The first step in bringing up children totally free of tantrums during their entire childhoods is to stop believing the decades-old advice of the parenting experts-that temper tantrums are natural, normal, inevitable, and mostly unpreventable when raising children. This advice is faulty. Virtually all children could be brought up without tantrums if the caregivers only knew how to do it. I can help you know how. My first five babies all had tantrums but the last eight didn’t. With number five, thirty-three years ago, I learned what I needed to change in my parenting style, and within one week or so he was free of tantrums, forever. None of my last eight babies ever threw temper tantrums because I’d shown them from their births on they could trust me to respond as they needed to their anger.
Where did this tantrum-universality misconception come from-besides being handed down through the generations? I’m not sure, on average, how many kids each parenting expert has had, but from my limited pre-Internet, pre-Wikipedia research about twenty years ago, it seemed like it was maybe one or two and hasn’t likely increased since then. Most book-writing parenting experts don’t seem to disclose how many kids they’ve had. We often have to guess by the number of people they dedicate their books to. It’s true.
I seriously doubt any parent could learn all there is to learn about parenting by one or two preschoolers or even one or two teenagers. I was still learning important skills with my fourth and fifth kids, and I haven’t stopped learning yet. Parents typically feel like hiding their parenting imperfections. Nobody enjoys openly admitting their parenting faults.
Nonetheless, this is how I believe the tantrum-universality myth came about. Parenting experts (who got to be experts mostly from attending college classes and not so much from raising kids) usually have a deeper-than-average parenting need to present as the perfect parent. Because of calling themselves the experts in raising kids, this implies that they’re close to perfect at it.
However, not very long after becoming parents, the majority of these experts find their own kids throwing tantrums. This validates their textbook learning about tantrum inevitability and universality, because if even they the experts have tantrum-throwing kids, certainly the inexpert parents couldn’t do any better, right? Wrong-millions of inexpert parents have accomplished raising tantrum-free kids. I believe tantrum-free child rearing is highly possible, and preferable. It’s also a much more enjoyable type of parenting (than the alternative) for all people involved, counting the general public. I can share with you what I’ve learned about creating a family lifestyle absolutely free of tantrums.
Learn more about how toeliminate tantrums . Visit Leanna Rae Scott’s site to learn how to prevent temper tantrums.. This article, Why Parenting Experts Think All Children Throw Tantrums has free reprint rights.