Tantrum and Discipline

Here comes the moment! the moment that I start to discipline Daniel.

I always believe that the responsiveness of parents towards their baby helps shaping the baby's emerging self-esteem during their early stage of life. There are so many research suggest that leaving an infant crying-out is so wrong, because the baby's brain is still undergoing fast-developing during his first year of life, the neuron cells in baby's brain will form the connections from the primitive part brain to its front lobe (which in charge controlling the emotions) at fast pace during the first year development. Leaving a baby to cry for too long will stop such connection's formation and make it hard for him to regulate his emotions at later life. For this reason, I always responded to Daniel's request very quickly when he was little, which probably taught him that tantruming is the way to get what he wanted. In the past We haven't really tried to discipline Daniel as such, not even naughty chair. But Daniel's tantrum is getting bigger and bigger, there were such moments when Daniel's tantrum would drive my anger sky-high that I found I was shouting to him, then later I became very regret with my outburst, because I knew clearly that shouting and scream wont work, it's just your primative reaction towards another person's anger/rage, besides shouting will probably just teach him that outburst is the the way to go in such situation. Now that Daniel is 28 month old, I came to realise that I need to keep the balance right, Daniel is probably old enough to respond well to discipline, and discipline doesn't necessarily mean damage as it would do when he was little, I also came to realise that the way I react to Daniel's tantrum will not help us to steer away from tantrums, it will probably helps to head more for it. We more or less react to Daniel's rage like this: when he whimpered we cajoled, as his anger mounted, we told him we would ignore him- but we didn't. we reasoned, then pleaded, then shouted, just one step before smacking him.

Since we came back from holiday, I started to discipline Daniel using the Cool Down technique combined with positive reinforcement. Basically, whenever he starts tantrum, I make my expectation clearly, eg. I say 'Mummy don't like you screaming, then I would withdraw attention completely (strictly no response) no matter how hard he screams. I found this works better than Time Out. With Time Out we put Daniel on naughty step, because Daniel can't physically sit there for required minutes, I had to go back to put him back on the step, which actually gave him the attention. Also, I now start to tell him how pleased I am when he doesn't throw a tantrum as a form of positive reinforcement. Now Daniel behaves a lot better. i am using Daniel's own word: ' I'm really a good cub today!' as the finishing words for this entry.