[fireattack]

I always find this kind of title weird.

Coming from a relatively "homogenous" (for lack of a better word) ethnicity, I think I can see a point to generalize something like "this is how X people teach their children math", but "control anger"? This seems to me a very personalized thing that varies wildly from family to family.

[moate]

Why? This is the "hard skills are real, soft skills aren't" dynamic I see so often (Hello, I'm the PM in a room full of Engineers).

Your first mistake is that teaching itself is very personalized and varies wildly from family to family. If we're willing to accept the premise that there are some commonalities among families from the same culture, then how they teach social skills important to that culture would likely be at the top of the list of things that would exist

[fireattack]

> there are some commonalities among families from the same culture

My exact point is this: I can't think of any commonalities for "(teach the kids) how to control anger", not for my culture at least. Maybe Inuit people are different.

[moate]

A little necro-posty on my part, but I think this is worth mentioning:

I'm an American from a white Midwestern family born in the mid-80s. I can tell you that in my upbrining things like "time out" or being sent to my room or being forced to apologize when I hit someone were part of the techniques used to help teach me how to control my anger and be pleasant to people. From my observations, these things were being taught in school as well as reinforced at home. This is part of how my culture taught me how to control my anger.

However, I know that other people with different backgrounds may have had other punishments (physical abuse, being made to write out their feelings, etc). There are all sorts of social skills that cultures value and try to pass on. "How to behave when you're angry" is at the very top of that list.

I promise you, there are cultural differences between how you were taught to handle anger as a child and those of people raised in different backgrounds. They just don't seem novel to you. Without knowing more, I can't point to specific examples but the larger point is that cultures pass on social skills, not just language.