Parenting can be extraordinarily complicated since the process of raising children requires approaching emerging issues from multiple perspectives while remaining supportive of the child. In the era of social media, when communication opportunities have expanded tremendously, parents can obtain numerous recommendations and pieces of advice from the global community (McCormick et al. 4). However, while most of these suggestions are likely to be well-meaning, and some of them are likely to work in any setting, a number of online recommendations offered to parents are highly questionable due to their subjectivity. Defined by different cultural perspectives, the pieces of advice concerning the management of tantrums need to be scrutinized carefully so that the myths regarding addressing tantrums should not interfere with teaching children to manage emotions.
The first recommendation to discuss suggests that tantrums should be ignored so that the child could not learn to use them as the means of getting attention. The described piece of advice seems to be predicated upon the assumption that children use tantrums intuitively to draw attention to themselves and manipulate the people around them (Crow). Therefore, this recommendation implies that childhood development is defined by the Pavlovian conditioning, in the course of which a child learns to respond to specific factors in a certain way and, in turn, develops the understanding of how this process can also be used in reverse, specifically, to condition adults to meet the child’s demands. However, the assumption seems to be mostly wrong since it disagrees with the primary ideas of the key developmental theories. For instance, according to Piaget’s stages of cognitive development framework, children of the specified age (approximately 2-4 years old) undergo the preoperational stage, during which the lack of logical reasoning is observed (McCormick et al. 54). Therefore, believing that children would use their tantrums as a weapon of manipulating adults into meeting their demands is not quite sensible.
However, a range of online recommendations for managing tantrums make sense as the tools for shaping children’s behaviors and addressing the instances of tantrums. For example, the idea of distracting the child from the source of discontent and encouraging a change in the experienced emotions can be seen as an appropriate solution (“Tantrums: Why They Happen and How to Respond”). The specified recommendation assumes that children have a very short attention span and, therefore, can be easily distracted from their tantrum. In the context of childhood development, the specified assumption implies that a child aged 2-4 is only starting to develop the skills for identifying objects, therefore, being easily distracted by new items introduced into the setting (McCormick et al. 54). The described perspective aligns with the tenets of Piaget’s stages of cognitive development, therefore, allowing parents to introduce viable tools for handling abrupt and negative changes in their children’s emotions (McCormick et al. 55). Thus, the recommendation in question can be considered a useful one for parents of 2-4-year-old children.
Due to the presence of multiple myths regarding child tantrums, the recommendations offered to parents need to be accepted only after thorough scrutiny. Specifically, theoretical frameworks for childhood development must be applied to evaluate the legitimacy and efficacy of a specific recommendation. Theories such as Piaget’s stages of cognitive development shed light on how children perceive reality at different age, which is why discrepancies between children’s needs as outlined in these theories and the recommendations offered to parents should be seen as a proof that the piece of advice will not be useful.
Works Cited
Crow, Sarah. “All of the Common Parenting Advice You Should Always Ignore.” BestLifeOnline, 2019, Web.
McCormick, Christine B., and David G. Scherer. Child and Adolescent Development for Educators. Guilford Publications, 2018.
“Tantrums: Why They Happen and How to Respond.” RaisingChildren.net.au, n.d., Web.