Parents, do you get embarrassed when your child is having an irrational breakdown?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Not when the child is hungry, or tired, or being denied anything, but just a total meltdown for seemingly no reason.

I ask because I was witness last month to one of these. The child had a complete screaming crying meltdown because she didn’t have her favorite cake…chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. What was the cake? Black and white with chocolate frosting. No matter how much we told the child that there was indeed, lots of chocolate in the cake, she would not calm down. This is not a toddler, by the way, this is a six year old child. I understand you can’t reason with a toddler, but I would think a six year old child would be old enough to be told, “This cake is not just for you, it’s for everybody. We had chocolate cake with chocolate ice cream for your birthday*, and now you can share in this cake with everyone else.”

*Which they did. And it was less than two weeks before.

While this went on, I saw that Dad was significantly embarrassed by his child’s behavior, while Mom was not even remotely chagrined. The whole thing just got me wondering.

2

Yeah, it’s super-embarrassing, and my response is to pick my kid up and take her to a different room where I can soothe her and then remind her of the rules of good behavior before she returns to company.

This happened on Monday at her birthday party: after opening her last present, she looked around and said, “But that’s not enough presents!” and started to cry. Scoop her up, exit stage right. It took about five minutes, during which my wife entertained the guests, but there was no way we were returning to the party until she was able to talk calmly and politely to her guests.

Contrast this with another party we were at a few months ago. A mother was trying to get her two kids to leave the party. One of them was fine with leaving; the other one, maybe four, started screaming, “I’M NOT READY!” at the mom and kicking her. Fair enough: preschoolers throw tantrums. But the mother was apologizing to her son the whole time. Yikes.

3

Hmm. I like the idea of removing the kid from the party. These parents take the kid aside right in the same room. What do you think about that? It doesn’t take five minutes, and in that much time, all attention is focused on the child. I’m not fond of that; I see no reason for the child to stop crying if they are still getting lots of attention. I am not a parent, so what do I know, but I think taking the kid into another room is much better.
ETA: And they gave her chocolate ice cream instead, after the chaos was over. Someone pointed out this might just be how they deal with tantrums in company; so the kids don’t ruin the party, but what do you think about that? She didn’t at any point have to conform to the rules of polite society, and I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.

Again, not my kids, so I’m only tangentially interested.

4

I am not a parent but I really feel like these are perhaps the most important parenting moments. Taking the child away so that they are not the center of attention, and then once they’ve calmed down, rationally and reasonably explaining why they were wrong to say what they said, using an example that they can understand.

I could imagine saying something like, “What you said in there and how you acted was not very nice and it made mommy and daddy feel bad, as well as our guests. Think of it like this, remember when you brought home that drawing for me the other day, that you made just for me? Well, how would you have felt if I said, “Just one drawing? That’s not enough!” and started crying? That probably wouldn’t make you feel very good would it? Well, that’s how we all feel. So next time when someone gives you a cake, even if it’s not your favorite cake in the world, it’s important to say “thank you” and appreciate the gift. How does that sound?”

Again, not a parent, but these are teachable moments. I think at 6 years old they are ready for a discussion like what I’ve outlined above. Any younger than that and you might be wasting your breath.

5

I don’t get embarrassed, because when my son (who’s 4) tries to pull that mess, it gets nipped in the bud,** immediately**.

6

When my kids were that age, if they tried that, yes, I was embarrassed. We also enforced an iron-clad rule. Whatever you’re tantruming about, you will NOT get. Ever.

I also second the action of removing the child from the area, outdoors if necessary, until she calms down.

OTOH, kids vary tremendously. It took my older daughter approximately two times to get this message. The other, well, it took quite a bit longer. She eventually managed to learn to ask politely and to use logic – by the time she was a teenager.

7

Somewhat embarrassed, but you would not know this, because in the moment I stay calm and handle the situation. Making a show of how embarrassed I am helps neither my child not anyone else at the party.

I have a 5-year-old with an autism spectrum disorder. He is somewhat likely to display behavior like this. If he melted down like this, I would put my hands on his shoulders and look him in the eye, and firmly but calmly say, “Your choices are this cake, or no cake. When it is your birthday, you may have chocolate cake. Today there is only vanilla cake. Do you want vanilla cake or no cake?”

This gives him the chance to imagine a time in the future when he will get his favorite cake. If that works to calm him, great. If not, we make apologies and leave the party. I will not leave a tantruming child in a place where he is disruptive to others.

If he did pull it together and calm down, of course he’d be allowed to have ice cream with the other kids. Is his reward for calming himself to be forbidden from having a treat at a party?

My daughter, now age 8, does not have any sort of autism issues. If she had pulled this at the same age, I would simply have told her, “The tantrum stops now or we will leave” and then would have followed through on the threat instantly. But she is a different child and I had/have different expectations for her behavior, and know she can be handled differently.

Having been doing this shit for ten years now, I’m quite accustomed to knowing that everyone around me, parents and non-parents alike, is constantly judging my parenting abilities, and I don’t spend much time worrying about that. My goals are to set appropriate expectations and consequences for my children, and avoid disrupting others. I’m not going to waste my time cringing and saying “ooh I’m so embarrassed” when I could be spending that time addressing the problem instead.

8

What was the context of the situation? In my experience, most of the “irrational breakdowns” are related to travelling/celebrations, which take kids out of their comfort zones and usually deprive them of sleep.

It’s especially frustrating when relatives only see my kids at family functions, when the kids are constantly overtired and behave at their absolute worst.

I’m not usually embarrassed because it doesn’t happen very often, but I am concerned that people are forming undeserved opinions about my kids sometimes.

9

Extremely embarrassed, and one is also confused about which option to pursue, as others in this thread suggested: Time To Discipline or Time To Smooth Things Over For The Guests. It’s a choice that you make in an instant and you don’t always make the right one.

I think if the kid was making a scene my instinct would be to take them away from the guests for the talking-to. If they were still in control of themselves, I might do it in a corner of the same room.

10

I never got embarrassed by it because it didn’t happen often and I also was scooping up and removing the kid from the immediate scene.

Surely everyone can understand that small kids don’t have the same control as adults and will have occasional meltdowns. Although at 6 years old those days should be behind you.

11

Absolutely. A tantrum should always get an immediate time-out in a quiet place. Children learn very quickly that they will not be engaged with unless they are speaking calmly and respectfully. Kids I have worked with have sent themselves to the time-out room because they learned that if you’re upset it’s nice to calm down away from everyone else!

Keeping them around and trying to reason with them while they are having a temper tantrum is counterproductive and it gives them attention.

In all seriousness, this goes for everyone in your life: don’t speak to people who are too upset to have a rational discussion with.

Not ruining the party should’ve been done by removing the child from the party for a time-out, preferably, if at all possible, while the adults stay at the party to have fun. That way you are showing that fun is had at the party, while children who have tantrums are not part of that fun.

Giving her what she wants for her behaviour? I don’t think I need to explain what the problem is with that…

Personally, I was never embarrassed when kids I worked with had melt-downs in public. They were kids with severe behavioural problems, so their melt-downs were pretty bad. But I think most adults look at you and think “I know how you feel right now”.

Embarrassing was having to take children round to other people’s houses to apologise for something vile they did to their angelic kids.

12

See, this not an autistic kid or a developmentally disabled kid. There is nothing wrong with the kid: she is bright and all too clever, and knows she gets her own way with the tantrum.

Now it was a holiday, and I do make allowances for the fact that the children are overtired and stressed. They didn’t have to travel far, though, only about a two minute drive. But sure, they can get stressed, too, but she was fine up until this moment, no problems whatsoever, until the cake mess.

I try to be understanding. But this little child has a cousin, who is one year older, who is as different as night and day, who is VERY well-behaved in front of guests. I have literally never seen this child throw a tantrum, which to me says the parents have been constantly coaching the child how to act in front of company. It’s very difficult not to draw a comparison (though I keep this thought firmly to myself). Plus, as others have said, it’s not cute anymore. When she’s two or three and throws a tantrum and they just give her whatever she wants, you think they are trying to smooth things over. When she’s six, you begin to think - this little girl is going to be at every party for years, always expecting to get her own way!

I like the “black and white cake or no cake” answer. I didn’t like the “stop crying and we’ll give you some chocolate ice cream” answer.

O h, and I should add, the dad never said he was embarrassed. I could just tell that he was. FTR, he is the one who always pulls the kids aside and talks to them and instructs them in the proper way. I’ve even heard Mom say “You can’t have this because Daddy says no” - sure, make Daddy out to be the bad guy, instead of uniting together as a team!

The most amusing thing was, her brother (three) was joyfully eating an entire slice of cake himself, and tried to steal mine when I set it down for 1.2 seconds. To him, it’s all “OK MORE CAKE FOR ME THEN”.

13

You’d make a good mom.

14

Yes, it’s embarrassing. I think I used the avoidance method, just didn’t take my child out into restaurants and such places much until they were not a toddler any more.

15

We haven’t had a real doozy since about age 3. Even at that age this was an extremely rare occurrence. In that case I couldn’t scoop and remove (which is, I agree, a far better situation) because I was checking out in the grocery store line. Celtling really, REALLY REALLY!!! wanted to get a movie from the “RedBox.” A movie she already owned. Which was actually sitting in the DVR waiting for her to press “Play.”

Oh. Lordy. :rolleyes:

My policy was to just wait for her to stop. I could not understand a word she said when she was like this - there was simply no way for me to hear her words if she was screaming. :wink:

After finishing at the cashier, I found a stack of newspapers to sit on and took the chance for a well-needed rest, smiling beautifically at the folks coming toward me in the three lines right in front of us while she screamed and flailed on the floor in front of me.

Watching their reactions was quite interesting. A few smiled their approval of my approach, a few grimaced their sympathy. . . and of course, you can always tell who the spankers are, with their haughty “I’d never put up with that” harrumphing.

Celtling wound herself down finally, apologized tearfully and followed me to the car, where she clicked herself in and then fell asleep almost immediately.

Which brings me to the bottom line here: A tantrum is almost never unrelated to either blood sugar, sleepiness, or both. If your child has a neurological difference then sometimes overstimulation can cause it as well. But my experience has been that kids who are “spoiled” who “always throw tantrums” are nearly always also cared for by parents who don’t respect the need for snacks and naps. The few exceptions have been mostly autism spectrum kids, who just have an all-around harder time of it than the rest of us.

We can’t know what other disappointments that child had experienced that day, or that week, or how many nightmares woke her up the night before. We just have to hope that her parents care enough to address this with a long-term approach.

The most difficult thing for non-parents to understand is that parenting is not just about getting a child to behave a certain way in the moment; that’s babysitting. As a parent you are raising a human being to make the right choices and respond appropriately to an enormous range of stimuli. That might entail occaisionally letting them make an arse of themselves, or allowing for big emotions which suddenly find expression in seemingly meaningless incidents.

16

Of course, I’d be embarrassed. I’d remove the child from the situation. I had to do this once when my youngest was misbehaving in a restaurant. I was mortified. However, she learned that misbehaving means that neither of us got to finish dinner, which was enough to curb future tantrums.

FTR I’ve seen grown adults who should be taken outside, too, because they can’t control their emotions. Sadly, they’re more likely to get 100,000 hits on YouTube than be shunned.

17

Heh. I’ve heard that all my life. And you know, I think I would. I like children on the whole. Sometimes I look at the cousin I mentioned, and think, maybe if I had a single daughter, she might be like that. My SO and I are both serious, quiet people, and I was an only child, so I know how to teach kids to entertain themselves. You can never tell, of course, until you have your own, but I think I could handle one. Of course I’d probably get the little hellion, but I don’t really think their personalities come 100% pre-stamped.

The thing that is beginning to trouble me is that I don’t want to dislike this child, as she grows older. But she is a difficult child: very LOUD in everything she does, seemingly can’t play alone for even a minute, can’t play quietly ever (that is, no coloring, no dolls, everything must be JUMPING and YELLING and SHOUTING). That is an exhausting child. Also, she is very clever and conniving - but if she had just learned to ask in a sweet manner, sure, I don’t mind spoiling her - it’s her parent’s job to discipline (unless they expressly tell me not to do something, and I always ask). No, she has learned that yelling and crying gets her what she wants.

I understand every child is going to meltdown sometimes. Even the best raised ones. I mean, they’re little people, they haven’t really learned how to modulate their emotions yet, and sometimes a good yelling screaming fit is the only thing. But I think I would have felt better about the whole thing if the child had been removed from the party. Not just for us, but for her too - if low blood sugar or crankiness or whatever it was was really bothering her, it probably would have done her good to be away from it all for a few minutes, to be able to wind down.
ETA: Not once have these parents ever removed a screaming child from the situation, even when they were young. Again, maybe they were just doing it because company was over, but we’ve had some mortifying moments in restaurants, with even other children (!) approximately the same age looking over to see what all of the hullaboo was. :slight_smile:

18

Anaamika and drew would be great parents, they should get together. It’s going to be odd explaining to SOs, though.

FTR drewtwo99, that’s how I try to handle my 3 y/o, and much of the time it works. He is used to when I squat down so that he can sit on my knee that it’s “Daddy talk” time. In fact the other day I squatted down like that for a random reason and he walked up and said “What do you want to talk to me about, Daddy?” :slight_smile:

To answer the OP, I’m not usually embarrassed the odd times he has a public meltdown. People who have kids understand (for the most part), and people who don’t and want to judge can suck it.

19

When I pulled my daughter after the “Not enough presents!” incident, what I said to her was a bit unorthodox. “Wanna know a secret?” I said. Her tears stopped almost instantly, replaced with sniffly curiosity. “I FEEL THE SAME WAY ON MY BIRTHDAY!” I told her. “I always open my presents, and then I’m like, is that all? It’s hard, isn’t it?”

She nodded. “But I need more stuff!”
“I KNOW!” I agreed. “Me too! Hey, do you need a hug?”
She nodded again, and I held her until she was calm. Then I told her, “The thing is, at a party, it’s never ever okay to say anything that complains about a present. Can you go back in there and be cheerful with your guests?”

Once she agreed she could do that, we returned, and she was a gem for the rest of the party.

It’s a bit like emotional judo: rather than standing up against her, I try to move with her emotions until I’m in a position to channel them in a more appropriate expression.

But yeah, she needed to be somewhere quiet and calm and safe before she could process the disappointment.

20

This never happened to me.

For one thing, I had a “easy” kid. At least, she was easy for me. For another thing, I didn’t do any of the things suggested, ever. I did something entirely different.

Empathy.

“Wow, I so wish I had some X to give you right now. You’d be so happy if you had it, right? It would be so yummy and perfect. In fact, I’d like some too. We’d sit here on the floor and get chocolate all over us. It’s really awful there isn’t any here.”

Notice: no blaming, no shaming, no appeals to (adult) rationality, no lecturing, no dragging off the premises, also no promises, no bribes, no attempts to fix the problem at all. Just empathy.

Later – much later – in a peaceful setting, it might be appropriate to talk about what she could have done differently that would have gotten her real needs met – maybe not via chocolate, maybe not at that very moment, but met in some way.

No one who hasn’t tried this has any idea how effective it is. People who are consumed with a passionate emotion are not rational and cannot be appealed to with rational ideas, until they feel that someone gets them. Once they feel you are on their side, they calm down, they are able to find some balance. This works with even the smallest children. Most of the emotion is not about the thing wanted, it is about the frustration of being not just thwarted but also the feeling of being misunderstood and somehow becoming an object of anger, disgust, horror. Impulse control goes out the window.

Punishment (and virtually all the previous suggestions come under the umbrella of punishment) is really ineffective in changing anyone’s behavior. Even if the behavior goes away, there is virtually always ugly baggage that doesn’t. So, poor choice under almost all circumstances.

I know some kids are a lot more challenging than others. I was lucky in that my kid and I were a very good match for each other. But I did manage to raise a child who is extremely empathetic, with a lot of impulse control, and I would like to think I had some part in that.