 The
forbidden emotion
Toddler tantrums are part and parcel of parenting. However,
for some parents, they exert an even greater emotional toll leading to
feelings of anger. Here we look at how to deal with parent and toddler
rage and turn a cross household into a calm one!
Part one: Anger and the parent
Part two: A mum talks of her fight to face her demons in order
to help her daughter deal with hers
The baby blues
My daughter has never been an easy child. She has always wanted to be more
advanced than her years would allow and her frustration manifested itself
frequently through rage. She is also hypersensitive to pain, emotions
and touch, demonstrating loud and often tearful or aggressive behaviour
as a result. Sometimes I feel able to handle her fury, while at others
it all seems too much and I either find myself near tears, or having as
vehement a tantrum as her.
People often tell us that it's a good thing our daughter is so strong-willed
but that she needs to handled 'firmly'. However, achieving this is difficult
and it's something my husband and I don't see eye to eye on, with the
result that my marriage even started to suffer last year because we couldn't
agree on a joint way of disciplining her. Soon, we were fighting regularly
about how to deal with her tantrums, without actually doing anything about
them. It got so bad that we ended up in counselling to try to find a way
forward.
My anger, your anger
The sessions were an eye-opener for both of us; we both learnt that we had
a problem with anger ourselves, and our daughter, sometimes, was manifesting
our own internal frustration. Particularly revealing was the insight I
gained into my own way of thinking. The counsellor asked how my tantrums
were dealt with when I was a child and I explained that I was always told
I was being 'wicked' or 'evil' whenever I shouted or screamed in rage
at my parents, so I learnt to push this emotion down whenever it threatened
to surface.
Now, 30 years later, I was having to deal with it again but in a double-whammy:
my own anger at my daughter during her rages with me. The counsellor asked
how I felt during one of my daughter's almighty rages. I said that on
the one hand I was furious with her for being thoughtless, even though
I knew that was a toddler's prerogative. On the other hand, I wanted to
run away, hands over ears and hide. Obviously neither of these approaches
were very helpful, and I was told that I needed to learn to cope with
my own anger if I was going to help my daughter with hers.
How children suppress anger
This is not easy. According to the now deceased family therapist Robin Skynner, in his hugely popular book Families and How to Survive Them , co-written with comedian John Cleese, anger is one of the most difficult emotions we have to deal with as humans. For this reason, many of us learn to suppress it at a young age, as I had done.
"The child … sees too how greatly anger upsets his parents, how they just can't cope with it, and how they ignore him or isolate him, or even attack him whenever he tries to express it," revealed Skynner. "Pretty soon, he's feeling very bad about anger too. He sees that they can't love him when he's cross, and since all children want to be loved by their parents and to love them in return and make them happy, he tries to hide any feeling of anger from them."
Practising what others preach
What happens in healthier families then? "Everyone will get angry at times
and that won't be regarded as a hanging offence," said Skynner. "The child
will see that this is a normal emotion; that it can be expressed; that
it is not destructive and deadly. If his parents have this relaxed attitude
to anger, he can feel safe to experience his own and, through being supported
and helped to cope with it, he learns to exercise the normal control over
it that's required socially."
This was a revelation to me but learning to control my own anger is
more difficult. Skynner talks about having to go through a 'missing stage'
in your psychological development in order to properly grow up emotionally,
and my time has now come with my child. I have to face up to my demons
while dealing with my daughter's and that's a tricky task to undertake.
My husband has to, too. Anger was never really expressed in his house,
which Skynner said made alarm bells ring in his head: if people stoutly
declared they never had a problem with a particular emotion, chances are
they and their family certainly did. In the case of my husband, he does
anything he can to avoid conflict of any type, to the point of letting
people walk all over him.
Homework for happy families
We both have homework to practise but of different sorts. I need to remember
not to take her anger personally and to try to keep calm during the worst
of the temper tantrums, to keep my voice low and firm. To talk about the
behaviour, not the child when dealing with disagreeable words or actions.
And if I feel I am really losing the plot, I give myself a time
out, which sounds odd but strangely works for all concerned. My husband,
on the other hand, needs to start being firmer with our daughter.
While it's important not to lose your cool when dealing with an angry
child, it's also vital to not let them get away with undesirable behaviour,
so he has to practise putting his foot down more, rather than trying to
reason with her in the midst of one of her furies. It's a long and slow
process but we're gradually getting there together.
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