Why has traditional temper tantrum advice, both historically and currently, failed to help parents totally eliminate their children's temper tantrums? The three faulty concepts behind traditional temper tantrum advice are partly the reason. The first misguided concept is that children under one year or six months old can't experience real anger or have real temper tantrums. Many child development experts perceive newborn babies as not yet emotionally functional-or not yet capable of experiencing real live emotions. The expressions of angry sounds that babies make aren't real anger, we're told. They're simply the babies' instinctual crying responses to hunger, pain, and other discomforts.
What, I wonder, do these experts believe happens when a baby turns six months or one year old that enables them to actually be angry whenever they sound angry? I'm thinking that it's something akin to a baby gradually gaining language or fine-motor skills. Decades ago I realized that I disagreed with this concept and I asked myself how these professionals could come up with the perception that infants are pre-functional with their emotions. We can't, after all, see if a screaming infant is or isn't angry just like we can see if it can or can't pick up tiny objects. By its very definition, an emotion is an un-seeable mental state. All we can do is interpret our perception of the expression of it.
If spouses appeared to be angry with one another, it wouldn't be guaranteed that they were. Conversely, if spouses appeared not to be angry with one another, it wouldn't be guaranteed that they weren't. It's easy to imagine grown ups experiencing different emotions from the ones they portray themselves feeling. Really, only the person experiencing the emotion can know for sure what is happening for them emotionally. And that concept logically applies to children and infants, as well.
I'm not sure how our current theorists arrived at such a scientifically unproven concept of emotional pre-functioning. I'm thinking, though, that they must have been taught these ideas at a university graduate level. That's where they studied the accumulated learning of the previous generation of child development experts. That generation, likewise, may have gleaned this belief from their own ancestral scholars who were behaviorism-based and generally viewed all subjective phenomena (such as emotions) as irrelevant-even for adults.
It would seem that some person, somewhere, sometime in history just constructed this concept out of thin air and then other theorists just accepted it as fact. Despite our history of social failure in recognizing babies and young children as thoroughly functional emotional beings, our current learning can help contemporary parents recognize the real anger and temper tantrum behaviors of their young infants and children.
What, I wonder, do these experts believe happens when a baby turns six months or one year old that enables them to actually be angry whenever they sound angry? I'm thinking that it's something akin to a baby gradually gaining language or fine-motor skills. Decades ago I realized that I disagreed with this concept and I asked myself how these professionals could come up with the perception that infants are pre-functional with their emotions. We can't, after all, see if a screaming infant is or isn't angry just like we can see if it can or can't pick up tiny objects. By its very definition, an emotion is an un-seeable mental state. All we can do is interpret our perception of the expression of it.
If spouses appeared to be angry with one another, it wouldn't be guaranteed that they were. Conversely, if spouses appeared not to be angry with one another, it wouldn't be guaranteed that they weren't. It's easy to imagine grown ups experiencing different emotions from the ones they portray themselves feeling. Really, only the person experiencing the emotion can know for sure what is happening for them emotionally. And that concept logically applies to children and infants, as well.
I'm not sure how our current theorists arrived at such a scientifically unproven concept of emotional pre-functioning. I'm thinking, though, that they must have been taught these ideas at a university graduate level. That's where they studied the accumulated learning of the previous generation of child development experts. That generation, likewise, may have gleaned this belief from their own ancestral scholars who were behaviorism-based and generally viewed all subjective phenomena (such as emotions) as irrelevant-even for adults.
It would seem that some person, somewhere, sometime in history just constructed this concept out of thin air and then other theorists just accepted it as fact. Despite our history of social failure in recognizing babies and young children as thoroughly functional emotional beings, our current learning can help contemporary parents recognize the real anger and temper tantrum behaviors of their young infants and children.
About the Author:
Want to find out more about temper tantrums, then visit Leanna Rae Scott's site for temper tantrum information tantrum advice. Free reprint available from: Temper Tantrum Insight: Children And Babies Are Real People With Real Emotions.
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