Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Is it really a Tantrum?

Krishnan raised an interesting question about what we adults refer to as a child’s tantrum in response to my earlier post, “Dealing with your child's stubborn tantrums”.

That set me thinking. I was curious and looked up the definition of ‘tantrum’. Tantrum is defined as a fit of bad temper. Now is it justified to call a child’s behavior of continuously crying to express her frustration or hunger a tantrum? I would tend not to agree. When children are not able to control themselves and resort to kicking, screaming, or pounding the floor, that may again be due to extreme frustration experienced by them because they have been denied something they want, and their parents aren’t responding to their actions either.

I came across this article titled “A Guide to Tantrums: Understanding, preventing and surviving them” by Claire McCarthy, M.D., Harvard Health Publications. Here is the link to the article http://health.msn.com/kids-health/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100211722&page=1.

Claire has written a very well balanced article on this subject that covers why children behave in this fashion, and how parents can help prevent or diffuse the same.

There is one paragraph I would like to quote that I believe is the essence to understanding everything: “The key to preventing or diffusing tantrums is to understand your child's tantrum triggers, and understand what it feels like to be little and out of control.” I think if we as parents really exercise patience in understanding this aspect, that’s half the solution.

In the case of our daughter after one time she was crying loudly for over 5 minutes when she didn’t get what she wanted, when she calmed down a bit I hugged her and explained to her in a very loving manner that I knew why she cried like this, but why we didn’t give her what she wanted.

To which she nodded her head as if she understood what I was talking about completely. We shall see, if not keep trying harder! :-)

1 comment:

pncool said...

Recently I read a book called "Scream free parenting" which discussed about how to improve your relationship with your child. It also delved in why children make tantrums which I thought is worth sharing in here. The most important thing is dealing with tantrums is to shift the focus from your child to yourself & ask yoursef the question " Why I am loosing my temper?" coz most of the times we scream & shout at our kids when they make tantrums. As mentioned earlier by Sriram tantrum is a way in which the kid expresses his'her dissatisfaction or frustration. Then instead of saying "no" give them a choice lets say instead of saying "no you can't have that graham crackers" tell them " would you like to have crackers or something else which they like & is appropriate to give them at that time like a fruit". Children like when they have they have the right to choose. When we start shifting the focus from our kids to ourselves then the incidence of tantrums will reduce. I recommend reading this book.