Kid Karma

I was given to tantrums, as a child. To this day I can remember them: the awful feeling of not having what I wanted -- the outrage and indignity of an adult standing implacably between me and certain happiness. My parents dealt with it as best they could. That is to say, my father got out while the getting was good, leaving my mother to cope with my rage.

She sang hymns. While I fit and fumed on the floor, screaming my willful head off, she would go about her chores, quietly washing dishes, preparing our dinner, and singing Abide With Me. Naturally, this enraged me all the more, but I have no recollection of her losing control. Not even when, at the embarrassingly mature age of seven, I threw a fit in the toy section of T G & Y.

When I became a mother, for a while there I thought that I had somehow managed to elude karma. Our eldest daughter was a colicky baby, but a remarkably biddable toddler. In her nursery school, she was a sweet, almost angelic paragon of a child, a heartbreakingly pretty, golden-curled charmer with a ready smile and engaging ways. "Let's share this together!" I remember her saying to the children of friends, right before they bashed her over the head with whatever toy was the subject of dispute.

We watched other parents with their toddlers and wondered what in the world they were doing wrong.

Other people's children threw fits on the train and in supermarkets. They struggled and screamed and cried and raised hell. Ours almost never threw tantrums. In fact, I can recall only one occasion when she did: we were buying her shoes and she insisted on wearing them before we had paid for them. At the time, I thought her tantrum was unsettling. But then our youngest came along.

Our youngest was a placid baby, seldom crying unless hungry or in pain. I have a picture of her as a newborn in the baby line-up at the hospital. She stands out not only because she is the only Caucasian infant there, but because every other child is screaming its head off while she alone seems lost in thought, her face as serene and contemplative as a Buddha's. But children constantly evolve: well before she entered the Terrible Twos, she had established herself as someone with a mind of her own.

It is funny now. I can write about how our youngest, at the age of nine months, would flop onto her back when crossed, face and fists clenched in rage, and work her way, worm-like, across a room, tears flying, screams enough to wake the dead. How she bit the wall of her pediatrician's office once, gouging out plaster and drawing blood from her own lip. How, out of over one hundred children, she was the only one in her nursery school to refuse to cooperate during a fire drill. Not a week went by without a major temper tantrum of some sort, and quite often there were several. It was an endless struggle to get her to put on her shoes, keep on a hat, allow me to apply sunscreen or give her medicine. Once, when she was very ill, we even had to force-feed her -- a horrible experience that even to this day it is hard to joke about.

We watched other parents with their toddlers and wondered what in the world we were doing wrong.

"Don't be afraid to punish her!" well-meaning friends would advise, not realizing that they were preaching to the converted. We drew the line at beating her, but emergency swats, time-outs, and acted-on threats and sanctions did not stop her from throwing spectacular tantrums. On one occasion, she actually slipped out of my hands in a doctor's office: she had worked up such a sweat that I could no longer hold onto her. Her reason for the rage? I had refused to let her pull ornaments off the Christmas tree. We began to collect books on managing difficult children; many we bought ourselves, many we received from those who had witnessed our youngest in action. All of it helped to some degree, but the tantrums still continued unabated.

One morning after a particularly exhausting -- and public -- conflict of wills, a kind neighbor took me aside. "I've been there," she confided. "My eldest daughter was just like yours, and now she's the gentlest, most reasonable fifteen-year-old you've ever met." This neighbor went on to tell me her theory: "All kids have to rebel. Either they do it when they're toddlers or they do it when they're teens." She sighed and smiled grimly. "Our youngest daughter was the most well-behaved two-year-old in the neighborhood, but you ought to see her now."

I clung to these words of wisdom like a shipwrecked sailor might cling to a piece of driftwood. Our youngest continued to throw tantrums and through them I tried to hum Abide With Me and concentrate on my neighbor's reassurances. And to make a long story short, our youngest child is now a sweet-natured, gentle, thoughtful teenager. Only rarely do we see a flash of that wild, scary temper that worried us so when she was younger, and when that does happen, there is always a good reason for it -- and she always apologizes.

Our neighbor was right, so I am now offering her words of wisdom to any parents of toddlers who are troubled by temper tantrums.

So if your children throw tantrums, take heart: I myself haven't had a proper tantrum for decades, and our youngest has now become a reasonable human being and is a joy to be around. Our eldest, on the other hand...