8 Reasons to Be Grateful for Tantrums
Here’s a new post on Mom.me. It begins like this:
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Grateful? Really?
I know what you’re thinking: “File this one under ‘You can’t be serious.’”
But I am serious.
Nobody likes a tantrum: not your little one, and certainly not you. But even though we don’t enjoy our kids’ tantrums, there are plenty of reasons to be grateful for the times when they get the most upset.
For example . . .
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Click here to check out the whole piece.
Five Reasons I’m Not a Fan of Time Outs
More and more, I find myself questioning time outs as an effective discipline strategy. I’ve written some about this already, but now I’d like to go into my reasons in a bit more depth.
I know lots of loving parents who use time outs as their primary discipline technique. I’m not saying that time outs are completely unhelpful; more that I don’t think they’re the best alternative we have when it comes to discipline—the goal of which, remember, is to teach.
Reasons I’m Not a Fan of Time-Outs:
#1. What we know about the brain.
Because I know that brain connections are formed from repeated experiences, I don’t want my kids’ repeated experience to be isolation, which they may view as rejection, when they’ve made a mistake.
What I DO want them to repeatedly experience is doing things the right way. So, instead of a time out, I’ll often Continue Reading »
Proactive Parenting: Getting Ahead of the Discipline Curve
When your kids misbehave, your immediate reaction may be to offer consequences with both guns blazing.
You hit your sister? That’s a time out.
You broke the book shelf while climbing to reach the matches? You just lost your playdate this afternoon.
Your kids act, and you react.
If you’ve heard me speak, or if you’ve read other pieces I’ve written about discipline, you know I’m a big believer in setting and enforcing boundaries. At times, giving consequences may be the best response in order to teach lessons about appropriate behavior and observing boundaries.
But here I want to make the case for stepping in before things escalate, before you have to start thinking about consequences. I’m talking about proactive parenting, as opposed to reactive parenting.
When we parent proactively, we watch for times when we can tell that misbehavior and/or a meltdown are in our kid’s near future, and we step in and try to guide them around that potential landmine. Sometimes you can even Continue Reading »
Surfing the Waves of an Emotional Tsunami: When Your Kid’s Upset, Connect and Redirect
[Two weeks from today (Oct 4), my new book with Dan Siegel, The Whole-Brain Child, comes out! Below you’ll find the third in a four-part series where I post excerpts from the book. I hope you enjoy it.]
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You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.
–John Kabit Zinn
Here’s a conversation I recently had with my 7-year-old when he wasn’t at his logical best.
My son: I can’t go to sleep. I’m mad that you never leave me a note in the middle of the night.
Me: I didn’t know you wanted me to.
My son: You never do anything nice for me, you do things at night for Luke, and I’m mad because my birthday isn’t for ten more months, and I hate homework.
Sound familiar? An encounter like this can be frustrating, especially when you’re beginning to feel that your child is finally old enough to actually be reasonable and discuss things logically. All of a sudden, though, you’re interacting with a being who becomes over-the-top upset about something completely ridiculous and illogical, and it seems that absolutely no amount of reasoning on your part will help.
This is one of those times when knowing a little bit about the brain can help us parent in more effective (and more empathic) ways.
You probably already know that your brain is divided into two hemispheres. The left side of your brain is logical and verbal, while the right side is emotional and nonverbal. That means that if we were ruled only by the left side of our brain, it would be as if we were living in an emotional drought, not paying attention to our feelings at all. Or, in contrast, if we were completely “right-brained,” we’d be all about emotion and ignore the logical parts of ourselves. Instead of an emotional drought, we’d be drowning in an emotional tsunami.
Clearly, we function best when the two hemispheres of our brain work together, so that our logic and our emotions are both valued as important parts of ourselves and we are emotionally balanced. Then we can give words to our emotional experiences, and make sense of them logically.
Now, let’s apply that information to the interaction above. My son was experiencing an emotional tidal wave. When this occurs, one of the worst things I can do is jump right in trying to defend myself (“I do nice things for you!”), or to argue with him about his faulty logic (“That’s just not true, and your birthday is actually only nine months away”). My verbal, logical response hits an unreceptive brick wall and creates a gulf between us: he feels like I’m dismissing his feelings and that I don’t understand; I feel frustrated that he’s being so ridiculous and impossible. It’s a lose-lose approach.
So I have to come to an important recognition: Logic will do no good in a case like this until a child’s right brain is responded to.
How do we do that? I suggest that we use the “Connect and Redirect” method. Continue Reading »
Ask Tina: Should I Give My Daughter Time-Outs?
In this video, Tina responds to a question about time-outs.
Related Posts
8 Reasons to Be Grateful for Tantrums
Five Reasons I’m Not a Fan of Time Outs
Proactive Parenting: Getting Ahead of the Discipline Curve
Surfing the Waves of an Emotional Tsunami: When Your Kid’s Upset, Connect and Redirect