All About Tantrums – A Holistic View of Tantrums At All Ages

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adults, All About Tantrums, attachment parenting, babies, books, child development, crying, discipline, emotions, independence, Karyn Van Der Zwet, older children, parenting, reviews, tantrums, teenagers, toddlers

Karyn Van Der Zwet, who you will see on my blog roll as Kloppenmum, came out with a new book recently, and she kindly sent me a copy to review.

All About Tantrums is probably the only book out there that really is ALL about Tantrums. If you Google books on tantrums you will come up with a lot of books about TODDLER tantrums.

But Karyn’s book isn’t age specific.

In fact, it gives multiple levels of advice based on the age of the tantrumming person, from 9 months old to teenagers to YOUR AGE. That’s right – her book has sections dedicated to ADULT tantrums as well, and what to do when you have one.

What Karyn does is break down the word “tantrum” into (I counted them) 15 tantrums with 35 sub-categorized tantrum types. And she not only describes what each one looks like and how to tell one from the other, but how to deal with each and every kind.

It sounds like a lot of information, but it’s actually insanely helpful, because I’m betting that every kid doesn’t throw every kind of tantrum. Chances your kid only throws tantrums over a couple of things on the list. And when you realize that you’ve been following generic advice which would work great for, say, an Intentional Tantrum (subtype Entitlement Tantrum), but that your kid is actually throwing a Brain Pain Tantrum (sub type Has To Be Done Tantrum), you realize you’ve been handling it all wrong.

Even if your kid doesn’t throw tantrums, it’s a great explanation of why kids do the things they do.

Letting Things Slide

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children, discipline, going up slides, playground etiquette, rules, safety, slides

When Owl was around one year old, he began to enjoy slides.

The local mall has a slide that is nicely baby-sized, so we started him on that one. From the beginning we taught him basic slide safety/etiquette which is, of course, that you must always go around and go back up via the ladder, and not back up the slide itself.

This is basic etiquette, isn’t it?

I have begun to wonder, because we are apparently the only parents IN THE WORLD who enforce it.

I am probably exaggerating because my friend Pug Mama also enforces this basic requirement when we have visited slides with our children, and I assume that my other friends do as well with their children. But that’s because I have awesome taste in friends.

Everyone else in the world seems to think it is TOTALLY FINE for their kid to spend five minutes trying to climb the wrong way up the slide, while other children line up on top with feet pointed at the rogue child’s head.

Then, of course, Owl starts imitating the behaviour. PH or I immediately swoop in and correct him and Owl goes back to his law abiding ways. Sometimes the other parent would become aware that my one year old was better behaved than their three year old and would suddenly start enforcing the rule, which no doubt confused the kid completely.

Sometimes, that doesn’t even happen.

A few weeks ago Owl was at that same slide and had quite an altercation with two little bruisers with buzz cuts. One looked about Owl’s age and the other was three or so. They were both climbing up the slide while Owl sat on top of the slide poised to go down and said in an increasingly annoyed voice, “Excuse me. Excuse me! EXCUUUUUSE ME! NO!! GO ‘WAY!!!!!”

He began poking at their eyes, which I put a stop to instantly, but I felt bad, because after all, he was in the right. But if we poked out people’s eyes whenever they broke the rules, we’d have a lot of fun, but probably end up in prison.

The parent of the two kids, by the way, was watching with pleasant-faced bemusement throughout all this. I would have said something but I didn’t know she was the kids’ mother, since she was watching with pleasant-faced bemusement.

It was only when Owl and the up-sliders began to engage in a battle to the death on the top of the slide that she redirected her kids, who were back and going up the slide again within five minutes and the mother just shrugged at me like “Ehn, what else can I do?”

I was tempted to tell Owl to slide down anyway and kick those kids in the face.

It’s not only a problem at the mall.

The local indoor play gym has big signs up everywhere about NOT CLIMBING UP THE SLIDES, often in quick succession and merely phrased in different ways so as to try and penetrate people’s thick skulls. It doesn’t seem to make a difference. Parents stand around and smile indulgently while their kids struggle up the slide going the wrong way. Last time I tried to embarrass the parents into action. Owl pointed at the kids going up the slide and screeched “Mommy, YOOK!”

“Yeah, they’re breaking the rules. Never mind what they do. YOU go around,” I said to him loudly. The group of watching parents didn’t even blink.

I suppose I could be a douche and point out to the parents that their kids are getting in the way of everyone else’s kids AND endangering themselves in the process, but it’s none of my business and I’m not naturally confrontational.

So beyond the occasional passive aggressive comment, I just watch in bewilderment.

I just don’t get it.

It’s one thing if your kid is nine years old in a deserted playground, and able to understand the difference between sharing a busy piece of playground equipment and enjoying having the slide all to yourself.

But in a busy play park packed with self absorbed toddlers?

Really?

Even if you don’t believe in etiquette, even if you want your child to be a rebel and explore playground equipment in novel ways, even if you don’t think that your kids should have to learn turn-taking or follow posted rules…

…don’t you worry that a descending child will torpedo your kid in the face?

…Or am I the only one?

The No-Cry Discipline Solution: The New Model For My Future Dog Training Book

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babies, behavior, book reviews, books, child development, children, discipline, Elizabeth Pantley, literature, No-Cry Discipline Solution, parenting, reviews, strategies

As you may remember, Elizabeth Pantley of the No-Cry Sleep Solution sent me some more of her books for me to check out. Since I love books, this made me pee my pants with excitement just a little bit. (Although that’s also a side effect of having given birth. Still working on those Kegels.)

So I started with The No-Cry Discipline Solution.

I really enjoyed this book, and I actually found it more useful than Harvey Karp’s The Happiest Toddler On The Block.

No!

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babies, child development, discipline, no, parenting

I have always been a little disturbed by the fact that understanding the word “no” is listed as a milestone in What To Expect The First Year. Especially since they then qualify it with “but not always obey it”.

First of all, the dog trainer in me says:

If he doesn’t obey the word “no”, then he doesn’t understand the word. 

Second of all, doesn’t it seem sad that “no” is the word of choice? Recognizing his name? Not listed as a milestone. Recognizing the word “yes”? Not listed. Recognizing the word “ball” or “dog” or “milk”? Not listed.

Apparently babies are supposed to live in a world of “no.”

Well, Babby was late to that milestone, because up until recently, he almost never heard the word. If he reached for something he shouldn’t have, I might say “no, honey” absentmindedly as I moved it out of reach, but until he could crawl his opportunites for mischief were so limited that I simply had no need for any kind of discipline.

He recognized his name. He could hand me something if I held out my hand for it. But he hadn’t a clue what the word “no” meant.

But he’s learning it now.

With great power comes great responsibility, and with the ability to crawl comes the beginning of responsibility for one’s actions. When Babby developed his own method of locomotion, I began to enact some basic discipline.

Our very first battle of wills happened at the airport on our way home from Nova Scotia. Waiting at the gate, we put Babby down for a crawl. We decided to make the line where carpet turned to tile flooring a boundary, and if Babby approached it we called “no!”, picked him up, and returned him to our feet.

The great escape: Take 3,354

Of course, he would immediately bee-line for the tiles again, and as soon as he hit the line, we’d call “no!”, pick him up, and return him to our feet.

He thought this was a great game. We didn’t mind. For the first time in his life he was discovering the possibility of resisting our wishes, and it was natural for him to try and test that boundary. Let him learn it now that resistance is futile.

Besides, it’s good exercise for everyone, and it sure keeps him busy!

I don’t know how many times he rampaged towards the tiling only to be cheerily told “no!” and returned to square one.

The kid definitely has a mind of his own, and he thought resisting my will to be HILARIOUS.

But in the end, he began to get bored of crossing the same patch of floor again and again and again and again and again. Finally, he reached the end of the carpet, I called “no!” and stood up from my seat, and he paused. You could see the thought whirling in his tiny brain: “Do I really want to get hauled all the way back there AGAIN?”

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He decided that he would rather explore to the right or left. He crawled away, along the edge of the carpet, and I praised him. He sat up again, grinned at me, and continued his explorations unmolested.

Thus ended Babby’s first lesson in “no”, but not the last.

We had a similar battle of wills at the doctor’s office the other day. Now, though, I only have to do it three or four times before he decides to pause at the threshold of my imposed boundary when I call “no!”, and then decide to explore in a different direction.

He’s learning fast.

That’s the “here’s the rule, don’t cross it” kind of no. I say it quite cheerily (in fact, it often comes out “nope!”). When he hears it he often spends some time figuring out the EXACT boundary. Oh, I can’t touch that thing on the shelf? What about this part of it? No? What about the shelf itself? That’s okay?

It’s not so much that he’s disobeying as exploring the limitations, and I am okay with that.

The other kind of “no” he learned all at once. 

That’s the “STOP!” kind of no.

He was playing with the bottom drawer of his dresser, pulling it open and pushing it closed again with great glee. I was sitting in the rocker and watching, and waiting. The moment I had been worried about arrived: instead of pushing back on the knob that he used to pull the drawer open, he placed his hand on top of the drawer to push it closed.

I jumped up from my chair and said quite harshly, “NO!”

He startled, but it didn’t stay his hand, and the drawer closed on his little fingers.

Now, he doesn’t have much strength, so it just closed on them. When I had whisked them out they weren’t bruised or even pinched. But it still upset him enough to make it memorable for him.

I left him with a friend while PH and I went to see Harry Potter, and the friend remarked on our return that he responded quite well to “no!” when he picked up a computer chord.

Yes, he definitely recognizes urgency, and he responds. Of course, he has no self control yet, so he ends up going back to the cord after a while, but he stops when he hears the word. That’s all I can really ask for at this age, hence, Babby proofing.

But I almost feel safe in saying that he knows what “no” means, now.

Almost.

Hey, boob-lady: LOOK WHAT I'VE GOT!

I bet these kids grew up to be terrible people

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babysitting, bad parents, child care, danger, discipline, memories, parenting, sugar, television

So there I am, sitting at the kitchen counter in my parents’ house, when my eye rests on the cover of the local newspaper and a name jumps out at me.

HER!

When I was a teenager, a friend of mine and I were hired to babysit some kids over the summer. The friend did one month and I did the other.

It was the lady who hired us whose name I had just spotted in the paper as the head of some festival organizing group.

For some reason it is always a surprise when someone we met a long time ago is discovered to still exist. That’s how I felt seeing my old employer’s name, and the memories came rushing back.

You know how, as a teenager, things seem unbearably awful, but looking back on it you think “Pfft. That wasn’t so bad. What was the big deal?”

Yeah, well that is NOT how I feel looking back on baby sitting this woman’s children.

She was thin and blonde and stylish – you know the type – and she and her husband made a decent amount of money, so her kids had everything. Which made them terrible little brats.

The two girls were 3 and 7. I would be paid 100 bucks a week to watch them from 7 am until 5 pm Monday through Friday, and fix their lunch, for four weeks. My friend received the same deal for the other four weeks.

“The seven year old is old enough to report back to us now,” the mother cautioned us, “and she knows to come and tell me if anything goes wrong while you are taking care of her.”

Translate that as: Don’t hit my kids, and my daughter has been told to tattle on you if you make her unhappy.

My friend and I were not given any kind of power. We weren’t given any household rules, or any method of disciplining the kids. As far as I was able to gather from the children, they were spanked regularly. However, the parents made it clear that spanking from a babysitter was unacceptable, and no other alternative was offered.As a 17 year old, I didn’t know about time-outs. The parents didn’t seem to, either.

We weren’t even allowed to eat their food or help ourselves to a drink. We prepared lunch for the kids, but brought our own lunches from home.

Every morning I arrived at 7 to be greeted by two small kids still in their pyjamas eating chocolate pop tarts and sipping at cans of soda pop. Their greeting consisted of them looking briefly away from Elmo’s World, and then returning to stare fixedly at the screen again. Over the course of the day they would expect to watch Zaboomafoo, Barney the Purple Dinosaur, more Elmo’s World, and occasionally Teletubbies.

The rest of the time, they did whatever the hell they wanted.

The oldest one, the 7 year old, was the worst. She was bossy, spoiled, and lived to defy everyone. She had the power, and she knew it, because SHE was charged with watching me and reporting on me to her parents. If I tried to thwart her in any way, she responded by dragging her little sister into their parents’ bedroom on the lower floor (for some reason I was strictly forbidden to go upstairs with the kids, but playing in Mom and Dad’s room was fine) and lock me out.

Do you know what was in that room? Well, an en suite bathroom, complete with soaker tub, and an exercise machine which they liked to climb all over as if it were a jungle gym. Every time they locked me out I felt a mixture of relief that I no longer had to deal with them, and terror that the 3 year old would drown in the bathtub and the 7 year old would give herself a concussion on the exercise machine.

Ow, My Empathy.

Tags

attachment, children, discipline, empathy, love, parenting

I hate to write two bummer posts in a row – I’m not depressed, really – but I have to tell someone what I just experienced.

Babby and I were out for our walk with Beloved Dog, and while I picked up poop I could hear the screams of a tantruming child coming from a distance. In our family-friendly complex, this is such a common sound that it took me a while to register it on a conscious level. I began to realize that the pitch was… more urgent than a normal tantrum, and that the words that were being screamed were alternately “Mommy!” and “help!”

I looked around and spotted a small child, no more than three, clinging to the other side of the fence in the old abandoned school yard. People often take their dogs and kids back there to play, since there is a soccer field and playground equipment. I waited for a parent figure to show up and deal with the child, but no parent was in sight. I waited, and waited. No parent, just a small kid screaming for help.