Sunday, April 6, 2014

Temper Tantrum Triggers Don't Really Exist

By Leanna Rae Scott


Throughout all of the forty-plus years I've been parenting, the most consistent tantrum advice from child rearing experts has been for parents to ignore every tantrum. The theory behind this technique of ignoring tantrums, to my understanding, is that ignoring tantrums prevents their validation. The ignore-the-tantrum parent avoids rewarding a child for tantrums and avoids reinforcing any negative behavior with any attention.

According to this theory of don't-reinforce-negative-behavior, in such a situation the basic assumption is that children throw the tantrum in order to get undeserved attention (this is negative behavior), and if parents avoid reinforcing such negative behaviors, they should stop, go away, and cease to occur. Despite this basic theory behind the ignoring-tantrums techniques, throughout the modern history of parenting advising, most experts who've recommended using them have not claimed that they will stop tantrums in progress or prevent them.

Only a few decades ago, expert parenting advisers still weren't including the word prevention in the same sentence as the word tantrum. Their advice was meant only to help parents know how to best manage and deal with the tantrums, the same as it mostly is today. However, modern parenting advisors now instruct parents on how to prevent some of the tantrums by managing children's temper tantrum triggers, such as frustration, hunger, and tiredness. In other words, these advisors teach parents to prevent the tiredness, hunger, and frustration in their children. They don't teach parents to prevent temper tantrums in the face of normal childhood living, which occasionally includes frustration, hunger, and tiredness.

My temper tantrum prevention and elimination method is vastly different from that of others. I instruct parents in how to respond to their offspring in a way that makes it absolutely unnecessary to be vigilant for temper tantrum triggers (which are actually only anger triggers). This happens because the usual infant and childhood frustrations don't any longer trigger temper tantrums. Despite this basic theory behind the ignoring-of-tantrums technique, through the recent history of parenting advice, most experts who recommend using the technique don't claim that it will prevent or stop tantrums in progress.

I teach parents to totally, 100% eliminate temper tantrums from their children's behavioral repertoire so there are no longer any tantrums in progress to have to stop, handle, manage, or deal with. I also teach parents to consistently respond to their newborn infants in ways that the babies never develop a tantrum-throwing pattern or even of escalating when angry. I teach parents these abilities with clarity and with many examples in hopes that they will learn them quickly and easily.




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