Parents must be prepared to make an empathetic response to any tantrum, to insist on quiet communication, and to refuse to change their position in the face of emotional upset. Since children most commonly throw tantrums in the early years of life, parents should teach the feeling words so that the child learns to describe her emotional states. Discussing feelings, parent to child and child to parent, allows your out of control teens to learn how to process emotional experience and to talk out difficult feelings instead of acting them out—by having a tantrum.
When a child yells and loses emotional control, we call it “throwing a tantrum.” When parents yell at the child to get him to do what they want, I believe they are also throwing a tantrum. Both tantrums are a good example of what can happen in conflict when child or parent can no longer tolerate delay. They want to release emotion, get attention, or get a result now. As one parent in counseling described it, “When I get pushed too far I reach a breaking point. I just can’t take what’s going on anymore, and I lose it. I get loud so I can get the kids’ attention. Now they know I’m serious, which I can tell because they’re looking scared, like maybe I’m going to hit them.
Of course I never would.” But I disagree. “You have already ‘hit’ them. Threatening violence is a form of violence,” I say. “Any time you are about to reach your breaking point, take a timeout. Set a time for further discussion, separate, cool down, and then start over to deal more calmly with whatever was going on.” Many tantrums, whether by parent or child, are similar to what one psychologist terms “emotional hijacking” or what one of his sources calls emotional “flooding,” a state in which emotional intensity overrules rational thought and dictates impulsive action.
“People who are flooded cannot hear without distortion or respond with clearheadedness; they find it hard to organize their thinking and fall back on primitive reactions. . . . They just want things to stop, or want to run or, sometimes, to strike back. . . . At this point—full hijacking—a person’s emotions are so intense, their perspective is so narrow, and their thinking so confused that there is no hope of taking the other’s viewpoint or settling things in a reasonable way.”
Now only yelling will do, yet parental yelling is counterproductive; it does more harm than good. Yelling is not talking out what is wanted; it is acting out to get one’s way. Consider just a few of the unproductive outcomes. If a child gives in to parental yelling, he is at risk of developing self-contempt for not speaking up for himself and demanding to be respectfully treated. Thus parental mistreatment can lead to a child who is driven by fear and unable to assert himself. This pattern may carry through to his adult relationships later on.
How to recover from a pattern of yelling? Parents should calmly and insistently pursue what they want instead. Recover from yelling by going to the other extreme. Talking more softly can be very effective because the child does not expect this response. In addition, he must now listen carefully to what you are saying. This creates a new cue for seriousness. Now he knows the parent means business because she has lowered her voice.