Tame that TANTRUM
Raising a happy child is not easy. You need to bond and not reprimand, instill confidence not cultivate complexes.
Alot of grumpy faced parents come to me and are confused about why their children are not happy though they have done everything possible as a parent. They have more resources, toys, luxury, comforts, holidays, guidance and good schooling, yet they are always cribbing about something. To understand happiness in our children, we have to find out the underlying parenting related psychology.
Smiling doesn’t equate to happiness
A child can be shy and yet be happy and doesn’t have to prove his happiness by always smiling and laughing. It’s perfectly okay to let your shy kid be shy. The reverse is also true. An extrovert, party dancer child can also be internally unhappy. What you should check for is contentment. As long as a child seems content and emotionally stable, it doesn’t matter if she or he is an extrovert who is always screaming or an introvert with a few words to say.
It’s wrong to expect permanent happiness
We hold our children to unreal expectations when it comes to their emotional well-being. How is a child always supposed to be happy? How can a little one not have an outburst or snatch a toy or get into a scuffle? Can we always be happy, smiling and brimming with joy all the time? Don’t we have days when we just don’t feel up to it?
Treat your child’s emotions with maturity
As long as emotions are concerned, children feel the same emotions as we adults do. They feel joy, sadness, jealousy and anxiety. The joy may be in the smaller things and sadness may be because of a small scratch on their favourite toy. These things might be small for you but for your child they mean the world.
Teach the child about the consequences of reactions
When the brain doesn’t have different centres for good or bad emotions then why should we classify them? Why is sadness termed bad while happiness is a good emotion? Emotions are a way of communication your child uses to let you know what’s happening in his world. Why shut down some channels of communication by calling them bad? Train a child early on that while it’s natural to feel any emotion, reacting to them is the key.
Help the child recall past incidents
Recall is a great strategy for helping children deal with temper tantrums. Let the child get over the tantrum and a few days later, when there is no tiff between you and the child, sit him down and ask him if he remembers his visit to the super market. And then tell him to recall his visit. The child is sure to bring up the tantrum he threw in his recall story and tell you what he was feeling and what led to his meltdown. Run him through the story and help him understand how he could have used his reactions constructively. The same goes for so-called happy emotions.