A tantrum is an outburst; usually an attempt to express emotional discomfort with an idea or task that may have been allotted to the child. It may be the child’s tactic to get attention when it is otherwise missing. A tantrum may be associated with screaming, yelling, crying, banging oneself on the floor or violent body movements (depending on the level of stubbornness and rigidity in the child). It may last a few minutes, sometime even hours. Sometimes even when the demand is fulfilled the temper tantrum continues. Temper tantrums in children manifest differently at different ages. They can range from mellow whining and crying to screaming and breath-holding spells. Boys and girls both express tantrums equally, although boys tend to present more often due to greater aggressive outbursts. The little infant may be tired or hungry or is just simply trying to seek the parent’s attention. A toddler may have expressed a desire for a new toy, which the caregiver may have denied him of; or the preschooler may be upset because his mother didn’t cook the food of his choice. Any thwart to a child’s demands is perceived very negatively and it can culminate into a tantrum.

Children usually have a pattern and rhythm for expressing tantrums. All children are self-focused (this is normal narcissism). When they needed to be fed, cleaned and comforted while they were infants; parents always gave into every demand right away; likewise in their developmental process they get attuned to that 100% attention at all times and wish that their desires be fulfilled. When this requirement is breached, they choose to express their discomfort in some or the other manner. Children were not born with tantrumming ability. They learned it along the way. A tantrum gets them attention. Their purpose gets mitigated. They realize that tantrums are a good means to fulfillment of demands. And the behavior continues over and over again in a structured repetitive pattern. If only parents were more cognizant of this pattern, they would take better steps to prevent the conditioning process.

Tantrums are more common at the child is nearing the second year of age: the common terrible twos as is widely known. It is a period wherein the child is beginning to understand language. A tantrum marks the ability of every child to understand emotions but it also delineates a lack of expressivity of emotion appropriately. As language develops children begin to express themselves better and incidence of temper tantrums then goes down.

Tantrums are generated by a pattern of faulty behavior reinforcement. And today outbursts are getting more common than ever before. Today 9 out of 10 children have trouble with tantrums. Throwing tantrums is easy all the child has to do is squeal at a great frequency so that the threshold of the parent is crossed and the demand is given into (presuming that’s the pattern that the parents are continuing to follow). All of us have limited thresholds and after a hard days work it becomes difficult to endure the trouble that kids offer; so parents tend to give in. But this behavior is adding fuel to the fire of tantrums, which is thriving. The response of most parent to a tantrum is with punishment. This qualifies as negative attention; for a child, this better than no attention at all. Hence the tantrums only increase.

Persistence of tantrums into older age is deleterious to the child’s overall development since it influences the psychological, social, and emotional make-up in totality. MINDFRAMES offers behavior modification techniques in order to make the parent-child interactions more desirable. Then the tantrums gradually diminish, positive interactions thrive and children express themselves more maturely. This requires effort from the parent as well as the child to empower him/her to face and deal with the incessant challenges of life.