Temper Tantrum Awareness: Babies And Children Are Real People With Real Emotions

Publié par Unknown on mercredi 19 mars 2014

By Leanna Rae Scott


I:1:T Why has the traditional temper tantrum advice, both historical and current, failed to allow parents to eliminate every temper tantrum of their children? There are three faulty concepts that traditional temper tantrum advice is based on: the first one being that infants under a year or six months old are unable to experience real anger or temper tantrums. Most child development experts have believed newborns less than emotionally functional-that is, not fully able to experience real emotions. Their angry-sounding expressions are apparently not real anger, we're told. Neither are they some other type of anger, fake anger, pre-anger, or simulated anger. We're led to believe their angry-sounding expressions are just instinctual crying responses to various discomforts.

What, I wonder, do these experts believe happens when a baby turns six months or one year old that enables them to actually be angry whenever they sound angry? I'm thinking that it's something akin to a baby gradually gaining language or fine-motor skills. Decades ago I realized that I disagreed with this concept and I asked myself how these professionals could come up with the perception that infants are pre-functional with their emotions. We can't, after all, see if a screaming infant is or isn't angry just like we can see if it can or can't pick up tiny objects. By its very definition, an emotion is an un-seeable mental state. All we can do is interpret our perception of the expression of it.

If spouses appeared to be angry with one another, it wouldn't be guaranteed that they were. Conversely, if spouses appeared not to be angry with one another, it wouldn't be guaranteed that they weren't. It's easy to imagine grown ups experiencing different emotions from the ones they portray themselves feeling. Really, only the person experiencing the emotion can know for sure what is happening for them emotionally. And that concept logically applies to children and infants, as well.

I wonder how current parenting experts came to this scientifically unproven theory of infant emotional pre-functioning. They must have had it taught to them in graduate university programs from the accumulated learning of their previous generation's child development experts. That generation probably previously gained this concept from their own behaviorism-based ancestral theorists who viewed as irrelevant-for adults and children alike-all subjective phenomena (like emotions).

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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