Today a Twitter pal asked me if I'd write about responding to tantrums, and OH YOU GUYS, I have more tantrum experience than your average bear. My oldest son threw hardcore tantrums for a long time. We laugh about it now, but it was not at all funny when it was happening. And here is a strange thing: I started to tell you a couple of the stories and I immediately felt inner resistance, a certainty that somebody reading this would say, "Well, why didn't you just--"
Believe me, I tried to just. Just ignore it. Just make my expectations clear. Just meet the needs he was struggling to express. There was no just-ing this boy.
Dealing with tantrums is harder than most things in life. I like doing hard things. I blog about them with some regularity. Shepherding a kid through serious tantrums is harder than all of the following:
- training for a half-marathon across a broiling Midwestern summer
- arranging a transatlantic move with young kids
- reading the complete works of Shakespeare
- completing the coursework for a PhD
- finishing a triathlon when you swim with all the grace and buoyancy of a Denali
- losing 30 pounds in middle age
I could go on. I tell you this because if you are having a hard time with tantrums, the reason is that tantrums are hard. It's not you. It's the task.
Think back to learning to drive. I am certain that if you reflect on your first year behind the wheel, you will recall moments that felt awful or at least awkward. The first time you drove an hour in the rain through construction with traffic surrounding you, it was scary and exhausting. You got out of that car and felt a little weak in the knees. Did you slide right into the space the first time you tried to parallel-park? Or even the tenth? I'm guessing you did not. Your parents' friends probably sympathized with them about how hard and time-consuming and sometimes frankly scary it was to teach a teenager to drive.
We learn to drive when we're old enough to remember the stress that goes along with it. It is every bit as hard for young kids to learn to manage their emotions.
Like driving, learning emotional regulation requires us to control a complicated tangle of interrelated systems. We have to practice being in charge of them, and practice and practice and practice some more until it becomes automatic. As with driving, we have to prepare for the occasional moments when we lose control-- how can we minimize damage in those circumstances? The consequences can be grave; the skills cannot be infused by osmosis.
Some of your peers, I'm betting, seemed to sail right through their driver's ed class. Others were more nervous, or had more trouble with figuring out the position of the car in space. But even the most spatially aware kids still needed time for the skills to become automatic.
Some kids have extra challenges when they're learning to drive. Here in Gladlyville, there's not much traffic; the streets are wide and flat. I would hate to teach a kid to drive in the West Virginia town where I was a teenager. I would hate to teach a kid to drive in Chicago, because secretly (except that I just put it on the internet) I still get a little stressed out about driving in Chicago myself. It would be preposterous for me to tell parents in those towns, based on my n of 2 licensed drivers, that I know just how they should teach their kids to drive. Some parents are teaching kids to drive manual transmissions in San Francisco: hills + traffic + fog + ill-timed stalls. And yet some people whose kids had Gladlyville-level tantrums think nothing of telling the parents dealing with stick-shift-in-San-Francisco-level tantrums that driving instruction is no big deal. Just-- insert preferred technique here.
I am not going to just you. I am going to tell you that it gets better. I promise it gets better. I am going to tell you that it's not your inadequacy; it's the magnitude of the task. And tomorrow I will tell you some things that helped me get to the other side.
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