Why has traditional temper tantrum advice, both historically and currently, failed to help parents totally eliminate their children's temper tantrums? The three faulty concepts behind traditional temper tantrum advice are partly the reason. The first misguided concept is that children under one year or six months old can't experience real anger or have real temper tantrums. Many child development experts perceive newborn babies as not yet emotionally functional-or not yet capable of experiencing real live emotions. The expressions of angry sounds that babies make aren't real anger, we're told. They're simply the babies' instinctual crying responses to hunger, pain, and other discomforts.
What is it these experts believe happens when babies turn six months or a year old that allows them to finally be angry when they sound angry? One might guess it's something akin to babies gradually gaining fine-motor skills or language abilities. I realized decades ago that I didn't agree with this concept and I questioned how these experts could possibly perceive that infants are emotionally pre-functional. After all, we can't actually see whether or not a screaming baby is angry like we can see if it can or can't pick up tiny objects. By the very definition of it, an emotion is a state of mental being that is un-seeable, and we're only able to interpret what we perceive to be its expression.
If, for example, spouses appeared to be angry with each other, it wouldn't be a guarantee that they were. Conversely, if spouses appeared to not be angry with each other, it wouldn't be a guarantee that they weren't. It's really easy to imagine adults who are experiencing alternative emotions from what they appear to be experiencing. Only the people experiencing the emotions can for sure know what is going on for them emotionally. And that applies to babies and children, too.
I'm not sure how our current theorists arrived at such a scientifically unproven concept of emotional pre-functioning. I'm thinking, though, that they must have been taught these ideas at a university graduate level. That's where they studied the accumulated learning of the previous generation of child development experts. That generation, likewise, may have gleaned this belief from their own ancestral scholars who were behaviorism-based and generally viewed all subjective phenomena (such as emotions) as irrelevant-even for adults.
It seems to me that someone, somewhere, sometime simply made up this concept out of thin air and then most other theorists just went along with it. Even though we've had a lengthy social failure to understand babies and young children as fully functional emotional human beings, the newer understanding can help parents recognize their infants' real anger and temper tantrum behaviors.
What is it these experts believe happens when babies turn six months or a year old that allows them to finally be angry when they sound angry? One might guess it's something akin to babies gradually gaining fine-motor skills or language abilities. I realized decades ago that I didn't agree with this concept and I questioned how these experts could possibly perceive that infants are emotionally pre-functional. After all, we can't actually see whether or not a screaming baby is angry like we can see if it can or can't pick up tiny objects. By the very definition of it, an emotion is a state of mental being that is un-seeable, and we're only able to interpret what we perceive to be its expression.
If, for example, spouses appeared to be angry with each other, it wouldn't be a guarantee that they were. Conversely, if spouses appeared to not be angry with each other, it wouldn't be a guarantee that they weren't. It's really easy to imagine adults who are experiencing alternative emotions from what they appear to be experiencing. Only the people experiencing the emotions can for sure know what is going on for them emotionally. And that applies to babies and children, too.
I'm not sure how our current theorists arrived at such a scientifically unproven concept of emotional pre-functioning. I'm thinking, though, that they must have been taught these ideas at a university graduate level. That's where they studied the accumulated learning of the previous generation of child development experts. That generation, likewise, may have gleaned this belief from their own ancestral scholars who were behaviorism-based and generally viewed all subjective phenomena (such as emotions) as irrelevant-even for adults.
It seems to me that someone, somewhere, sometime simply made up this concept out of thin air and then most other theorists just went along with it. Even though we've had a lengthy social failure to understand babies and young children as fully functional emotional human beings, the newer understanding can help parents recognize their infants' real anger and temper tantrum behaviors.
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