an outlet – they need to do something. Usually, that means a timeout. It means excusing your child from a situation when things are starting to escalate. And one of the most common scenarios is you’re somewhere important where your parents care how you’re behaving. You’re at a family event, or you’re at something where the stakes are high. If you see that your child is starting to swing a little bit emotionally, excuse them. Give them the out. Let them know they can leave for a couple of minutes and go blow off their steam and come back. It’s like hitting reset. If you’re at family dinner, and your child starts to snap at their sibling, let them walk away for a couple of minutes. And parents find this surprising advice, but the reality is if you don’t allow it, then there’s often an emotional spiral down and things don’t get better on their own. So give your child the out. When you’re home and there’s free time, let that out be aerobic. Let them go run, or bang on a pillow, or hit something, or jump up or do something to get their energy and aggression out, especially boys. But if it’s out in public, at least give your child the gift of time. Just give them a two-minute break and let them collect themselves and come back and act as if they just pressed restart and they can go again from the beginning.