Parents can react to temper tantrums in any number of ways. They can:
- Try to distract a child from the tantrum
- Tell the child to stop crying
- Punish or humiliate the child for crying
- Support the child’s need to express emotions and let it all out
My experience has been that most parents tend towards one of the first two. Unfortunately, some still do the third. And there is a growing movement towards the fourth. This movement recognizes that it is healthy to let our feelings out rather than keeping them all bottled up. We need to stop looking at tantrums as something that is “bad” and that must be stopped. Instead, look at it as an opportunity for your child to express himself.
Meet needs first
Not all crying is about letting out emotions. Our children do cry to let us know about true needs that they have. This is especially true of babies that do not yet have the ability to use words to tell us what they need. So the first step with a crying child needs to be to meet any needs. Is your child hurt, hungry, tired, wet, cold? If the answer is yes, then that crying should be dealt with by meeting the child’s needs as quickly as possible. That is our job as parents.
Dealing with big emotions
Little kids have big emotions. And a good temper tantrum is a great way to let them out. Science has shown that leaving kids to cry on their own can be damaging to their brains and their development, but there is an increasing movement recognizing the value of a “crying in arms” approach. Mothering Magazine has a good article called Crying for Comfort: Distressed Babies Need to Be Held that talks about the difference between cry it out (where the baby is left alone to cry), which is damaging and increases stress level vs. crying in arms, which can be beneficial and help to relieve stress and deal with emotions.
So rather than telling my children to stop crying or trying to distract them from that temper tantrum with an offer to play a game, go to the park or have a cookie, I’m going to try to let them cry, to hold them while they cry, and to help them to express their emotions. I’m going to validate their feelings rather than minimizing them. I’m going to allow them to be frustrated and accept that it is okay and that I can’t fix everything for them. I’m going to accept that the things that upset them sometimes seem silly to me, but that they are monumentally important to them and I need to respect that.
Expressing emotions is something that I have always struggled with. So anything I can do to help my kids to express what they are feeling is a move in the right direction.
Crying in Arms Resources
- Aletha Solter – Mothering Magazine – Crying for Comfort: Distressed Babies Need to Be Held
- Patty Wipfler – Mothering Magazine – Cry for Connection: A Fresh Approach to Tantrums
- Marion Badenoch-Rose – Parenting with Presence – Babe in Arms, Crying to Heal
- Marion Badenoch-Rose – Instinctiveparenting.com – Crying and Emotional Release in Babies – The Aware Parenting Approach
- Mindfully Mothering Blog – Protecting our Children from Pain
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thanks for your link to my blog! I love connecting with other mamas who are sharing respectful, present parenting with their babes and with the community.
Glad to! I’ve been reading regularly and enjoying your blog. Thanks for stopping by here.
Temper tantrums can be challenging to deal with. From my experience the best thing to do is just let your child have the fit as long as your child is safe. My oldest used to throw tantrums that would last an hour or longer. When that happened I just sent her to her room and let her cry until she eventually wore herself out and stopped. When she threw a fit in public I made sure I exited the building with her until she was done with the tantrum. Distracting her from her tantrum did not work. When children throw a fit the best thing to do is let them cry until they calm themselves down. My middle child has tantrums on occassion. Her’s are different. When she throws a fit she usually does something distructive to herself like hitting her head against the wall. When she does this I convene by picking her up and holding her firmly to make sure she is safe until the tantrum is over. Her tantrums never last more than a couple of minutes and are very infrequent. If your child is throwing temper tantrums the best thing to do is make sure your child is safe and not harming him or herself and just let the tantrum run its course. Usually this is a phase and when your child gets older the tantrums will get less frequent.
Great blog by the way!
Thanks for your link to my website. I’m really happy to see you sharing these ideas about supporting babies and children to express their feelings. I really enjoyed your emphasis on the importance of us being there with our children (and holding our babies) to make the crying healing – the closeness is a vital part of it.
Warmly,
Marion
I think it depends entirely on why the child is having the tantrum. When my child screams bloody murder because he can’t have another cookie, I often find it hilarous (because he can put on quite a show.) In those situations, I say “oh, you’ll be alright” and go about my business. If he’s throwing the kind of tantrum that will hurt himself or others, he’s removed from the situation and put in a time-out until he can calm himself down and be civilized. That works 99.9% of the time. If he’s crying because he’s sick or hurt, then of course I’d hold him, but I wouldn’t even call those situations “tantrums.” I guess I have a very narrow view of what I consider a tantrum to be – and to me it’s ridiculous behavior based on some unreasonable request that was denied for a very good reason. Anything else I think falls under a different term.
This is a great post. I would also add that sometimes a child throws a tantrum because they’ve found it’s the only way to get their parent attention. If they feel listened to, respected and validated on a regular basis, the need to “throw a fit” to draw attention diminishes (if that is the source of the tantrum and not simply a release of emotion, which is also a very valid and frequent reason).
~Tara
Aletha Solter talks about “the broken cookie phenomenon” – when a toddler or child starts to cry or tantrum after something that seems very minor to us – like the last cookie is broken. From an Aware Parenting perspective, the child is using this as an opportunity to heal from accumulated stress, tension, or trauma. When we set “loving limits” – eg, “I see you want another cookie, and there’s no more cookies now, except that broken one,” rather than trying to fix it (go to the shops) or distract, or ignore the child, then the child is free to release all those pent-up feelings.
If the parent can remember that the feelings aren’t really about the cookie, but about something else that the child was not able to express at the time, and give the child their loving presence, then the child will have a cry or tantrum and emerge bright and clear and present, more relaxed, and wanting to connect. Most of all, the child learns that we support them, however they are feeling.
It’s just like when we are upset and the last straw is our husband making some comment about our cooking, and we explode – it wasn’t really about the cooking, but it still means we need to express the feelings and for them to be heard with loving respect.
Children aren’t really so different from us – they are most in need of loving support when they are feeling upset.
Aletha Solter! I read one of her books on this topic (couldn’t remember her name, though) just before DC #2 was born and it made a HUGE impact. Wish I’d read for my first born because the difference is incredible, if not violent. Thank you for the reminder!
Hi – the links in the Dealing with big emotions paragraph appear to be broken.
Thanks. They should be all fixed now. The combination of me migrating to self-hosted and Mothering reorganizing its own site meant that the links in this post took quite a hit!
I can’t speak to a situation where tantrums are chronic or indicitive of a greater behavioural issue, but for my own kids, who are not prone to tantrums (I can count on one hand the number of full-ons my kids have collectively had), it’s number 4 all the way. The first thing I try to do is remove them from the stimulus/situation causing the tantrum, but I have totally learned that what my kids need to do, is ‘express’ themselves for a little while, and then come into my open arms. When I recently wrote about how humiliated/angry I was when my 2 year old had a shit storm of a freak out in a restaurant, a trusted friend of our family’s, who is also a psychologist, told me that I should be consoled by the fact that my kids trust me enough and feel secure enough to express themselves and know that they will still be loved and not shunned. I was.
I’ve been dealing with more tantrums in the last 4 months or so due to my son’s age (2) and I have, without thinking about it, gravitated to #4 when he’s upset for no apparent reason. If he’s upset that I’m not letting him do what he wants to do, I will comfort him but also make it clear that it won’t change my mind. I think it’s important to realize that children are extremely smart little people. They have figured out from experience that when they cry they get what they want. It’s a learned behavior from day one.
I cry – I get food.
I cry – I get a diaper change.
I cry – I go to bed.
I cry – I get a cuddle.
Can we blame them for trying to use it to get a cookie? Or more time playing at the park? I hate to use the word, but it’s an accurate descriptor – children have learned to manipulate situations. It doesn’t help that very young ones don’t know the difference between want and need. In many cases, I don’t believe #4 is always the best option, particularly for strong-willed children like my son who start resorting to hitting when they aren’t getting their way. I’m not going to hit him back, but I have to get the message across that hitting isn’t acceptable, which usually involves a form of discipline (not humiliation) like removing him from the situation until he’s calmed down.
I have a real problem with telling my daughter to stop crying. Tantrums can be challenging, upsetting and even humiliating for the parent, depending on the situation. But even so, during a tantrum I think she needs more love and support not less. When she has a full-blown tantrum it generally stops being about why she’s having a tantrum in the first place. It could be because she wants something, she’s tired, hungry, frustrated at her inability to do a certain thing – whatever. But at the point it crosses over into a tantrum her emotions take over and it’s all about the overpowering, uncontrollable emotions and not whatever she was upset about.
I really want her to have a positive experience when she is expressing herself, both when she’s happy and when she’s sad.
One of the main things I do with her to help with tantrums is we go through photos and she points out which one’s are happy, sad, angry, frustrated etc so that she can start to put a name to her feelings and they aren’t so scary when they do happen.
My daughter hates being held when she is frustrated. So, I have had to find other ways to support her. Sometimes, though, if she’s hurting her brother, I do have to remove her. She’s welcome back as soon as she’s ready to be gentle.
Great thoughts (as always), Annie! I tend to take the same approach that you do – especially with babies. I think there’s a world of difference between letting a baby cry in a lonely room and letting a baby cry in the warm arms of a loving parent.