I:1:T 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, for example, appeared to be angry towards each other, that would not be a guarantee that they were. Conversely, if spouses appeared to not be angry towards each other, that would not be a guarantee that they weren't. It's fairly easy to conceive of adults who are feeling different emotions from the ones they appear to be feeling. Only the person experiencing the emotion can really know what is going on for them. And that goes for children and babies, as well.
I wonder how current parenting experts came to this scientifically unproven theory of infant emotional pre-functioning. They must have had it taught to them in graduate university programs from the accumulated learning of their previous generation's child development experts. That generation probably previously gained this concept from their own behaviorism-based ancestral theorists who viewed as irrelevant-for adults and children alike-all subjective phenomena (like emotions).
It seems to me that someone, somewhere, sometime simply made up this concept out of thin air and then most other theorists just went along with it. Even though we've had a lengthy social failure to understand babies and young children as fully functional emotional human beings, the newer understanding can help parents recognize their infants' real anger and temper tantrum behaviors.
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, for example, appeared to be angry towards each other, that would not be a guarantee that they were. Conversely, if spouses appeared to not be angry towards each other, that would not be a guarantee that they weren't. It's fairly easy to conceive of adults who are feeling different emotions from the ones they appear to be feeling. Only the person experiencing the emotion can really know what is going on for them. And that goes for children and babies, as well.
I wonder how current parenting experts came to this scientifically unproven theory of infant emotional pre-functioning. They must have had it taught to them in graduate university programs from the accumulated learning of their previous generation's child development experts. That generation probably previously gained this concept from their own behaviorism-based ancestral theorists who viewed as irrelevant-for adults and children alike-all subjective phenomena (like emotions).
It seems to me that someone, somewhere, sometime simply made up this concept out of thin air and then most other theorists just went along with it. Even though we've had a lengthy social failure to understand babies and young children as fully functional emotional human beings, the newer understanding can help parents recognize their infants' real anger and temper tantrum behaviors.
About the Author:
Want to find out more about temper tantrums, then visit Leanna Rae Scott's site for temper tantrum information tantrum advice. Check here for free reprint license: Temper Tantrum Insight: Children And Babies Are Real People With Real Emotions.
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