My DS has just turned 10.
He is a good boy, does well at school, kind to his little DS (ag 7 and 5)etc, and we are a close and loving family and have a good relationship with him.
Over the past few weeks, however, he has flown off the handle on multiple occasions, and his verbal violence is escalating. During arguments, he regularly comes out with 'I have you / you're the worst mother in the world' , which although unpleasant I consider relatively 'normal', to now language which I consider as much less normal. A couple of weeks ago he said 'I want to kill you', and last night there was a big argument which culminated in 'I want to kill you, I want you to suffer, I want you to break your back' (we had had a conversation about people breaking their backs jumping in to swimming pools earlier in the day). He then continued by saying he wanted to kill himself and jump our of the window.
To be clear, I have absolutely no concern about any of our physical safety. He is absolutely not violent physically and I simply marched him up to his room to go to bed, and 5 minutes later, the thing he was most upset about was the fact he was missing out on chips.
His main objective is to wound with words - and what I do worry about is whether in years to come, this desire to hurt with words escalates into something physical. And also to understand why he seems to have no filter when he is very upset (he was especially upset yesterday).
I am very tempted to take him to a child psychologist, for anger management, and to show him that this is unacceptable behaviour - my husband is not keen, saying that would be 'over-medicalizing' the problem, making it into a massive deal that then won't really be resolved anyway.
Does anyone have any thoughts or advice?