Stop making these five mistakes to avoid your child's temper tantrum

Tantrums are the anti-grails of parenting. Every parent is willing to avoid tantrums as much as crusaders have been eager to find the holy grail for centuries and on.

And just like the holy grail is yet to be found after all these years of sacrifice and effort, the tantrums of children of all ages, but particularly of toddlers to four-year-olds, remain to be successfully avoided.

Here’s why.

For one, tantrums are necessary phases of a child’s development. When a child faces the outside world, especially the world of adults, she often gets overwhelmed by the excess of stimuli thrown at her. Her internal tension gradually increases, until the point where it all explodes - usually in the face of those nearest to her.

A tantrum, for a child, is one of the few tools available and known to her, to release steam, to process information overload, or to overcome frustration. Until her toolset expands (if ever) she will default to tantrums wherever she faces one of the situations above.

The intensity and frequency of these tantrums will, of course, hugely depend on factors like the attitude of the child, the lifestyle or the pace of life conducted by the family in general. 

And while you as a parent are unlikely to be able to protect your child from frustration or information overload, I am also here to deliver some good news.

There are a number of actions you can take in order to avoid at least some of the tantrums, decrease their frequency, and perhaps, intensity, too. And there are a number of actions as well that you as a parent can choose not to take, presumably and hopefully with the same result.

Unsurprisingly, these are the very actions most parents will naturally take when a tantrum is on the horizon.

Let’s see what these mistakes are, and how you can avoid making them.

Parenting, in a way, is like Fight Club. The first rule of parenting is that you don’t ask a distressed child questions. The second rule of parenting is that you do not ask a distressed child questions.

Still, how many times can we see freaked out parents shouting at their crying children questions like:

• How many times have I warned you that you’ll hurt yourself?
• See what you just did? Are you happy now? Knocking your little sister down, is that what you wanted?
• Why are you doing the exact opposite of what I’m asking you to do?

All of these questions are, of course, poetic, in the sense that the intention of asking them is not to receive a meaningful answer.

A child will have very few tools to let the adults know how big her problem is. You guessed it: one of these tools is throwing a tantrum.

Not only because she wouldn’t know the answer to any of these questions even if she tried really hard. But distress will even shut down the parts of the child’s brain that deal with any kind of rational reasoning. 

And while the questions may be poetic, the result is not so much. Asking these questions only raises the level of frustration even higher both on the parent’s and on the child’s end.

Avoiding these questions, while definitely hard to resist, is a relatively easy and actionable way of mitigating the situation by not worsening it further, when things are not looking too bright anyway.

Children have a very different sense of relative importance than adults. And while we can easily brush off their problems as saying things like “I wish those were my biggest problems”, that will not change the fact that those are big problems for her, indeed.

A child will have very few tools to let the adults know how big her problem is. You guessed it: one of these tools is throwing a tantrum.

She is not interested in how you deal with that specific situation. She is also interested in how you deal with frustration in general.

Saying things like “it’s just a toy - you have gazillion other toys at home” won’t lessen the importance of the plush bear that she has just lost at the playground. And “I can’t believe you cannot do this tiny little thing I’m asking you to do” will not make the task any smaller or less important if she feels strongly about doing or not doing it.

Many tantrums break out on ridiculously petty things that are ridiculous or petty only when looked at with adult eyes. Acknowledging the importance of these nuances is often the only thing the whole tantrum aims for.

So ignoring these, or worse even, pointing out their unimportance, is counter-productive to say the least.

Since we cannot expect a child to step in our shoes, and look at the world through our eyes, the only option we’re left with is for us to step in hers.

Acknowledging the severity of the situation by repeating the child’s complaint and perhaps offering a new perspective using adult language, surprisingly enough, will make the whole tantrum go away.

“I see, you’re scared of this dustbin. I totally hear you. This is, indeed, the scariest dustbin I’ve seen in a long time. And believe me, I’ve seen a good few of them lately.”

“I know, I know… it can take forever for Mum to take a pee. And you still have to wait outside. That’s unacceptable. But, you know, life isn’t always fair.”

A healthy dose of irony will help you out in many of these situations. Since the child won’t notice or understand, she won’t feel offended, and you can have a whole lot of fun, too, which will then, in return, relieve some of the pressure and frustration.

As the person closest to your child, you would expect to get the best of her, right?

Wrong!

Well, right and wrong. You will get the best and the worst of her.

And this is actually good news. Because it means that when she is with you, she can honestly and fully open up. She dares to be her full and unabridged self.

With this in mind, it is still extremely difficult to not take a tantrum personally. Especially when it is personal.

“You won’t let me do this…”

“I don’t want you, I want daddy!”

or even:

“I hate you!”

But really, what can possibly be any more personal than ‘I hate you?’ It is still very important to know that there is absolutely nothing personal in that I hate you.

When throwing a tantrum, your child is completely out of her right mind. She is back to her very basic instincts of survival (which is not to say she is not self-dangerous).

Acknowledge the severity of the situation by repeating the child’s complaint and perhaps offering a new perspective using adult language

A tantrum is not directed at one specific person. It is directed against the outside world. You are just the lucky one to have it explode right in your face.

So the you in ‘I hate you’, is in fact a generic you. ‘I don’t want you, I want daddy’ would be the other way around, if daddy were there instead of you.

The best way to tackle this, personal part of a tantrum is to ignore it completely. And the best way of processing it afterwards is to ignore it as much as you can.

It’s so easy to do it that it’s next to impossible not to do it.

She’s shouting, she’s being irrational, she hurts you, you are exhausted…

...and the next thing you know is that she is not shouting alone. Now both of you are shouting.

It is perfectly common. But there are a few reasons why it is also a problem.

I’ll just name one here: handling a delicate situation, like a tantrum is not just about handling that specific situation.

For a child, this is about much more than that.

If you lose your temper during a tantrum, and make the whole thing a zero-sum power game, you demonstrate an example that you will later regret.

Think about it: as her parent, you are her role model. In you, she has her most important guide. She is not interested in how you deal with that specific situation. She is interested in how you deal with frustration in general.

And the model you are showing her at this very moment is not the model you want her to follow in general. The more she will see you shouting when you face frustration - the more she will end up shouting herself when she is frustrated.

You need to stop showing her that example. Simple as that.

Just like patience (see above), flexibility is something that can be better learned by example than by explanation.

If you lose your temper during a tantrum, and make the whole thing a zero-sum power game, you, again, demonstrate an example that you will later regret.

With that said, it is obvious that you are still the adult, and you are still running the show. You have the right to set the limits and boundaries. If you say, there’s no way she can get away without brushing her teeth, so be it.

But you also have the right, and the opportunity (yes, there always is an opportunity) to be flexible within the boundaries.

“Do you want to brush your teeth in the tub, or afterwards, in your bathrobe?” “Do you want me to sing a song or tell a nursery rhyme while I brush your teeth?” “Do you want to use the toothbrush with the panda, or the one with the penguin?” You get the idea.

Just like when you acknowledge the severity of her problem, a choice you offer, however minuscule, can have a magical effect. It can distract her enough to make the whole tantrum go away.

But even if it doesn’t, you show her a very important skill, and something she can later build on: flexibility, and finding her way around the obstacles she is unable to remove.

Like it or not, tantrums are here to stay.

But if you do these five things right - by not doing them altogether - you can substantially mitigate the impact these tantrums have on your life, and relationship, I promise. 

And you can perhaps also decrease the intensity of her tantrums.

And, with a bit of luck, you might also be able to reduce the frequency of these tantrums.

And when you fail at one or two, don’t be discouraged! There will always be a next time to try again, and do better.

It is now your turn! What are the techniques that worked for you? What were the ones that led to spectacular failures? Do let me know in the comment section below.