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Meltdowns

Small children sometimes blow a gasket and have a tantrum. I never allowed that to become a situation where they got the idea you could use a tantrum to manipulate mom into giving you your way. I also didn't punish them.

One son has flat feet and he used to have a meltdown periodically when we were out and about and I would sit down next to him and wait and occasionally ask if he was done yet. I eventually realized he fell apart due to foot pain and began arranging to have a stroller or cart or some means to not put him in that position.

One of my sons needed more sleep than average and trended towards ONLY sleeping well in his bed. While moving or traveling, he sometimes got overly tired and had a meltdown and I would send him to bed to get the rest he clearly needed.

One son once was literally hopping mad and apparently literally burst a blood vessel. His fit ended completely and suddenly when he began gushing blood from his nose.

Years later, he told me that it served as a kind of biofeedback that allowed him to FEEL some brain pathway involved in his temper tantrums and over time he was able to figure out how to disrupt the process intentionally. I similarly learned to find ways to put a stop to tension headaches in my teens by doing some physical caretaking when it started up.

Small children don't cope well with hot weather. They physically don't handle it well and aren't old enough to account for that. If it's hot and your child is under age four, an adult needs to work at making sure they don't overheat and they stay hydrated and keep calm.

Allergic reactions can disrupt sleep and cause miserable crying without ever causing hives. This kept me up until like 4 a.m. once before I figured out it was an allergic reaction and I'm never feeding him that again.

Had I been less knowledgeable, I might have had multiple incidents like that until the allergy got bad enough to cause hives and just chalked it up to "colic" or some nonsense like that because physicians were terrible about being useless in the face of similar problems.

Not my kid, but I knew someone who was told their baby cried all the time due to colic. They resolved it by trying multiple formulas for sensitive babies until one worked.

One of my sons is lactose intolerant and after multiple days of diarrhea, I took him to a physician who suggested I feed him juice until it passed, as if I hadn't already tried that. On my own recognizance, I put him on a bean formula for a few days and switched him to that for a few days every month whenever the problem recurred.

When he stopped taking formula and was old enough for milk, he suddenly was sick all the time and someone in the clinic said something sort of jokingly like "Some babies just have an expiration date." She was probably trying to reassure me but she should have been asking what changed? 

I again figured it out on my own after six weeks of drama and stopped giving him milk.

Toddlers absolutely will engage in "button pushing" and trying to get a reaction out of people, but in my experience most tantrums in early childhood are rooted in something physical going sideways and I believe if you focus on finding the root cause, it doesn't have to become learned behavior where throwing a fit is how you get your way.

It can be as they used to say "just a phase."

And if they push your buttons too much, try harder to feed their mind. It may be Bored Gifted Kid Syndrome.

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