Making Sense of Tantrums and Making Childhood Better
Wednesday 30th of October 2013 | Category: Opinion | Written by: Leoarna MathiasI don’t know about you, but when our youngest child, who will be two in a couple of weeks’ time, hits full tantrum mode, my equilibrium is severely tested. While his older sibling was more than capable of letting us know how she felt about things, her brother has brought a whole new level of screaming heebee-jeebees to this household. Just this morning, I placed him in his high chair for a second round of cereal, seemingly at his request. He then proceeded to complain about being strapped in, refuse to eat the food and generally adopt a mournful air. After five minutes and a feeling of rising exasperation, I took him out of the chair and returned his bowl to the kitchen side. A fatal error on my part, it would seem. A huge, screamy red-faced tantrum ensued. I could do nothing to soothe, and his sister and I endured the hideous noise for a good five minutes. He then fell suddenly silent and proceeded to play with his garage.
There are times when as parents we have to accept that there is no fathoming the strong feelings of a little one. All of us feel a little compelled, at some point or another, to feeling tremendous guilt at our child’s distress – only to feel cheated a moment later as the noise dies down and they are perfectly and happily engaged in something else. This very idea, that the ‘baffling illogical responses’ of our children reveal their ‘despotic nature’, clearly has a universal truth behind it, as ordinary American father Greg Pembroke discovered.
His blog, Reasons My Son Is Crying, is a simple photographic diary, with single sentence annotations, illustrating the irrational reasons his son chose to express his anger and despair. One man's blog has become a whole-world movement, with 5 million hits inside a month, and parents from every corner of the world sending him photos to post of their child. Here is just a small selection of the quotes that appear under each screaming child photograph on his site; "He doesn’t want to show daddy his new ball." "He learned that paper napkins are made of paper." "He dumped his popcorn out for the dog...and the dog ate it." "I stuck the stickers he wanted on his face, on his face." "There’s no more detergent to spill out."
Greg now finds himself hailed as a new kind of parenting guru, and his new book is available on amazon. Though a little bemused by all the attention, one visit to his blog had me understanding completely why he has attracted so much media attention. I laughed till it hurt and came away feeling better about my frequent failure to ‘read’ our son. And perhaps that is exactly why he has become so popular – he has reduced the essence of the crazy unpredictability of the early years to a simple online art form, and helped us to all feel better along the way. As Greg himself says:
“We worry too much and take child rearing a little too seriously. I think that if you're present, loving, and not a total push-over, your kids will turn out fine – whether or not you played Mozart for them while they were in the womb."
Children on a Pedestal?
And while it has a very different tone, another piece from The Guardian caught my eye last week. Suzanne Moore is known for her strong views on a range of topics, and she writes with intelligence and insight into many of the social and cultural phenomena that surrounds us. In this piece, she wonders if whether the challenges of raising children in our current socio-economic climate have forced us all to narrow our focus a little too much, and put our infants on pedestals. For here there is then irony that within a few years we have seemingly lost interest in their collective progress, unengaged with the challenges that young people face as they are expelled from school, unable to get jobs, disaffected and drug-using. She expresses it thus;
“Successive governments have forced parents to become entrepreneurs on behalf of their individual children, for education and as the NHS fragments, also for health. We haven't got time to change the world because we are too busy making sure the kids are OK. So we absolutely rely on this idea that they must fulfill us, which is rather insulting to the child-free.”
And then goes on to highlight the ironic contrast between the idea of worshipping them when they are young and the results of so many major studies (including those done by Unicef, The Children’s Society or the Child Poverty Action Group to name but a few) into the quality of British childhood that paint a depressing picture, as consumerism and alienation dominate.
I’m no policy maker or political commentator, and I know not what the answer is to this conundrum. As I write today I am struck by the notion of how difficult it is to be realistic about the tyranny of a toddler and their sometimes ludicrous protestations, while at the same time valuing every child just the right amount to enable society to be an altogether healthier place for them to grow up in.
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