A hard knot of tension forms in the pit of your stomach as you feel your patience being tested to the limit. You try to catch your breath and slow it down, attempting to stem the rising hot anger that bubbles up inside you, scared that you will erupt in public. Now the focus of disapproving stares, you feel ashamed and helpless, unable to control the situation.
These feelings are doubtless all too familiar for parents of 1- to 3-year olds. Tantrums behind closed doors are difficult enough to handle, but ones in public bring about a special degree of stress and anxiety. It’s little wonder that toddlerhood is referred to as “the terrible twos” and “the troublesome threes.”
Parents are taught to ignore or punish their toddlers’ bad behavior and pile on the praise and rewards when they are good. Toddlers are viewed as mini Machiavellian manipulators, scheming and plotting to get their own way by wearing their parents down with unruly behavior. Many parenting experts view toddlers as the enemy in a battle of wills that parents should seek to win at all costs, never backing down to the attention-seeking behavior that is a tantrum.
[Read: The Serious Business of Play.]
In today’s society, authoritarian discipline rules, and at its heart is the belief that toddlers deliberately misbehave to get what they want. But what if I told you that this sweeping assumption couldn’t be further from the truth? You see, while tantrums are difficult for parents to navigate, toddlers feel just as bad, if not worse. In fact — if you didn’t catch it on first reading — what I initially describe above is how a toddler experiences a tantrum (though parents may feel some of those emotions, too, when a child throws a tantrum in public).
Why is it so rare that mainstream discipline methods consider how children feel? Most poor behavior is chalked up to manipulation, selfishness, deliberate naughtiness and attention seeking. The motivation behind the difficult behavior is typically considered to be unpleasant and wrong. Solutions generally seek to make the child feel bad about their undesirable behavior, whether that’s through punishing or shaming them, removing them from our loving attention — such as having the child take a “timeout” — or withholding a reward or praise when they fail to act in the desired way.
Parents of toddlers frequently pour over child-raising manuals and implement carrot and stick techniques beloved by so many. These same parents are frequently left to wonder why the discipline methods endorsed don’t have the instant and seemingly permanent positive results promised. The answer is simple: because none of these methods consider how the child feels. If you want to change the way children behave, you must start with changing how they feel!
[Read: Practice Positive Discipline to Help Kids Learn From Their Mistakes.]
A child who feels sad, angry or unloved or who is struggling with a lack of autonomy is a ticking time bomb. If their feelings aren’t diffused, with parental help, they are going to explode. In other words, they are going to have a tantrum. When toddlers do throw tantrums, the response that’s most effective over the long-term is to support them to safely release these emotions in a way that makes them feel seen, heard and loved. Anything else is doomed to failure from the outset.
One simple way to implement more effective discipline is to ask yourself these “why,” “how” and “what” questions the next time your toddler throws a tantrum:
— Why are they doing this? All behavior has a trigger, such as tiredness, hunger, invasion of personal space, lack of parental attention, overstimulation and so on.
— How are they feeling? Almost always, the answer here is “pretty bad.”
— Finally, what do you hope to gain from disciplining them? Most likely, you want to teach them to respect others and their belongings and to behave in a more societally acceptable way.
Asking these questions makes it easier for parents to empathize with their children. It gets them on the same team, understanding that actually tantrums are pretty rough for both the adult and the child. From this position of teamwork, it helps parents to look for the cause of the difficult behavior and to extinguish it, rather than just superficially palliate it, as most mainstream discipline methods do.
[See: The 11 Most Dangerous Places in Your Home for Babies and Small Kids.]
Understanding how children feel when they misbehave helps parents to select the most effective discipline methods, whether the child is 18 months or 18-years-old. Most importantly though, being empathetic and understanding of children aids emotional connection, which in turn tends to dramatically reduce any difficult behavior naturally, without having to enforce any discipline methods at all. Not only is this approach the most effective and in the best interests of the child, it tends to be the easiest for the parent, too.
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A Better Way to Respond to Your Toddler’s Tantrums originally appeared on usnews.com
