JohnL

Thanks for hosting the discussion about responding to toddler tantrum behavior. I haven’t read them all (members of the community were contributing frequently as I started to type this note), but I recognized some of the responses on the public forum. The participants in the forum suggested some sensible ideas that corresponded with some of what researchers have found about managing tantrums.

I hope that, perhaps once the intensity of commenting has abated a bit, some one of you editors will take the time to summarize the comments and emphasize the most sensible, well-founded of them. There is (as sentient beings know) a lot of bogus or near-bogus content floating about on the Internet; providing parents with recommendations that are not spurious would be a great service.

In my discipline, people must address tantrum behavior of both the familiar variety and much more substantial forms. Some of the methods that we use (e.g., functional behavioral assessment, functional assessment) are necessary for those instances where a child’s tantrums go well beyond the usual or “normal.” Many of the recommendations we make, however, are quite applicable to the tantrums that parents routinely experience—and were hinted at or even explicitly stated in some of the foregoing comments.

Happy parenting!