I’m going to try and take another tack for this post about tantrums. The others all lost steam for me, perhaps because I wrote them in too close a proximity to an actual tantrum. They ended up feeling like a play-by-play breakdown of a tantrum and how it starts. And they read like I was trying to justify my own inability to solve them as a problem. It was very “See what I put up with?” Those details are a bit beside the point. It’s just me wallowing.
There’s still something to be said about tantrums, and I’m going to have Kyle Reese help me with this one. During a tantrum your kiddo “can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop.” Your only real option is pretty similar to Sarah Connor’s in this situation: evade until you get to a more advantageous situation.
You don’t want to give in to your child and, in our experience, giving them the benefit of trying to reason with them just feeds the fire. The only tactic we have found with Joshua that “works” is that we tell him that we’re done trying to convince him to calm down and when he’s ready to come and find us and get hugs, he can do so. Then we go about our business as best we can. He’ll come around eventually, be it 2 or 20 minutes later and we’ll do hugs and try to make everything okay. Sometimes he thinks that just deciding he’s done panicking is enough to get his way, and when he learns it’s not going to work, we often end up starting the cycle anew… but we don’t really have another choice. Until he’s decided he’s done, it’s just how it’s going to happen.
We have tried to be very focused on communication and honesty. Leaving a tantrumming kid alone while we went about our routine felt like giving up on all that. It had the feel of emotionally distant parenting. And so Janelle and I fought against that while we fought against little out-of-control Joshua. Early on, we learned that you cannot hold on physically to a child lost in the throes of a tantrum. They are angry and confused and sad and now also trapped and they react like a caged animal. It has taken us much, much longer to realize that the same applies for trying to hold onto that child emotionally.
Whispering, yelling, bargaining, distracting. None of these tricks work, not consistently. I’ve found that if they do, you’re not dealing with a tantrum. You’ve out-maneuvered a child trying to work themselves into a tantrum. A critical distinction. But we fought for so long to be able to talk Joshua through tantrums that he grew accustomed to our sitting by him and trying to reason with his insane little demands (“I want you to give me a hug!” “No, I want Mommy!” “No, I want Daddy!” “I don’t want you to sit there! I want you to sit here!” “I don’t want you to say that to me! I already know that!”). He never would hear us, because he never could hear us. He was stuck in a spiral of what started as sadness and anger and then got all wrapped up with embarrassment and shame. We set a precedent though that there was some manner of response that Joshua was able to get from us, rather than his learning that tantrums just lead to nothing at all.
That was the trap that we fell into. We always assumed that by not giving in to whatever caused the tantrum—most typically things like wanting to watch another TV show, or play more of a certain game—we were holding strong and abiding by the rules of parenting that tell you to hold fast in the face of these outbursts so you don’t teach your child that crying and screaming is an effective tool to get what they want. But Joshua was changing the rules on us and we didn’t realize it. Tantrums became less about getting what he wanted than about holding us captive. He had lost control of the situation before him… but he could still gain control of us.
The hope is that now that we don’t entertain him for as long that this will fade. He gets a couple minutes of “Do you really want to do this?” or “Is this really how we’re going to end a super great day?” before hearing “If you can’t calm down, we’re just going to leave you over here to cry it out and you can come find us when you’re ready.” Then we have to hear him cry like his world is ending for sometimes as long as 20-30 minutes. The best is when he plays the “I don’t want to be alone!” card and wails that over and over and over without stopping (Protip: This is also a tactic. If you go in the room and ask if he wants a hug, he’ll yell at you and demand you get the other parent, too, or something else tyrant-ish.). That makes you feel like a great human being, trust me.
I feel like in general we get fewer tantrums these days, and fewer of any great length. But who knows if that’s really true. And who knows if we have had anything at all to do with their getting worse, or getting better. He’s growing up. Quickly. He may just be figuring this out all on his own.
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