Tantrum strategies

This weekend has been a long one. Yesterday I had a migraine but last night and this morning has been overshadowed by M having some tantrums. Last night she was stomping, yelling – screaming. You know the kind where those handy catch phrases like, “are you being the parent or the child” -- don’teven  touch the issue.

Ultimately, she wasn’t following directions and was told she was done with volleyball (this is her first year on a sporting team and she loves it) and was told this morning she needed to start her resignation letter to her coach. I then wished her good night and that I knew she would do the right thing (despite the fact she was yelling at me from her room). I then went back to my room and had a great time watching TV. (Being able to separate her anger and my emotions has been a process.)


This morning she gave us her completed letter and it read:

Dear Mr. Ward,


I have to quit because mom’s making me. She says that I was being mean, when I say I wasn’t. My mom’s making me (making is underlined twice) quit the team.

From, M

Did you sense any anger in her letter? Of course you can imagine the redirection we gave her after reading her letter. She wasn’t too interested in hearing it and more arguing ensued on her part. She likes to tell us she isn’t getting enough sleep (this line is one of her favorites and it may well be true) and she “wasn’t thinking straight.”

Sleep is so essential to M’s ability to function normally and maintain her behaviors it is amazing. I have heard that for kids who are adopted they have something like 5x the muscle movement at night in their sleep as compared to kids in a healthy birth family. This explains why so often we check on her at night that she is wrapped up in her sheets and blankets much like a mummy. Not having any birth children of our own I can’t make any comparison between sleep of a birth child and sleep of an adopted child, so I have to go on what I’ve been told.

We have been working to help M see that if she gets her homework and chores done when we ask rather than dilly-dallying she’d get to bed earlier and get more sleep. This has been something we’ve been working on for a while and I’m sure will continue to work on for a while.

Some of our strategies in this situation are to:

1) Give her the opposite of what she thinks she will get – like we did when she got to take a hot bath in lieu of a ‘punishment’. Once, we took her out to ice cream after an epic tantrum in a restaurant and we actually had a really great conversation over ice cream about how she has every right to be angry because of everything she went through with her birth family, but that she has to channel her behavior appropriately. Life is about choices, we tell her. She can choose to be angry and mean or she can choose to try and help others who've maybe even been through similar things. We've told her we'll support her however she wants to do this if this is what she wants to do. This example resonates with her as we have a doctor she sees who was once held hostage by gorillas in Mexico (not the animal gorillas), had a gun put to his head and now he is one of her favorite people to go see because he is so positive - he chose to help others!

2) Do something shocking – for a while when she would tantrum if I started making loud, weird monkey noises (or if at home I’d start dancing – anything to get her back on track with reality) she’d start laughing and immediately change out of her funk – this worked well in the car with just her and I -- when I do this now, she is horrified because, well, everyone around us MUST be watching us :).

During our PRIDE training one of the trainers told us about a child she had who continually had tantrums in the grocery store when they went shopping. Well, one day they went shopping for groceries in another town and the trainer decided she was going to have a tantrum. She got on the floor and started screaming and flailing her arms. The child was aghast but even better stopped having tantrums in the store.

3) Give her time alone to calm down be it in her room or her walking w/ the dog. We've done this in restaurants - she has to sit in the waiting area until our food comes at which point one of us will go get her and she can eat with us if she is nice or we take her food home for her to finish (we make this clear to her ahead of time so she can refocus herself). I've done this in the mall by having her stand somewhere specific in the store where we can see one another but we're not together.

4) Give her food –sometimes she will be upset and we’ll realize she hasn’t eaten in a while (for this reason we always have spare snacks with us in the car). She and I were in Costco once and she was just being rotten. I kept hoping someone would tell her how awful she was being, but that didn't happen. I finally looked at her and said, "Do you want some pizza?" She immediately stopped her nastiness and said, "Yes!"

What strategies do you use when your child is so wound up they can’t function appropriately?

RAD behavior management strategies

So, RAD consequences are a bit counter intuitive and so some of the best saying to get M to rethink her actions are a bit different, as well.


Some of my favorite RAD-ish saying and strategies are:

When she is trying to maintain control:   Are you being the parent or the child?

She tries, at times, to gain control of the situation because w/ her birth family this is what she did – she was in the position where she had to fend for herself all the time and so we’ve been working hard to reteach her how to be a kid – and do kid things. This saying forces her to acknowledge her role is to be the child. We are the parents and she does not have to do anything but be a kid.

When she is acting immature:    Are you acting 5 (or however old) or are you acting 12 (insert the child’s current age)?

 Then we’ll talk about how someone who is 12 behaves verse someone who is 5 (or whatever age). Of course, there are times where it is appropriate for her to act young because she didn’t get her needs met at those ages. For instance, in the tub she has toys and though she doesn’t play with them as much as when she first moved in, she still plays with them off and on.


When she isn’t following directions:   What did I ask you to do?  (Meaning she repeats back to me what she was told to do)

We use this when she has been given directions but has either gotten off task or has done something she wasn’t told to do. Having her repeat directions to us before she starts chores or does multiple step tasks does help increase her level of success.

The kicker...

When she is REALLY being nasty and we’re in public (we've used this in the mall the most often) to get her head thinking straight we will tell her, “M, you need to spit out your attitude.” She refuses and we’ll tell her again. Eventually she spits it out on the ground (at this point she is just spitting once on the ground). Then we tell her, “Ok, now say, ‘goodbye’ to your attitude.” She then looks at us and says, “Do I have to?” with that pre-teen glare.  “Yes, you have to.” She says, “Goodbye attitude” while looking at the ground at her attitude. Then, we lastly tell her she needs to stomp on her attitude. If this doesn’t make her smile and/or laugh (this is, afterall, pretty ridiculous!) or at least change her attitude some, we make her stomp more and the combination of her stomping and noticing that people might be looking at her (of course, being 12 she is sure everyone is always watcher her), gets her out of her funk.