Melting Away Meltdowns

Sometimes, you read an advice column that makes you wonder if they really mean what they said. That happened to me last week when I read a parenting advice column in my local newspaper. The reader question involved the behavior of four-year-old twin girls. One girl is sweet and good-natured, while the other one has daily meltdowns. The reader wanted to know the best way to handle the temper tantrums when the one child didn’t get her way.

The answer, from a parenting expert who has been dishing out advice for years now, started out on the right foot, with recommending that the mother stop whacking the child with a belt to the legs whenever the child had a meltdown. But then the expert veered off into psychobabble territory by telling the mother that the child probably has “one of those hard-to-spot physical problems that make children’s behavior go haywire.”

The expert went on to send the mother on a wild goose chase to see what component of the child’s diet might be triggering these meltdowns. Is she hypoglycemic? Lactose intolerant? Allergic to foods with salicylates? While the mother rushes around trying to figure out what foods could be causing her child’s outbursts, the child morphs into a victim of her diet and her tantrums continue unabated.

What the expert doesn’t seem to grasp is that nothing causes children to misbehave—they are wired that way from birth, like all of us. Part of our jobs as parents is to force the child to see the errors of his ways and reform the little criminals into responsible citizens of the family and community.

By repurposing this child’s behavior into something she is not responsible for--if it’s caused by what she eats, then changing her diet should fix her tantrums. Unfortunately, the mother will find that even if she tries all these different diets, her daughter’s outbursts will continue and probably get worse.

I would have advised the mother to designate a special tantrum place in the house, such as an unused room (like a guest bedroom) or downstairs powder room. When the girl started to have a meltdown, simply direct her (with a helping hand, if needed) to the tantrum room and tell her to have her tantrum there. When she’s finished, she can come out. It will probably get worse before it gets better, but consistent and unemotional application of removing the child from the center of attention to a place where nobody’s watching her tantrum will cure her of her meltdowns. While she will still have them occasionally—because some children seem more prone to those than others—she will gain mastery of herself and the mother will have a more peaceful house.