Well let me tell you (though I am not the expert), I am not saying my kids do not have random temper tantrums, but if "routine doesn't matter for kids" is what you believe, then be prepared for unexpected; and don't complain if your 6 years old whines and cries over dropped cookies.
So, a friend of mine asked me what to do with young toddler's meltdowns, or temper tantrums, yes I praise my kids often but that doesn't mean they do not experience such moments. Basically a lot of experts would suggest a few ways:- time-out (usually most effective if your child is trained to calm down this way)
- offer alternative options (2nd most effective because kids are often easily distracted)
- use words (yes effective communication it is, but this might be the toughest one)- count down (yes 3, 2, 1... shut up, oops no aggressive parenting in our house)
- offer a reward (as bad as giving in to their request in my personal opinion)
And in another post on Renzo's blog I mentioned about the 3 different ways of parenting, you can see the methods above are pretty much in alignment with those ways of parenting I mentioned there.
Of course Assertive Parenting is what we would love to cultivate at home, so I usually use a combination of time-out, alternative options/distraction and selected words. But just a few days ago, I spent more than 30 minutes (or at least it felt that long) to coax Rynus after he became distraught, the moment I told him to go to bed. Oh yes you might say, who doesn't struggle with sending young kids to bed??!! But nope, we don't. Our boys have a pretty standard and good bedtime routine which they could follow well since young. So I was pretty much caught off gaurd by Rynus' reaction that night. Because he snapped right after I turned off the TV and told him to go to his room. And before I did that, I've passed him my iphone, nope I do not allow kids to play with gadgets but Rynus recently has this habit of watching his concert dance video clip right before he goes to bed. And since it makes his bedtime routine easier, I am pretty cool with that fast 2 minutes clip. I thought that's enough prep considering usually he doesn't fuss around even if I off the TV without prior notice. That made me believe that his sudden change in behavior, might be due to the change of routine recently, since his elder brother Renzo, has just started Primary School this year.
Time-out method has not been effective to him since a couple months ago. He has developed this new emotion that whenever we mention about sending him to thinking corner, he feels ashamed and simply refuses to go for it each time. It's a method I still believes in strongly, just that it doesn't work on Rynus now and Renzo doesn't need it anymore.
So up next, it's about using the correct words to distract him with other alternatives. But trust me, it's not as easy as what experts advised. The "I know you are upset because mummy does not allow you watch TV anymore.". "I understand your feeling and why not we go to the room and watch your concert dance together?" kind of "model" questions suggested by experts, totally didn't work on him! Right, at that very moment, I was wondering, do those so called experts who studied kids, raised up any kids of their own successfully??!! How is that possible that their advice sounds so straight forward but it doesn't seem to work on every child??!! And Rynus just made it tougher for me when he changed from crying to begging, "I want to watch TV, I don't want to sleep, please mummy, let's go! Please I want to watch TV mummy please...". His voice sank to a whisper, misery was written all over his face, tears blinded his eyes and choked his voice as he begged again and again, my heart was broken. But I know once I compromise, the next time he's just going to act out this way to get what he wants. When I continued to stay calm and press on, while accepting his 50 shades of emotions at the same time, it caught my attention that whenever I mentioned that "I understand you are upset", he seemed to settled down a little. His eyes softened as he gave me a tighter hug. So I decided to add that liner in front of every single alternative option that I offered to him, from my iphone to watch his concert dance, to his milk bottle and pillow for comfort. He refused to budge. But trust me, I know all I need to do at that moment, was just to repeat what I did again and again, till he finally got the idea that no, mummy is just NOT going to turn on that TV for the rest of the night! Keeping him comfortable definitely helps throughout the bargaining process, and as soon as he allowed me to hug and kiss him, I know I've won my battle.
Boy it's a super tough 30 minutes, probably this has been the biggest ever emotional meltdown I've had to handle so far. But the good thing is, I've learned about his limit, 25 minutes is probably the maximum amount of time needed to win over him.
So again, I do believe Rynus will get better slowly, after all, it's only been 2 weeks after he switched to this new routine of staying in childcare, without his brother's presence. Like my favorite quote from Gary Chapman, the famous author of The 5 Love languages series stated:
“Inside every child is an ‘emotional tank’ waiting to be filled with love. When a child really feels loved, he will develop normally, but when the love tank is empty, the child will misbehave. Much of the misbehavior of children is motivated by the cravings of an empty ‘love tank.’” -Gary Chapman
