Tantrum City
Childless readers will probably be bored to tears with this entry, so if that’s you, you may want to skip down to the links.
Today we discussed tantrums in our parent participation class. The teacher’s suggestions were–there’s no other way to say this–laughable. How many of you think giving a kid in a full blown tantrum a nice cold washcloth (”so he can cool himself off”) is going to work? You’ve got to be kidding me. If I tried handing one of my girls a washcloth during a tantrum that stupid thing would thrown right back in my face in about 1.5 seconds. The other suggestion was to ignore them, and say stuff like, “I can’t understand you when you screaming so I’ll just go wait over here while you get yourself together.” Hello? A kid having a grand mal tantrum isn’t going to hear any of that shit. After about the second word your voice sounds just like Charlie Brown’s teacher: blah blah blah blah.
Not too many people seem to care why toddlers tantrum, so a lot of the suggestions for curing them simply focus on just getting the screaming banshee to shut up. This is why most of them don’t really work. Dr. Karp ingeniously pointed out in his book that usually toddlers have meltdowns because they feel powerless and unheard. He makes it very clear that responding like you would to an upset adult is not going to help…what you need to do is get down on their level and repeat what it is they want, and what they are feeling. This is hard to do when they are going insane, but can work miracles with some effort. You just have to keep repeating until they hear you. I myself have never implemented his methods completely, so I have never had perfect results. But I will say the tack of at least acknowledging their feelings (E.g., “You are so mad! MAD! MAD! MAD! You want a sippie NOW!”) does seem to help take the edge of the tantrum off, even if it doesn’t stop it completely.
Obviously if the girls are tired or in pain, all bets are off. When that’s the case, we are already starting off in the red zone and so I can usually count on dozens of tantrums a day. These are the days that are the most draining, and I suppose is one reason I have never quite followed Dr. Karp’s excellent advice to the letter. On those days I just don’t have the energy to be particularly disciplined and I feel that tantrums are really pretty much inevitable with supremely tired kids. But you can turn down the volume significantly even if you do his suggestions half-assed like I have. The best part is you don’t have to resort to old-school non-solutions like spanking, either.
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Parents Behaving Badly
Pet President gets it right again
The “all fans, all the time” computer case
We’ve had gazillions of childcare advice programmes on the telly in the UK recently. “House of Tiny Tearaways with Dr Tanya Baron” is my wife’s favourite.
In general, they all say the same thing: time out. Time out in their room, or on the Naughty Step, or the Naughty Chair, or blah blah blah.
When Didi has tantrums, and you try to put her in a Time Out, she gets worse. And she started to kick and throw things around, so that you’re afraid she’ll break something or hurt herself. It always works on the telly, but it never works in real life, in my experience.
I am aware, though, of some of the things I might do that can lead to bad behaviour, and ultimately tantrums. Things like reading at the table, or only half-listening (because you’ve been at work all day and had a crappy journey home etc.). Anyway, I’m rubbish at the tantrums - it’s all I can do not to have one myself.