Dealing with tantrums

Most children throw tantrums. These setbacks and regressions indicate that the child has veered from positive behavior largely due to misunderstanding and ignorance of the child's parents or care givers.

These character defects are of two types. Those shown by strong children like fits of rage, insubordination, aggression and disobedience. The other is shown by weak children and they are passive by nature example includes idleness, lies, stealing, lack of appetite and craving for attention. These defects could affect the child's mental life .An example is his/her inability to develop moral awareness which should ordinarily appear between the ages of 6 and 12.His/her intellectual capacity may become subnormal due to these defects. Physically, the child may have insatiable appetite thereby overeating and causing other physical illness or the child may lack the appetite to eat resulting in physical problems associated with under eating or over eating.

Children's character defects can be normalised if the right conditions prevail. One of the major character traits of the normalised child is concentration. For concentration to be achieved, the task provided for the child has to engage his whole personality. It has to be freely chosen by the child so as to engage his interest. The child must not be disturbed not even to give him/her praise or encouragement he/she should be left alone to concentrate.

Work is another trait of the normalized child. This work is done with his/her hands, with real things and is accompanied by mental concentration. Children wish and should be given the freedom to choose their work spontaneously, this brings them joy and serenity.

The normalised child prefers disciplined task to futile idleness. He is quite the opposite of the child who shows character defects of aimless clumsy movement and a wandering mind that comes from a lack of organized personality. Discipline springs up spontaneously when freedom is given to the child. Whenever I try to cajole my son to do something I find interesting, everything ends up in chaos but when I let him do his own thing, he shows enthusiasm, serenity and perfect discipline.

The normalised child shows a degree of intelligence and learns to live in peace with himself and others exhibiting a sense of sociability.

Our roles as parents and caregivers changes as the child's normalisation emerges and develops. There is usually no reasoning involved because at their early age children cannot understand reasoning. There are times I try to get my 3 year old son to behave better by reasoning with him. When I do not get the expected result, I get frustrated thinking he is refusing to cooperate on purpose now I understand he simply has no sense of reasoning. An activity should be introduced and everything but the object of the lesson should be removed to check distraction. The object chosen must be suitable for the particular child and should be placed in such a way that he takes a keen interest in it.

The child should then be observed and it should be decided whether to go up to the child, to with draw, speak or keep silent according to the needs of the child.

Then take the role of a guide, check to see that there are no errors because errors prevents the child from being able to concentrate ,therefore defeating the aim of the normalisation process.

If the child carries out the activity correctly, that is in a manner which shows intelligence, he/she can be permitted to continue in repetition without interruption whatsoever.

The changes appear all of a sudden. It exhibits itself in form of deep concentration on some activity.

The problems associated with character formation, lack of character or character defects disappear of themselves when mothers, care givers and teachers allow the children work at interesting activities to feed his/her mental hunger and allow them work without unnecessary interruptions or assistance. Infact, once the conditions under which the children live is normalised, character defects will cease to be a problem.

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