Tantrums
When it comes to tantrums, parents are experiencing a lot of different emotions. Some of it is frustration, some of it is embarrassment and some of it is just bewilderment, right? If you think about a parent who's watching their beautiful, happy three-year-old child playing in the play room, getting along nicely with their siblings, and then all of the sudden they turn into this head spinning, lava breathing, alien in the middle of a meltdown; the parents look at their child and think, “My goodness, where did that beautiful happy little toddler go?”
There's never anything you can say when it comes to a tantrum; when a child's tantruming and losing control it really comes down to action and that's really what parents need to learn: “What do I do about a tantrum?”
Because talking at that time is useless. There's never a good time for a tantrum and there's never a good place for a tantrum. Parents have an easier time managing tantrums when they happen at home; they really struggle when they happen in the middle of a grocery store, at church, at a friend's home. Again that's in part because they're embarrassed, they're kind of worried about how they might be disrupting others in the environment. In the book I talk about two different things that parents need to think about when it comes to managing tantrums. One is something that parents don't think a lot about and that is prevention.
There are a lot of things that parents can do to prevent tantrums and we talk about some of the triggers that tend to set tantrums off - letting parents be aware of that. The second thing is trying to match up the reason or the purpose for the tantrum and the type of intervention that the parent would use. I talk in the book about different reasons or different purposes that are behind tantrums and I talk about specific strategies that parents can use to kind of match up with the purpose of a tantrum.
