I:1:T Why has traditional temper tantrum advice, both historically and currently, failed to help parents totally eliminate their children's temper tantrums? The three faulty concepts behind traditional temper tantrum advice are partly the reason. The first misguided concept is that children under one year or six months old can't experience real anger or have real temper tantrums. Many child development experts perceive newborn babies as not yet emotionally functional-or not yet capable of experiencing real live emotions. The expressions of angry sounds that babies make aren't real anger, we're told. They're simply the babies' instinctual crying responses to hunger, pain, and other discomforts.
What is it these experts believe happens when babies turn six months or a year old that allows them to finally be angry when they sound angry? One might guess it's something akin to babies gradually gaining fine-motor skills or language abilities. I realized decades ago that I didn't agree with this concept and I questioned how these experts could possibly perceive that infants are emotionally pre-functional. After all, we can't actually see whether or not a screaming baby is angry like we can see if it can or can't pick up tiny objects. By the very definition of it, an emotion is a state of mental being that is un-seeable, and we're only able to interpret what we perceive to be its expression.
If, for example, spouses appeared to be angry with each other, it wouldn't be a guarantee that they were. Conversely, if spouses appeared to not be angry with each other, it wouldn't be a guarantee that they weren't. It's really easy to imagine adults who are experiencing alternative emotions from what they appear to be experiencing. Only the people experiencing the emotions can for sure know what is going on for them emotionally. And that applies to babies and children, too.
I'm not sure exactly how current parenting experts arrived at this unproven concept of infant emotional pre-functioning, however, I think they must have learned it at university graduate programs. That's where they would have studied the knowledge accumulated from the previous generation's child development experts. And that generation might have previously learned this concept from their behaviorism-based ancestral experts who typically viewed as irrelevant-for adults even-every subjective phenomenon (such as emotions).
It would seem that some person, somewhere, sometime in history just constructed this concept out of thin air and then other theorists just accepted it as fact. Despite our history of social failure in recognizing babies and young children as thoroughly functional emotional beings, our current learning can help contemporary parents recognize the real anger and temper tantrum behaviors of their young infants and children.
What is it these experts believe happens when babies turn six months or a year old that allows them to finally be angry when they sound angry? One might guess it's something akin to babies gradually gaining fine-motor skills or language abilities. I realized decades ago that I didn't agree with this concept and I questioned how these experts could possibly perceive that infants are emotionally pre-functional. After all, we can't actually see whether or not a screaming baby is angry like we can see if it can or can't pick up tiny objects. By the very definition of it, an emotion is a state of mental being that is un-seeable, and we're only able to interpret what we perceive to be its expression.
If, for example, spouses appeared to be angry with each other, it wouldn't be a guarantee that they were. Conversely, if spouses appeared to not be angry with each other, it wouldn't be a guarantee that they weren't. It's really easy to imagine adults who are experiencing alternative emotions from what they appear to be experiencing. Only the people experiencing the emotions can for sure know what is going on for them emotionally. And that applies to babies and children, too.
I'm not sure exactly how current parenting experts arrived at this unproven concept of infant emotional pre-functioning, however, I think they must have learned it at university graduate programs. That's where they would have studied the knowledge accumulated from the previous generation's child development experts. And that generation might have previously learned this concept from their behaviorism-based ancestral experts who typically viewed as irrelevant-for adults even-every subjective phenomenon (such as emotions).
It would seem that some person, somewhere, sometime in history just constructed this concept out of thin air and then other theorists just accepted it as fact. Despite our history of social failure in recognizing babies and young children as thoroughly functional emotional beings, our current learning can help contemporary parents recognize the real anger and temper tantrum behaviors of their young infants and children.
About the Author:
Want to find out more about temper tantrums, then visit Leanna Rae Scott's site for temper tantrum information tantrum advice
0 comments:
Post a Comment