Oh yes, I forgot to mention one other thing. During heightened emotional states, the information the brain is able to access during normal emotional states is often not available. When you speak to your child, she may not even be aware of what you are saying to her. She may have difficulty doing even simple tasks she was once able to do. The hormones may be putting her into a continuous emotional state she was not normally in. One of the children I had mentioned actually said they could not understand a word said to them when the parents were yelling at them.
One of the reasons for these hormonal and emotional state changes, which begin from the time the child is in the crib, is to allow the brain to relearn much of what has been learned during the normal states. Certain children are more apt to having extreme parts of knowledge disconnected during these states than other children.
The best way to think of this is to realize in some ways your child is now functioning at the level of a much younger child. This is only temporary, but it does help the brain to learn information useful later in life when these emotional states are triggered. People who fail to learn during these early childhood cycles will often freeze up during traumatic events. They are literally unable to talk or walk.
By the way, the behavior you are seeing will probably calm down occasionally for short periods and then flare up again.
And one other thing, in the two extreme cases I mentioned, the children both suddenly took an interest in guitar (I think it had a cool aspect to it) once this one to two year cycle had ended. It did go a long ways towards keeping them occupied during the teenage years (they are still not through them yet).
Last edited by JamieH; 03/09/11 12:01 AM.
