Tirades and Tantrums

By Elana Rabinovitch

Parenting in the 21st century is a curious business. Even the verb “parenting” is a relatively new coinage. My mother always says “What’s parenting? We had kids and we raised them.” But today’s parents are looking for alternatives.

And the universe has obliged. The last two decades have seen an explosion of parenting books – almost 120,000 titles can be found in the Parenting and Families category at Amazon.ca – a confounding glut of expert opinion whose main exhortation to parents is to do as they prescribe.

The approaches are varied and often conflicting. To impose discipline or win cooperation? Unconditional love or time-out? Flashcards and workbooks or free play? The only common ground is how tacitly these books bury what natural child-rearing instinct we might yet possess under a pile of confusing self-help rubble.

Compare this excess with what parents during the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, and most of the ’70s were weaned on. One resource – Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care – was the bible of child-rearing. The book has gone through numerous editions, been translated into 39 languages, and sold more than 50 million copies, making it second in sales only to the actual Bible.

Researchers attribute the generational uptick in parental anxiety to a host of factors: 24/7 information flow, therapy culture, the 60-hour work week, divorce, childhood depression, etc. Peter Stearns, author of Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America (NYU Press) says that since the concept of boredom wasn’t even in the lexicon of childhood pre-World War ll, giving our kids endless recreational options today has only backfired.

I read several parenting books because, while I had concrete ideas about what I didn’t want – for example to dole out stickers when my kid pees in the potty – I was unsure about what to do instead. Shouldn’t parenting be about more than strategies and gimmicks?

Well, yes and no, especially at the tender age of two-and-a-half, which sometimes feels like one long temper tantrum. So how to avoid power struggles when my ego, in the eye of the tantrum storm and crying out for compliance, knows instinctively that punishment and reward are short-term solutions?

According to several books I read, it starts with a whole new way of thinking about children, understanding that children are people, too. That may seem obvious, but treating children with dignity and respect is the very antithesis of “Children should be seen and not heard,” “Do as I say, not as I do,” and the mother of all parental admonitions, “Because I said so.”

The eminent American child psychiatrist Rudolf Dreikurs wrote a brilliant, practical book called Children: The Challenge (Plume) in 1964, a time when conventional child-rearing practices were still in vogue. Dreikurs argues convincingly that the conventional model is broken, especially given how evolved our political and social systems have become. The democratization of the Western world has flattened long-established hierarchies due in large part to game-changers like the civil-rights movement and feminism. The family, however, seems to be the last bastion of an uneven balance of power.

Dreikurs understood that children thrived on attention. He knew that often the only kind of attention children got was through punishment due to bad behaviour. So their lesson well-learned was that if they did something bad, they will be in the spotlight. Conversely, good behaviour was ignored by parents. Flip the equation, Dreikers says. Ignore bad behaviour and it will go away. Praise good behaviour and watch it blossom. 

Barbara Coloroso’s Kids Are Worth It! (1995, Somerville House) is especially on point here. I worried that my strong-willed son posed a discipline problem. Still anguishing over Spike’s most recent rejection of a request, I read and was floored by the following passage:

“Compliant children are very easily led when they are young, because they thrive on approval and pleasing adults. They are just as easily led in their teen years. … Strong-willed children are never easily led by anybody – not by you, but also not by their peers.”

I realized that my kid was displaying his own wants and needs by saying “no” and that I could probably earn his cooperation by better understanding what was behind the behaviour. This is what Alyson Schafer in Honey I Wrecked the Kids (Wiley) refers to as the four basic needs of personhood – the need to feel connected, counted, capable, and courageous. I would add a few others to the list, like feeling sated and rested, but maybe that’s another book. The point is our kids aren’t trying to make us miserable; they’re just trying to communicate their own needs.

If children are indeed people too, then just like people, they need to be seen and loved for their unique selves. Like fingerprints, no two kids are alike. Which is what makes this parenting thing so exhilarating and so challenging.