When Mom Has a Temper Tantrum

Two top parenting experts share strategies to help parents stay in control.

By Melanie Howard
http://www.clubmom.com

Each month, my five-year-old son's kindergarten class compiles a "book of days," in which the children share their daily home experiences with one another. The next month, the book gets circulated to all the parents. Imagine my chagrin when James brought last month's book home, and there—between "Mollie and her mom made brownies" and "Jeremy helped his dad take out the trash"—was "James's mom was angry with him this morning." My temper, in writing, laminated and distributed for all the world to see.

Worse yet, I realized that almost all our recent mornings had degenerated into Mommy screamathons over seemingly minor matters—dawdling, misplaced gloves, sibling bickering. I felt terrible, and obviously James did, too. How could we break this angry pattern?

"Yelling is usually a sign that a parent has no strategy," says Thomas Phelan, a clinical psychologist in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, and the author of the popular 1-2-3 Magic: Effective Discipline for Children 2-12 (Child Management, Inc.). At a loss for what to do, moms may resort to yelling out of anger or frustration. But the end result is that parents feel guilty and children get the emotional message that they are bad.

It's because we love our children so dearly that they are able to provoke such strong feelings of anger in us, according to Nancy Samalin, a New York City–based parent educator and the author of Love and Anger: The Parental Dilemma (Penguin Paperbacks). But that doesn't make expressing that anger through hollering or put-downs appropriate—or effective. Samalin, who has conducted workshops for parents of toddlers through teens for more than 25 years, says the key is to feel and acknowledge your emotions but not let them control you and make you act irrationally.

Samalin and Phelan recommend drawing on these following strategies when your kids are driving you up the wall:

• Exit or wait. When you feel your anger getting the better of you, briefly withdraw from the situation until you calm down, Samalin writes in Love and Anger. Phelan agrees: He suggests stepping out of the room, counting to ten, going to your bedroom, and closing the door—whatever it takes to restore your cool.

• "I," not "you." Avoid attacking your child with "you" statements—"You are such a slob!" or "You'll never learn." Instead, think in terms of "I": "I don't like picking clothes up off your floor every day" or "I get upset when we're not on time." These are less hurtful and inflammatory.

• Put it in writing. If you are too angry to speak, don't. If your child is old enough to read, express your feelings in writing. Sometimes just the time required to find pen and paper will help you to cool off.

• Stay in the present. When your child makes you angry, don't work yourself into a tizzy by listing every offense he has committed in the past week and is likely to commit in the future. Stick to the issue at hand.

• Restore good feelings. When you do lose it, reconnect with your child as soon as possible. That may mean saying you're sorry and giving a hug and kiss to a younger child. For an older child, you may want to offer an explanation of why you were angry along with an apology. Don't worry that apologizing will diminish your authority—it won't. It shows your child that you respect him and teaches him that everyone can be wrong sometimes.

• Recognize what the problem is. Is it really your child's messy room? Or are you sleep-deprived? Feeling overwhelmed at work? Mad at your husband or mother or boss? Be aware of when you are more vulnerable to anger and resist the urge to transfer negative feelings to your child.

• Make yourself—and all family members—accountable for lashing out. Institute a "no losing it" rule to make kids and parents aware of the times they go ballistic. But do it with a light touch. For instance, make a chart and tack on a sticker when one of you has an outburst. If one family member is accumulating a lot of stickers, it's time to talk about it.

• Carry a tape recorder. When you feel yourself about to blow, turn it on. If you explode anyway, play back the tape and imagine yourself as the child on the receiving end.

• Use cognitive therapy. This technique is sometimes used to calm fearful fliers. Analyze your thoughts and put them in perspective—or, as Phelan puts it, "deawfulize" the situation. (Fliers learn that their fear is of crashing, not flying. And since crashing is unlikely, their fear is not reasonable.) Ask yourself—when your children are fighting, say—if it's really that horrible. Think of the situation as aggravating but normal behavior that merits a calm, rational parental response.

Melanie Howard is a writer and a mother of two. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

When Little Kids Curse

Cleaning up bad language requires action and creativity.

By Jenifer Whitten Woodring
http://www.clubmom.com

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me. Unless they come from the mouths of babes—my babes, that is. I'll never forget when my son, Patrick, then a darling two-year-old with angelic curls and adorable blue eyes, began saying, "Damn it, Mommy!" with both feeling and enunciation. How could I teach a toddler who was just learning to talk that some words are better left unsaid?

Preschoolers have an uncanny ability to pick up words—all words—that they hear. In my case, I must admit, Patrick probably heard it from his parents. And what kids pick up on TV, on the playground, in the store, or at child care is bound to stick. Eventually, your angel is going to utter something downright demonic, no matter how much you try to shield him.

Your little one's first cussing episode may seem funny at first, but don't laugh. "Swearing can get them into big trouble when they go to school. It's better to teach them now so they don't have to suffer the consequences later," advises Kathy Burklow, a psychologist at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center.

Curbing a Cusser

While there are many ways parents can help children avoid bad language, there is no substitute for avoiding it yourself. James O'Connor, the author of Cuss Control (Three Rivers Press), suggests trying alternative exclamations like shoot, blast it, nuts, phooey, for crying out loud, and dagnabit. Silly terms—malarkey, balderdash, hogwash—will get your kids to laugh, making them more likely to want to imitate them.

Most children under three won't comprehend that certain words are unacceptable. Often, ignoring the offense may be the best defense when dealing with the very young. But after their third birthday, they're more likely to understand that some words are naughty. So take action. "Get down on your knees, look your child directly in the eye, and tell him, 'That's a word that we don't use in our family,'" recommends Linda Metcalf, the author of Parenting Toward Solutions (Prentice Hall). "Make the words—not the child—the culprit to give him a chance to move away from the behavior."

If your child persists in using such language, show him you mean business with disciplinary action. For a four-year-old, that may mean calling a short time-out or taking away a favorite toy. Kids a little older may benefit from time spent in their rooms.

Fortunately, Patrick's transgression turned out to be an easy fix: We convinced him to substitute the more acceptable "darn it." It didn't take long for him to start correcting adults who failed to use this alternative.

Writer Jenifer Whitten Woodring has two children and lives in Pennsylvania.

When Dad's Away

One mom finds that when her husband travels, life gets just a little easier.

By Jennifer Moses
http://www.clubmom.com

I really dread it when my husband travels. The idea of him packing up his two favorite ties and his container of Johnson & Johnson waxed dental floss throws me into a tizzy of anxiety. First off, he's getting into an airplane—which, as everyone knows, will be held together by Band-Aids. But mainly, I dread the idea that he is leaving me, albeit temporarily, alone with the kids.

The problem is that there are two more of them than there are of me. Among the three of them, they have eight million after-school activities—a logistical nightmare for one woman to tackle alone. And at a certain point in the day, I begin to thirst for conversation that doesn't revolve around, for example, farts. I rely on my husband to be a beacon of intelligent conversation at the end of a long, trying day during which I've morphed from a hopeful and even pleasant person (who looks way, way younger than 40) to a harassed and nasty witch. So maybe we don't always talk about the decline of American letters or the state of the Middle East. So maybe, sometimes, we just sit there in total, exhausted silence—but at least no one's talking about farts.

Luckily for me, I married a man who does not, in fact, travel much on business. But when he did go on a trip recently, I felt slightly ill for a full week beforehand. Then...he left. And I realized that, just for starters, for the next three days no one would ask me where we keep the flashlight batteries. Maybe, I thought, this won't be so bad. It also dawned on me that my household routine was drastically simplified. Usually I have to cook one meal for the kids—say, macaroni and cheese and chocolate milk—and an entirely different, more sophisticated meal (perhaps spaghetti and chocolate milk) for the grown-ups to eat later. That means that I typically don't finish washing the dishes and cleaning up the kitchen until around 8:30 at the earliest. Then I haul myself upstairs to fold the laundry that's still in the dryer, do my requisite nighttime channel surfing and kvetching, and get into bed around 10—which is way too late for this cowgirl. But even then, it's not over: My husband inevitably stands before me, holding up a white shirt in one hand and a pink one in the other, asking, "Which one of these do you think goes best with this jacket?"

But during my husband's recent absence, I didn't have to deal with making two dinners, cleaning up two sets of messes, or helping him choose a shirt. In fact (and I feel kind of guilty for even thinking this), I didn't have to be bothered with any of his personal needs or issues—his ego, his work-related boo-boos, his laundry, the sound of his snoring.

I don't want to brag, but here's what the kids and I ate: pizza the first night, pizza the second night, and pizza the third night. On Friday night, after the kids were in bed, I watched You've Got Mail, a movie my husband swore he'd never see. I went to bed early. Amazingly, the kids weren't all that horrible, either. They seemed to know that, with their dad out of town, they'd better be nice to their mom. They must have realized that if they set me off, they wouldn't have some other, nicer parent to run to.

"Oh, I know just what you mean," an acquaintance remarked when I told her that I was going solo for a few days. "Absence makes the heart grow fonder!" Only that's not what I'd said at all. What I'd said was something along the lines of, "You know, I really don't miss my husband one bit." Not that I'd want to make a steady diet of it, but as a once-a-year, short-term event, being the sole voice of authority just isn't all that bad. And Domino's delivers.

Jennifer Moses is a mother of three and the author of Food and Whine: Confessions of a New Millennium Mom (Fireside).