Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Pre-school Toddlers and Intensity

Hi everyone,

I'm hoping to get some advice on how to deal with a VERY INTENSE toddler. My daughter (now almost 13) was maybe a little more intense as a toddler than most kids, but son is a whole different story and we're running out of sanity around here.

He's almost 2. He can speak in sentences, but generally chooses not to talk. Not sure if there are perfectionist issues going on there or not. When he does talk his pronunciation is starting to get somewhat more understandable, so I think his hearing is okay.

99% of his communication is done through pointing and grunting and then a lot of high-pitched screaming if he can't get what he wants.

He's started hyperventilating when he doesn't get what he wants now. We don't give in (often because it's something dangerous, so we couldn't if we wanted to), but he just keeps escalating his reactions anyway. We try not to pay too much attention to a temper tantrum, but at the point of hyperventilating, it's more that he's extremely upset than being manipulative (I think), so we do try to comfort him.

We have a very open house - he can play with almost anything in it except for things like knives and items on a hot stove, so it's not like we say "no" a lot. However, there are situations where we'll say "no" all day -- for instance if he keeps asking to make a smoothie (he loves helping with the blender). He might ask 20 times a day to make one. I've tried to do pretend smoothies with him and he'll do that once, but it won't work again for the rest of the day. We eventually close the kitchen door which leads to hyperventilating. It's not always smoothies that lead to the meltdowns, obviously, though that's been a particular issue for the past few days.

We try distracting, but he is completely focused on the one item that he has to have and can't be distracted.

I've also tried the "I wish you could," thing - which doesn't seem to work much. I've tried giving him a specific timeframe ("we can <do this item> after we eat dinner <or some other timeframe>.") ... That doesn't seem to work. We've tried removing the item from his view, that only works sometimes and it's working less and less now.

Any other suggestions?

I'm open to reading some books about this, but finding time between dealing with him and my work pretty much takes me to bedtime as it is, so I'm not sure when I'll fit that in. Feel free to make suggestions on those though anyway. I already have intentions on getting "Transforming the Difficult Child."

Considering your own history I expect he has been screened for ASD already, right?

In general, kids practice temper tantrums first as a raw emotional reaction, but as they escalate, it's because the child has found that sometimes, tantrums are an effective measure to get what they want. So then the kid resorts to the tantrum again, the results have changed, and they're confused. So they experiment with a bigger tantrum, and they find that this also works at times. They really don't understand the inconsistencies, but it's always worth a try.

And the solution is to eliminate all that uncertainty and take the entire reward system out of play. A tantrum can never result in achieving the desired end. This requires consistency from everyone who is responsible for providing care for him.

Unfortunately, even the "comforting" is, in itself, a form of reward for this behavior.

In the case of my DD, if she wanted something she couldn't have, we'd tell her no, and we'd try to redirect her attention to something else. If she refused to be redirected and threw a fit, we'd tell her no tantrums, to give her an opportunity to get herself in check. And if she continued on from there, she'd find herself in her crib, all the toys and other items removed except for her blankie, until she got her emotions under control. Sometimes that would be pretty quick, and sometimes it took forever, with a few different visits in between. If her behavior continued to escalate, we would warn her of the loss of a privilege, and then the next step was we'd inform her that she'd just lost said privilege. We had to figure out which privileges motivated her, though... after some experimentation we found that taking away bedtime stories worked the most effectively (and still does, six years later). Eventually she'd settle down and we might have a perfectly good day for the rest of the day, but there can't be any idle threats, so once she has been informed that she lost her bedtime stories, she lost her bedtime stories, end of discussion. That might send her into another mini-meltdown at the end of the day, but it also sent a strong message that we mean what we say.

My wife and I were on board with this same plan, and when my wife started taking classes and my mom was watching her in the mornings, we brought her on board, too. Because of the consistency, she got it, and we gradually started dealing with this behavior less and less, until it practically disappeared. The exceptions were when she'd see something inconsistent... my mother-in-law would reward her when she got fussy, and so after visiting with her other grandma, she'd come home and experiment with us again. Then we'd be in the store and she'd see some little kid throwing a tantrum and the parents ignoring it, and she'd wonder why someone wasn't putting that kid on timeout, so she'd experiment with us again. As long as the results stayed consistent, though, the experiments never lasted very long.

We started this when DD was only a few months old, and we never had what people refer to as the "terrible twos." She was a delight to take out into public at that age. Before she was three, she started to develop a talent for negotiation instead, and many times my wife and I were quite pleasantly surprised at the solutions she would propose where we could both get what we wanted.

Of course, it's still an ongoing, daily-adapting process. But the basic theory doesn't change. Just be consistent, and take away the rewards for negative behavior. Because the thing to remember is that every time you have an interaction with a child that young, the child is learning something from it. The question you have to ask yourself every time is, "What did I just teach him?"

This can apply to any negative behavior, not just the tantrums. For instance, the constant re-asking of the same questions:

1) "No."
2) "I said no, and this discussion is over, my answer is final, do not ask again."
3) Warning: "Next time you ask me this, you'll be on timeout."
4) Timeout.

LOL.

Negotiation reminds me of this thread.

Mr W now has some more tactics he has picked up since I posted this.

http://giftedissues.davidsongifted.org/BB/ubbthreads.php/topics/104600/2.html

I agree with this, but I will mention that I have learned to read my daughter fairly well. If I can tell that a "No" response will lead us down a path I don't want to go down, and if I can accommodate her much more easily, then I often pick the path of least resistance right from the beginning. I'll never contradict my initial answer, but I'll agree to things I don't really like sometimes, just to placate her. (I obviously wont agree to anything dangerous though.)

Another thing I would like to mention is that different people react differently to children crying. I personally can't stand it. It really drives me insane. I have to use something to drown it out, or else I think I'd break down in tears myself. My wife doesn't seem too bothered by it, though. On the other hand, I don't mind so much when my daughter wastes food, but that drives my wife up the wall.

So in some ways, the question isn't necessarily restricted to what to do with your child, but what to do with yourself that will allow you to do the right thing with your child.

Have you discussed this with your pediatrician?

Also, have you considered teaching your son sign language? We stopped using it once my daughter's spoken vocabulary took off, but there was a while there where she would use signs during times when she was too upset to speak. (Strange people and places can still make her go mute... but it's rare now, and she's forgotten all her signs.)

annette: I think you may have misunderstood my post. When I discussed consistency and discipline, I limited it to just those two applications: tantrums, and incessant asking for the same thing. They're two sides of the same coin, which is negative behaviors in order to get what the child wants.

I agree that empathy has its place, and we always try to be generous with it when appropriate. The trick with toddlers is trying to figure out when it's appropriate. You might think she's bawling because you moved the sharp object out of her reach and she wants it, and you might have missed that she whacked her hand on the edge of the table when she reached for it.

In the place of negative behaviors, the empathy comes AFTER the tantrum has subsided to a reasonable degree. Because not only do you not want to reward the negative behavior, but the child also has to learn to self-soothe.

This topic here is particularly relevant to gifted kids, because they generally experience emotions with far more intensity. It was just last year my daughter started crying her eyes out while watching some movie or other with puppies, because, "They're so cuuuuuuuute!"

SiaSL - No - but we do expect that he lies somewhere on the spectrum. It's just too hard to tell at this age how much. It's also hard to tell if what he has right now constitutes as a language delay for HFA. He is super sensitive to sensory issues - both hypo and hyper, and he's already showing some social issues with other kids, but part of that could be because he's a toddler. I don't believe he has shown any signs of regressive forms of autism - he's more in the Aspie/HFA line.


Dude - thank you for the suggestions. I agree that the comforting can be a form of reward, but not comforting when he's beyond upset would go too far against my own personal parenting philosophy. I hope that I've found enough of a middle ground to only comfort him when he's past the point of being manipulative. But you're right in that it could lead to larger issues. I'll have to keep a close eye on myself and critically evaluate the reaction I'm having each time.

I will say that your daughter sounds a lot like mine at that age. I did set limits and was consistent in my approach with her, but she also didn't feel the emotions as intensely. I don't know if this is a "different kids need different approaches" situation or if I am really being too inconsistent with him. I'd like to think it's the former, but wouldn't we all?


Austin - that's a great thread and reminds me of my daughter at this age. She's always been my little lawyer.


Dad22 - We haven't discussed with our pediatrician, but I don't really like our pediatrician. I think I need to find a new one. We did consider sign language, but when he said his first sentence at 6 months, we decided not to go there. Now 18 months later, he still barely talks. (Not in a regressive way - when he does talk, he shows a lot of language skills). It almost feels too late, but I think it would help with a lot of the frustration. I'm going to look into it.

You're right that a lot of it is about what we're willing to do and how far we're willing to go. There has been a lot of compromise lately to avoid meltdowns. "We can't make a smoothie yet, but you can help me clean the broccoli and put it in the steamer." I think for him, he just wants to be involved in something - I'm not sure he cares what it is. But the broccoli incident had me watching very careful for his small fingers around a big knife. So it was an uncomfortable moment.


Annette - thank you for your very valuable feedback. I really like this approach - it gels well with my parenting philosophy. I'm going to give it a try and see how it works over the next few weeks. I noticed that he responds more when I get really close to him and speak very softly to him. And it couldn't hurt to give him more empathy skills since he's on the spectrum somewhere (though it's important to add that I don't believe autism necessarily equates to a lack of empathy.)

Mr W is very intense.

We remind him to "use his words" and he will get more of what he wants.

We've had a lot of success with acting out his tantrums using his stuffed toys and dinosaurs as well to show him how silly it is.

He is getting better and better with his meltdowns limited to less than one a day.

We also use the empathy track. Back when he was less than a year old, he had a horrible melt down while I was on the freeway. He had already agreed to go with me to the bookstore but changed his mind. He could not speak well then but understood me when I talked about how his tantrums hurt people's feelings. I had taken the day off to spend with him and all the stuff I'd planned he did not want to do and he was hurting my feelings. it worked pretty good.

I wonder about this:
I hope that I've found enough of a middle ground to only comfort him when he's past the point of being manipulative.
could be backfiring? If he doesn't have the skills to calm himself down when he's upset, could it be that the realisation that you're not going to help until or unless he's extremely upset is itself part of what's getting him upset, in that moment? I should say that I'm coming from DS-now-7 having been a really rather reasonable toddler, with only a fairly brief period of getting very upset over incomprehensibly tiny things, so take it fwiw, but: it seems to me that it's not only possible but wise to separate out whether you allow yourself to be forced into changing your mind by a child being upset (I agree that one shouldn't, unless one has actually made a mistake in which case it's good to admit it) and whether you are sympathetic to the child's upset. I think you can be sympathetic to the upsetness without any suggestion of giving in over the decision, and that there's no need to wait until the upsetness is clearly out of control. It's only manipulation if you're manipulated by it :-)

I think "We can't make a smoothie yet, but you can help me clean the broccoli and put it in the steamer." is great and did a lot of that kind of thing. Another kind of thing that worked well for us was more like "Tomorrow we'll have a smoothie, but today we haven't got [time before the next meal/the ingredients/whatever the reason is]. What do you think the best smoothie in the ENTIRE UNIVERSE would have in it?"

I'll agree with this. I'm pretty sure I have a negative EQ, which causes me all sorts of problems.

I'm slowly coming to the realization that there is an entire emotional management skillset that it's best to develop in children early in life. I think when you have intense children, they need extra help in managing the intensity. The intensity has to go somewhere, and when there is nothing productive to do with it, and you're a child who's already upset and getting more upset by the minute...

I still deal with massive scream-a-thons at age 6 with my son, fortunately, most of them are at home rather than in public. Public presentations result in us leaving the public area.