The Crazy Shit You've Done To Prevent Tantrums

Plus: Is it bad to encourage your kid to see your point of view?

On Monday, I shared some of the science of why kids freak out. To continue with the theme, for today’s thread I’m wondering what ridiculous feats of environmental engineering you’ve undertaken in an attempt to avoid enduring a tantrum.

I came to this idea after my best friend — the one with the tantrumming one-year-old — told me that she has to engineer every grocery store visit so that she walks down the dairy aisle last. Otherwise, her daughter will see the Chobani yogurt, DEMAND that my friend open one immediately, and have a full-on tantrum if she does not. (In this case, the tantrum is pretty much inevitable, but she prefers when it ruins only the end of her shopping experience rather than the entire thing. “It’s like a 5 minute countdown to meltdown city, as she demands I open one and I continue to refuse,” she said.)

It’s been a while since I’ve had a toddler or preschooler, so it’s hard for me to remember all the things I did to try to keep things smooth sailing — but I know there were many. (This is how you end up with multiple kids! YOU FORGET!) I have a vague memory of parking in a certain way to avoid my son’s meltdowns, which sounds bonkers because it almost certainly was. Oh yes and god forbid I ever opened the car door for him — except for those times when he wanted me to but did not say so. When it came to car rides, the next stop was almost always tantrum town.

What kinds of crazy shenanigans have you done to try to escape a complete toddler meltdown? Share in the comments! (Also, allow me to channel my inner developmental psychologist for a minute and assure you that it’s actually really good when we refuse to be kept hostage by our children and do the things that will piss them off. I’ve even written about that, if you’re curious.)

Is Our Kid’s Perspective The Only One That Matters?

And now for this week’s

Today I’m commenting on this Instagram post from @responsive_parenting:

Here are my thoughts.

It’s true that it’s important to try to see our kids’ perspectives. We often bring only our own points of view to our kids’ choices and think things like “Well, she should have known better!” — when, in fact, there were very good reasons why she couldn’t have known better. When I found melted chocolate all over my daughter’s sheets a while back, I wanted to chide her for eating chocolate in bed — and then realized that I’d never actually told her not to eat chocolate in bed. How could I blame her for an error she had no way of knowing she’d made? When we consider the knowledge and experience our kids bring to specific situations, we can much better understand their behavior.

But! We absolutely should encourage our children to see our point of view, too. There’s a notion in the gentle parenting movement that we should only allow ourselves to be receptacles for our kids’ feelings, ideas and beliefs, and never share our own.

That’s a mistake.