During her son’s seven-year old well visit, Sue told me that her son, Corbin, was having some temper issues. I asked her to describe them. “Well,” she said, sometimes he just has meltdowns. For instance, if I tell him to do something as simple as picking up his toys, he screams!”
During her son’s seven-year old well visit, Sue told me that her son, Corbin, was having some temper issues. I asked her to describe them. “Well,” she said, sometimes he just has meltdowns. For instance, if I tell him to do something as simple as picking up his toys, he screams!”
That sounds kind of normal, I thought. I waited for Sue to elaborate. “I mean, he really screams–at the top of his lungs for an hour. It’s exhausting.”
I was surprised at Sue’s calm demeanor. She wasn’t upset or even asking for advice. My curiosity prompted me to ask, “So what do you do when he has these episodes?”
“Well,” she said, “at first they really shook me. I wondered what in the world I was doing wrong that would cause him to do this. I never knew any child this old who did. Then I realized maybe it wasn’t something I was doing; maybe it was something deep that was bothering him. Maybe he gets emotionally overcharged and needs to erupt once in a while. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to his episodes.”
Well, that makes good sense, I thought, but it still didn’t seem clear to me, so I asked her for more details.
“When he erupts, I just think ‘The volcano is coming.’ I take him into the family room and sit him on my lap facing away from me. He used to scream for me to hold him when he first started. Then I cross my arms over his shoulders and hold him tight until they pass. Over the months they’ve gotten shorter. I just sit there and wait. That’s what he needs.”
Now, if you’ve ever been in the same room with a wailing seven-year-old boy, you might not appreciate the emotional fortitude required to sit and hold a screaming child, particularly when you’re the mom. Let me tell you, it pushes all of a mother’s buttons, hammers at her patience, and makes her wonder–even fleetingly–if she did the right thing in having this child. Mothers take everything their kids do personally, and when it involves emotional outbursts, we can’t help but believe on some deep unconscious level that we’re doing something terribly wrong in this love process. After all, we conclude, normal kids with good moms don’t do this kind of stuff. But I have some news–oh yes, they do.