Right now, I have two sons.  Both are at the age where they reg­u­larly have melt­downs or tantrums when they don’t get what they want.  Luck­ily, K is get­ting to the age where he can under­stand some­times when he doesn’t get what he wants.  He doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily like it, but he can under­stand that some­times things just can’t hap­pen in a way that he wants them to hap­pen.  Unfor­tu­nately, A is still pretty young and we’re not to that stage of under­stand­ing the whys and why nots of deci­sion mak­ing.  How­ever, his tantrums are often pretty short lived, so that is a plus.

To be hon­est, this is one stage that I didn’t ever antic­i­pate.  I thought about what would hap­pen when they were both nurs­ing and how to han­dle that.  I thought about what I would do when A became mobile and wanted to take K’s toys.  I thought about what I would do when we were at the mall and one child went left and the other went right.  I just didn’t think about hav­ing them both be in the tantrum stage at the same time.  Whoops.  I wish I would have thought more about this stage so I could have had some ideas on how to pro­ceed when it arrived.  Instead, I’ve had to take each day as it comes and learn from the one before.

Right now, K’s tantrums or melt­downs tend to hap­pen when he is hun­gry or tired.  Gen­er­ally, when he starts to yell or cry, my first thought is when did he last sleep (and how was the sleep qual­ity) and when did he last eat.  If either of those is con­tribut­ing to the issue, I try to remem­ber that.  Of course, it doesn’t excuse a tantrum, but it does put the cause into per­spec­tive.  He’s pretty seri­ous about being mad, but I have to admit that I have a pretty hard time keep­ing a straight face when he starts to jump up and down and wave his arms at me in an attempt to show me just how angry he is.   Unfor­tu­nately, if Jason and I don’t catch the tantrum early or if we don’t react in a con­struc­tive man­ner, it can go on for a while.  That is def­i­nitely the draw­back of an older child’s tantrums.

A on the other hand tends to explode into melt­down mode as soon as he wor­ries some­thing might not go his way.  In fact, today, he and K were play­ing in our play kitchen area.  A thought that K was tak­ing a toy from him when actu­ally I put it on the floor instead of let­ting it fall.  A turned toward K and had his mouth WIDE open in antic­i­pa­tion of a good, hard bite.  When he saw his toy on the floor, he just sat down and started play­ing with it.  Luck­ily, the tantrum was avoided.  Unfor­tu­nately, he is cur­rently in a phase when he hates, hates, HATES hav­ing his dia­per changed.  Some­times, all I have to do is move toward the dia­pers and he starts get­ting mad at me.  He is eas­ily dis­tracted though, so once the dia­per change is over, he’s happy again.  Yay!

Right now, I don’t think that I have a “good” or 100% effec­tive way of respond­ing to either one of them.  I’m not sure if I ever will.  I do think that par­ent­ing isn’t always about find­ing the most effec­tive or effi­cient way of deal­ing with a sit­u­a­tion.  I think it’s more impor­tant to respond in a way that is respect­ful of the child and myself.  I haven’t read the entire book, but I’ve seen Har­vey Karp on a few tv shows.  His book, The Hap­pi­est Tod­dler on the Block has some good tips.  Also, Eliz­a­beth Pant­ley has a book called The No Cry Dis­ci­pline Solu­tion.  I haven’t read the entire thing, but the one part of it that suck out to me was that a child will not learn from what you are say­ing once he/she is cry­ing.  I think part of par­ent­ing is seek­ing out solu­tions and then using what works.  For us, we haven’t found a fool­proof method, but that won’t keep me from con­tin­u­ing to look!