Sometimes a tight (but not painful) "hug" can help a child to get control when they've lost it. This worked like a charm on one child and made the second one madder, so we were 50/50 with it.
The one it worked on would actually come to me (even before age 2 or 3!) and *ask* for a time-out when he felt himself getting frustrated, and he is to this day definitely my kid who deals better with frustration. The other one is now more OE and seems to find a greater need to express his OEs, so holding him just makes him more frustrated. At least that's how it looks.
So the "hug" may not work, but it seems worth a try. At least it's a different approach, right? And after all, one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome...
