  Blogging about your child who throws tantrums is tantamount to coming out of the parenting closet. Today, I'd like to share that my name is Annie and my daughter Eleanor has tantrums. They started sometime around her first birthday, and continue to occur a few times a week.
They have the potential to take a deep emotional toll on both Eleanor and us-the-parents, but we all keep getting better at doing this with time. After raising Aidan through toddlerhood, I thought tantrums were fits. Ellie has taught me they're not. Fits are what I'd call it when Aidan would get really upset and lose his cool. Especially if we were in front of relatives or friends, fits would be very embarrassing.
But they're pretty easily handled with a private moment taken between parent and child, and they are actually preventable with communication about consequences when we don't express our emotions appropriately (except imagine that whole conversation in kid talk with phrases like use your words and angry feelings ). I've heard child development specialists call tantrums disorganized moments, and, except for the absence of emotion in the event, the term does communicate what appears to occur in her brain during a tantrum. A tantrum is when crying over not understanding or being understood, being overstimulated, or a similarly difficult event rapidly escalates out of control.
The child uses volume and violent bodily actions to express the overwhelming emotion that no words could ever express. Our tantrums happen most often at home rather than in public because only at home can Ellie release her shyness and fully interact with the world, a risk that consequently exposes her to the risk of a tantrum. As an adult, I know the danger of a depression episode is that scars can actually form in the synapses and leave a person more susceptible to depression from that time onward.
Watching Ellie lose control of her emotions in tantrums has led me to wonder if this behavior pattern actually begins as a baby, when the world sometimes is so overwhelming or confusing or trapping that he or she loses control. There's no scientific study about this that I know of, but as a parent who attempts to deeply understand her children, I have to respect the amazing sincerity of Ellie's tantrum episodes.
We've gone through an evolution in parenting in our efforts to handle Ellie's tantrums. We try to love her and support her first and foremost, it's like a seizure in this way. We try to make sure she doesn't hurt herself, but to some degree, it just has to run its course. The loud wale, the arched back and flailing arms. Sometimes it makes me cry to see her at the mercy of the negative feelings that sometimes overtake her. Last month we broke down and bought Dr. Sears' The Fussy Baby Book , which specializes in parenting high need children. Dr. Sears' personal story of raising his high-need daughter, Hayden, won us over. Interestingly, as an adult in a family of physicians, Hayden chose music.
Her brain was always wired differently, and by gently meeting her needs, I think the Sears parents helped her develop the special attributes only her brain could offer. The book is like part strategy and part pep-talk, already I appreciate the chapter on emotionally coping as a mother of a high-need baby. Dr. Greenspan, Dr. Sears, and many other parenting gurus consider high-need children to have particularly active, and even high achieving brains. I don't know if this is a sour grapes rationalization to help parents with difficult kids be inspired to put extra effort into them, but they do make a powerful argument.
I know this about Ellie's brain: it always plays music, it observes everything, and it's very intuitive. Aidan runs through the world with his arms open, like Laura Ingles. Ellie is more the scientist, observing and carefully plotting her steps. Aidan always fell because of his adventurousness. Ellie's curiosity is even more deeply ingrained, but she acts on it with methodical experiments. As a result, she rarely falls, but achieves the same heights in climbing or trips down the slide as Aidan. I've heard parents say tantrums are efforts to get attention by the child. I've always had a mantra that children's plays for attention should be treated as formal communicative requests for attention because children don't know how to ask like an adult.
You wouldn't ignore a polite request, and I don't think parents should employ ignoring their child as a parenting technique. If your child has to resort to negative methods of requesting attention, they might be more deprived for attention than the parents realized. But the kind of behavior people discuss here might very well be fits, which are more about not being able (or choosing to the easier route) to express upset emotions than the losing control issues of tantrums.
In this along with many other ways, Ellie encourages me to become a better mom. I feel like nothing but my love can help her through this. I don't let her tantrums make me angry. Way back in labor I recognized a tool of disconnecting from the situation, hiding in my deep brain so the then-pain and now-emotions don't touch me. I don't think they're her fault, or her being naughty. I just love her more with every kick and scream.
My lingering fear is the effect on Aidan when John and I suddenly uber-focus on Ellie, I don't know what to do but encourage him to come help, too. Maybe taking care of his sister can help him develop his sense of sympathy? He hasn't ever picked up false tantrums in an effort to draw the attention, the worst he does is try to tell us an interesting story when we're doing our best to keep Ellie from flipping out of our arms or into a table.
One of his classmates has had problems with tantrums before Ellie began hers and his teacher was always good at handling it. I think that has helped him understand them a little. Maybe some day parenting fields or medical advances will come to some big realization over synapse mechanisms in children and we'll all know what to do. Until then, I just love her and love on her, and follow the books' advice for avoiding them where I can. It's a wild ride, this is just one bump on the road. 
