When Children Explode: Parenting the Unregulated Child
by NoSorry Parent Lisa
The Walmart Nightmare
We have all seen it: the child standing in line at Walmart with his mother, throwing an impressive tantrum over the latest toy he is not allowed to have. The mother, frazzled and upset herself, attempts to defray the escalating situation by alternatingly ignoring her child’s antics and calmly telling him that he can ask for the toy for his birthday…six months from now. The boy, disgruntled and working himself into a downright frenzy, starts kicking at his mother’s legs, slapping her arms and screaming until he is blue in the face. Customers who have the misfortune of sharing the line with the pair look left, right, up, down…anywhere other than at the uncomfortable scene in front of them. Where is the parenting line in this situation? At what point does the mother simply pick her child up bodily, abandon her cart, and remove him from the store? Should she? Or should she continue to ignore the behavior to prove her point that his tantrums will not affect her, in hopes that he will learn the life lesson that yelling and kicking are not effective means by which to get his way?
If you have had kids, you have inevitably been in some version of this very public scenario, whether at a store, on a plane, in a restaurant, or at a park. Kids are wildly emotional creatures, their brains incapable of easily regulating emotions such as disappointment or anger. Many parents have never been explicitly taught how to deal with their child in such a harrowing situation, and even those who have been taught methods of approach may have difficulty sticking to their tried and true parenting strategies in such potentially embarrassing moments!
Gentle Parenting or Parent Punching Bag?
Many parents are taught that kids will learn best through gentle parenting. By not reacting to the bad behavior, but instead calmly explaining to the child what they are feelings and why they are acting the way they are, the gentle parent is giving their child the opportunity to name what they are experiencing, which, psychology teaches, gives them the beginnings of power over their emotions and their responses to their emotions. But while gentle parenting relies on teaching kids through in-the-moment modelling of empathy, respect, and understanding, it necessitates a clear idea of where the boundary needs to be. A parent cannot, after all, let a child attack them physically for five minutes straight, all the while demonstrating nothing more than understanding of their strong feelings in return!
The real question here is, how do we best teach our kids how to regulate their emotions while still enforcing personal boundaries? I have three kids, and all three are in their teen and tween years. All of them, being fully human, lose their tempers from time to time. I have been told more times than I can count that I am the worst mom in the world, that they hate me, and that I am a (insert bad word here). To me, it does not feel like enough to simply understand that they are using me as their emotional regulation device. I have an intellectual understanding that they are storing up all of their strong emotions as they cope with an overwhelming number of social interactions, criticisms, and frustrations from peers and teachers, and also that as soon as kids hit the door of their home, they might feel they can finally let go of all their stress in one giant detonated bomb.
I have also been instructed repeatedly through parenting blogs and books that it tends to be the primary parent, the one who spends the most time with the child and therefore the parent with whom they feel the safest, who receives the brunt of the outbursts. Sometimes it feels downright baffling as a parent to get the emotional shrapnel from our kids. While their literal fight might be happening over, let’s say for example, a text message with their friend, somehow, we as their parent end up getting told we are the worst or that they hate us! It is laughably confusing to be passing by a child’s bedroom carrying a load of laundry to the washing machine, and then suddenly become the target of a seemingly random passing emotional blow! As a parent who daily tries my best when raising my kids, it doesn’t feel quite right to me to allow them to use me as their emotional punching bag simply because they feel safe with me. I, after all, am a person too!
Parents are Human, Too!
I have been taught that as a parent, it is my job to never break. I have been told not to show my emotions, not to let the kids know they are affecting me, and never to break my cool. Ice mom. That way, they will learn both that their outbursts will not be effective tools against me to get their way, and they will also learn through example what a calm and cool person looks like under emotional assault. But that is not my personality. I am not an ice mom. I’m a human mom, and it bothers me to have my kids disrespect me or be downright mean to me.
So, in my personal choices in approaching my kids, I chose to throw “ignore them” right out the window. Do I dive in and escalate the situation by fighting back and insulting them in return? No! But do I tell them that their words have real power and can hurt even me? Absolutely. Because while I am there for all of their ups and downs in terms of their emotional lives, I will not be their punching bag. I have lived long enough to know that this dynamic does not automatically disappear when kids hit adulthood. I have seen enough parent/adult child dynamics in which the adult child STILL attacks the parent, who STILL fronts indifference towards their child’s words. This, quite simply, is not the relationship I choose to nurture with my children, parenting advice notwithstanding. I want my kids to know that I am a human with human feelings. If you kick my legs at Walmart, my legs will hurt.
A Balanced Approach
I choose instead to teach my children that they are absolutely allowed to have their emotions. They can feel angry, irritated, frustrated, depressed, sad, unsocial; in short, they can feel the whole gamut of negative emotions that humans inevitably feel through the course of daily life. Adolescence is a time when flooding hormones collide with increasing academic demands and social difficulties. It is hard to be a young teenager, watching the kids around you develop physically at different rates, feeling romantic feelings for perhaps the first time, learning what social rejection is, having a teacher who just does not seem to like you, and having your GPA mean something for the first time ever. It is completely understandable why teens and tweens might come home in emotional stitches, an angsty landmine just waiting for the lightest treading foot to set it off on everybody in the household. And kids starting in their “terrible twos” and continuing well into adulthood all might have the same instinct: unload on the parent.
Understanding where these emotions are coming from, however, is different than accepting disrespect from a child. While I am more than willing to talk through difficult feelings with my children and empathize with the things they are saying, I am unwilling to accept being treated disrespectfully. When my kids do inevitably speak to me with disrespect, my regular response is simply to ask, “Why are you being so disrespectful to me? I haven’t treated you with disrespect, and I’m not being disrespectful to you now, either. You can be mad, but I’m not okay with you speaking to me like that.” Honestly, this is often all they need to shake out of their approach. They know that I am not their enemy, they just misdirect their ire sometimes. If they apologize and redirect themselves, I tend to let the incident go. We all need to learn how to approach people even when upset, and I don’t feel that it needs to be a punitive learning experience as long as it does not escalate further than the initial warning.
Avoiding Creating Emotional Terrorists
One thing we do not want is to teach our kids that it is okay to let their negative emotions spill all over the people around them. They can have their feelings. It is okay if they tell me that they do not want to be around me and then leave for their bedrooms. They are allowed opinions, even when they are negative! But their negative emotions cannot become overflowing random acts of rudeness on anybody and anything that happens to be around at the time. If they are having a hard time, it is not okay to drag unsuspecting victims down with them. This is all a part of learning emotional regulation. They can have their emotions and give them space and air to breathe, but they do not get to try to make the people around them feel badly, or project their own feelings onto others who are merely trying to mind their own business.
I have learned, from having kids unleash emotionally on me plenty of times, that the unleashing itself is a part of the recovery process. They might say truly mean things, slam their bedroom doors, and disappear for a while. As I sit in my bed stewing about what they said to me, they, meanwhile, instantly feel better, having transferred their negative feelings out of themselves and onto me! By the time I open their door to lecture them about their attitude, they are more often than not ready to apologize and are mostly over the problem that caused their outburst in the first place! Letting negative emotions have space, therefore, is a part of the emotional regulation process. It is important that kids don’t pretend they are okay when they are not, because this leads to stunted emotional growth that can affect their relationships and mental health in the future. The fine balance, therefore, does not lie in whether or not our children should have or voice negative feelings. The balance lies in just how far they can take these feelings in terms of disrespecting the family. Can they cast a dark pall over the entire family for the day, week, or month they are going through a negative phase?
I have a friend who, when her child was young, allowed her to scream and cry and carry on in the middle of the livingroom all evening long, even during dinner time, if she wanted to. My friend did not believe in sending her daughter to her bedroom because she felt that would be stifling to her feelings. I tend to be a little stricter about how long my angry child can suck the oxygen out of a family common area, if only to preserve my own mental health. My children can have feelings. They can yell and cry and carry on, but they must do so in their bedrooms, so that the rest of the family does not need to have their entire evening dictated and defined by the emotions of the one. Eventually, I always make sure to talk with the child so they have a chance to feel fully heard, but it is not my personal opinion that everybody in the family must either actively witness or actively hide from the emotional maelstrom. (Not to mention, given the opportunity, sibling witnesses sometimes turn into peanut galleries that ultimately exacerbate the situation.)
As With Most Parenting Issues: No One-Size-Fits-All!
There may be dozens of different opinions about how the mother standing in line and looking on with dismay as her child throws himself on the floor at Walmart should have approached the situation, but it is always easier to judge when one is not in the situation oneself. There is truly no clear-cut answer to how to properly deal with a wildly emotional child. Parental response must, in part, depend on the personalities of the parents and children themselves. Not all emotional outbursts look the same. Not all emotional processing times are the same. Not all parents will be able to regulate their own tempers for the duration of an extended tantrum. It does no good to cast aspersions on the parent who lets the kid wail away on her leg at Walmart, nor does it do any good to call the parent who has her child scream in her bedroom rather than in the middle of the livingroom, heartless.
We all have to make our parenting choices based on what is going to both preserve the peace in our home and our relationships with our individual children. So, in a world of infinite variables, it would be silly to mete out step-by-step instructions on how to deal with a dysregulated, screaming child and expect them to always go well. It depends on the place, the time of day, the temperament of the child, whether or not the child has gotten enough sleep or food recently, the personality and communication style of the parents, and so on and so forth. There is no obvious, one-size-fits-all answer for how to deal with an explosive child except to say this: approach your child with love, understand that this too shall pass, exercise all the patience you have in your personal reserve, discuss ahead of time with your child what your collective plan will be when these moments occur, anticipate that your planning may all come to naught in the heat of the moment, and always demand respect for your own physical and emotional boundaries!
When things go wrong in an explosive moment, let it go in that moment, but address the issue afterward, and discuss ways you could both approach a similar situation differently in the future. Letting your child be involved and active in these discussions about their own emotions and how you as a family will approach them is, in and of itself, an empowering act. It gives your child the ability to name their feelings, understand their actions, and receive a large dose of confidence from knowing that they have the ability to address their own big and bad feelings and can help themselves to come out the other side of them. You will have their entire childhoods to figure out how to improve on these moments, and if you’re willing to work with the particular child you are raising, these bad times will get easier, or at least slightly more predictable in their trajectory!