Mr. Emotional
Friday, May 30th, 2014From Friday Mom – Erin:
We had Rory’s final parent-teacher conference of the year last week. He’s getting ready to transition into the younger toddler classroom at the end of July, and we signed up to meet with his current primary care giver to hear how he’s been doing since we last met back in November.
Rory has been doing very well from an overall development standpoint and is right on track in terms of his various fine motor, gross motor, social and other skills. The one area his teacher pointed out as having room for improvement, however, is his tendency to have very intense emotional reactions. I wouldn’t call them temper tantrums, but periodically, Rory will go from zero to sixty on the emotional speedometer in a matter of mere moments. Our usual approach has been to let him work it out himself, but his teacher informed us that their approach is usually to try to talk through what is bothering Rory and get him to work through his problems more proactively, rather than retreating to the corner of the classroom in a tizzy.
We’ve been working on implementing this approach at home to try and calm Rory down more quickly when he looses his cool. The results have been mixed thus far. He’s still not very happy when we inform him that it’s time to come inside to play (even if we have given him fair warning that he only has five more minutes) nor when we tell him he can’t play inside the china cabinet. Generally speaking, however, the act of talking to him and helping him work through his emotions productively is at least training Rory to address his emotions in a more measured manner.
Expecting a toddler to have complete control of his emotions is asking far too much, but we hope this recent guidance will help us chart a course toward a more constructive way of dealing with such outbreaks in the future. And, even if it doesn’t, it at least gives us something to focus on during the next screaming, red-faced tantrum.