I’ve seen high-needs babies throw tantrums, and the destruction of the universe is nothing.

When Su Bao was a little over two years old, he officially entered the \”terrible two years old\” period of high-need babies. In fact, the title of this article was typed out a year ago when Su Bao cried hysterically for nearly half an hour. I typed it out in despair, and then I kept it there, thinking that one day this stage would pass. , I will also write a countermeasure post from the perspective of an experienced driver. Unexpectedly, the terrible two years really lasted for a whole year. Parents of babies with high needs must know the kind of physical and mental exhaustion that crying babies of two or three years old bring to adults. I remember that when Su Bao was two and a half years old, which was also the eighth month I was pregnant with Guozi, she would cry almost every day. One time when Su Bao was eating, there were some corn kernels in her pasta. She took one look at it and cried. I explained that I couldn\’t pick out the corns one by one. When Su Bao heard this, he cried so much that he almost couldn\’t bear it. Nothing I said was of any use. Another time, Guozi was just one month old, and I was shopping for groceries in the supermarket with my two children. It was almost noon and Su Bao was already a little hungry. The queue at the checkout was extremely long, and Guozi started to get irritable at this time. I held the crying fruit in one hand and pushed the shopping cart with the other hand. Su Bao, who didn\’t get any attention, just lay down on the ground and started to cry loudly. No matter how much we tried to persuade him, he couldn\’t stop it. All the shopping people avoided us and gave me sympathetic looks. Thinking about it, I was also strong at that time. Even though my heart was about to collapse, I still took Su Bao to a corner where there was no one there and calmly stayed with her until she calmed down. From the age of two to three, my family\’s high-needs Su Bao would cry, fuss, and hang himself almost every day, and now he only gets a little moody occasionally. After getting through this little by little, I finally gained some insights. One of the biggest changes in my perspective on my baby\’s tantrums this year is from thinking desperately, \”I have to do something to calm my baby down\” to \”I have to deal with this to myself first.\” consumption to a minimum.\” Therefore, when faced with a high-need baby throwing a tantrum, the things you should not do are: 1- Be reasonable 2- Lose your temper 3- Compromise with the child Because: First, when a high-need baby throws a tantrum, she is actually no longer on the earth. At that moment, she couldn\’t hear or see, and her understanding ability had degraded to the level of a baby. No matter what adults did, the effect was actually not good (just like Su\’s father often said helplessly: She\’s gone). Secondly, when the baby\’s emotions explode, , if adults cannot protect themselves, the child will give adults the feeling of powerlessness, bruises and despair, which is actually the invisible killer in the parent-child relationship. Only by protecting a mother\’s own emotions can she have enough energy and mood to teach her children to deal with their emotions. The Montessori kindergarten teacher at Subao has often talked to me recently. When a baby loses his temper, it is the right brain that dominates emotion, not the left brain that dominates logic. It is useless to reason with the child at this time. (This theory comes from scientist Daniel Siegel’s whole-brain culture method). Of course, don\’t compromise with your children, because then the children will think that as long as they are hysterical, they can get the attention and permission of adults. Through constant trial and error this year, I have learned which methods are not effective.After it worked, I summarized a set of more useful methods for dealing with Su Bao, which is divided into 3 steps: Step 1: Adjust your psychological expectations. Your plan for today may be ruined. Su Bao usually breaks down and cries often in the morning. After 11 o\’clock or before nap, because of these two points, she is hungry or tired, but she still can\’t understand why she feels uncomfortable, so she is particularly prone to losing her temper. Sometimes Su Bao would refuse to eat lunch because he was hungry. As a result, the more he cried, the more hungry he became, and he was about to destroy the earth in minutes. As a stay-at-home mother, what I look forward to most every day is noon. I have a good lunch with Su Bao and read a few picture books. Then her lunch break is also my writing time. If this happens, Su Bao will basically make a fuss until 1 o\’clock, and then spend another hour to calm her down, and she won\’t even take a nap. I was actually very upset when this happened, because it meant that the official account would have to be updated again. So every time Su Bao lost her temper during lunch break, I felt particularly uncomfortable and always wanted to calm her down as soon as possible. But often the more anxious I am to appease her, the worse the situation gets and the angrier I get. In the end, both adults and children are exhausted physically and mentally, and I also blame myself very much. Then I finally realized that with children, a day can be unpredictable. When a high-needs baby throws a tantrum, you must take a psychological precaution: your baby may eat late today, or he may not be able to go to the zoo where he bought tickets. Then be flexible with the rest of the day and tell yourself: This is not my fault. In the past year, I lost my temper suddenly because of Su Bao. Halfway through the supermarket shopping, I returned the shopping cart to the staff and went home directly. I also took her on a trip abroad. I had carefully arranged a day\’s activities, but in the end, because Su Bao was too big Instead of crying, I spent the entire afternoon reading picture books with her in the hotel room. Although the plan fell through, when I lowered my psychological expectations to an extremely low level, the negative impact of the baby\’s emotional explosion on me would be very small. Step 2: Think of the child in front of you as yourself when you were a child. Many parenting books say that you need to be empathetic when your child loses his temper. But true empathy is easier said than done. For example, when Su Bao cried loudly because he spilled the water he was carrying, and frantically pulled all the toys and picture books in his room from the bookshelf, and rolled in the pile of toys (the scene of the disaster), it would be difficult for me to restrain myself. anger. Whenever this happens, I take a deep breath, pull myself away from the scene, and then imagine Su Bao in front of me as myself when I was a child, to feel her mood at the moment. This method works great for me because every time I imagine the child having a tantrum as myself, my anger and anxiety disappear. When I go back in time, I see myself, and what I think about is how I would want my mother to treat me if that child were me. Suddenly I could feel the rage and powerlessness of a child who thought he could control the entire universe but couldn\’t even hold a bowl of water. At this time, I felt deep pity in my heart, and I just wanted to hold her and tell her that it was okay to be angry and that my mother was here. After I deal with my own emotions, it will be much easier to take the next steps. Step 3: Think of yourself as a robot Back to the beginning of the articleThe misunderstanding mentioned: Thinking desperately, “I must do something to calm my child down.” I did the same thing during the initial period of Subao T2, but it didn\’t work at all. If I say a word or touch her, she will collapse even more. If I walk away, she will cry to the point of dying. Later, one time I was so disheartened by Su Bao\’s troubles that I simply sat there neither talking nor moving, just accompanying her. After Su Bao collapsed, he actually recovered on his own and didn\’t need my help at all. It turned out that this blank space gave her a chance to practice handling her emotions. Later, whenever Su Bao was in the vortex of a temper storm and couldn\’t listen to advice at all, I would try to restrain my impulse to intervene and imagine myself as a robot. The robot will not get angry because humans are angry, because it does not have this function in its program. It will only accompany humans quietly. At this time, I will calm down and think about other things, such as where to go on the weekend. The robot itself has no emotions, but it will repeat the child\’s expression – to put it simply, if Su Bao says \”I don\’t want to wear shoes!\” when he cries, the robot will also say \”Yes, you don\’t want to wear shoes.\” \”; Su Bao said \”I don\’t want to go home!\”, and the robot would also say \”Yes, you don\’t want to go home.\” This kind of mechanical repetition is a \”magic\” that helps Su Bao calm down quickly. I also call it \”mechanical empathy.\” Many times, children break down and cry because of the frustration caused by \”not getting it\” or \”can\’t do it.\” Although the robot\’s approach is relatively low-level, it is saying \”Yes, I see your frustration. I can understand you.\” Usually, as long as I use the first three steps, Su Bao won\’t cry for too long. Once she calms down, I hold her and talk to her about what made her angry. One time when Su Bao was painting, because she used too much force and had too much paint, the brush punctured the paper. She desperately tried to repair it with her hands, but the more it punctured, the more the paper was punctured. Su Bao was so angry that he tore up the painting. came down and tore into pieces. I didn\’t clean up the scraps of paper on the floor. Instead, I waited for her to finish crying and pointed at the scraps of paper and said, \”Look, this is how you looked angry just now.\” Su Bao stared at them thoughtfully for a long time. She finds it interesting that abstract emotions become intuitive objects. What is gratifying is that after the age of three, Su Bao seemed to have changed as a person and became more reasonable and easier to discuss in many matters. If someone had told me a year ago that Su Bao would become so reasonable, I would never have believed it. Therefore, the growth of children is also a process of opening up the imagination of parents. Shao Hua flies by, and the child will grow up in the blink of an eye. As long as you are patient and have faith, you will find that almost every challenge in parenting comes in stages. The tantrums we lost at this stage were a headache at the time, but looking back more than ten years later, they may become a joke for us after dinner.