Tantrums

I spent this afternoon's nap time reading a few articles about toddler tantrums and how to better manage them (and myself). My mom told me stories about how I was demonically possessed as a child and threw tantrums of magnificent proportions. This spilled over into flipping desks and swearing at teachers in elementary school. (Lucky for me, nearly all of my elementary years are blocked from my memory, probably for my own good, so I remember none of this but friends who have known me long enough love to recount these events.)

When I see Kelsey thrashing on the floor and screaming so bad my eardrums vibrate, I get flashes of these stories and start to panic. 

I cannot handle a little me. I am not equipped with the patience. 

So I yell back. "Knock it off or you're going straight to bed!" She hears the threat and cuts off mid-scream. While she hitches and wipes at her face and whines about whatever it was that set her off, I come down from the panic and feel like shit.

There's counts to three when issues arise. When we get to three, there's a time out for two minutes. She has had one successful public time-out. When two minutes is up, I try to talk to her about why we don't do X or why she was upset, but she's over it and just wants out of the chair and on to the next thing.

I absolutely have a short fuse and a terrible temper, and I yell too much. "There's no peanut butter on your sandwich because you don't eat it, you feed it to the dog. No I will not add it now. Dry it up! I'm tired of you wasting food!" 

Every day is survival til bedtime, and once bedtime hits and I close her door, I'm immediately overcome with guilt. I didn't play enough today, I yelled too much, I was an asshole, I really need to do better tomorrow, there were too many tantrums and I did not handle myself well. She's absolutely going to become like me, and I really don't want her to inherit my temper and the shitty feelings that go with it.

So today I came across a few articles that interested me. The first is Thriving While Parenting a Toddler. It directs attention to where I make mistakes in speaking to Kelsey, which is pretty much everything that is listed.

From there I found a series of three articles on tantrums, starting with When Your Child Has Many Tantrums. I do not subscribe to the parenting technique called "attachment parenting" but the questions to ask when things are going south are fairly basic. I can almost always pinpoint what is causing the fits, whether it's something stupid (to me) or there's something bigger going on, like overstimulation or exhaustion. 

The second article is Preventing Tantrum Escalation which I definitely suck at. I am not good with the empathy statements, because, to be honest, I feel like it's kinda ridiculous to do so. But I haven't actually tried it, so I will be testing this out with the next few fits to see how Kelsey reacts. What interested me most was the idea of "futility," but I'm not sure I can tell when she's reached that point or if she's still just crying because she wants another cookie. Things escalate here rather quickly, though she tends to end things quicker with me and draw them out longer and more dramatically when her dad is around. (Daddy is kindof a pushover.)

The third is where I need the most work, and where I have the most trouble. It's What to do While Your Child is Having a Tantrum. At home, I can ignore her. If it's bad enough that she's kicking and hitting things, I pick her up and put her in her room and tell her she can come out when she's done. I let her work it out. If we have to go anywhere, I usually power through and pick her up and stuff her in the carseat. (She hasn't hit Hulk mode yet where her rage is stronger than me.) In public, I bribe and threaten under my breath. 

I'm unsure of sitting calmly beside her while she tantrums, because I know for sure I will end up being hit. If I try to hug her afterwards, she usually gets mad and shoves me away or begins the process over again. But I'm thinking trying this for several fits, like with talking through her emotions, maybe she will come around and accept the rebound affection a little better. 

I plan on coming back and posting my findings and how these techniques go. I have the most work to do on my own inner voice, because I definitely do build up the frustration and think "this day has gone to complete shit" and I eventually mentally throw up a white flag and think "fuck it." I have a difficult time talking myself down from places of frustration and anger. 

Plus a stiff drink at nap time, plus several more at bedtime take the sharper points off the edge.