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Tantrum Therapy: Expressing Alternative Behaviors

Children have different ways of coping with things, depending on their personality. Some children may be extremely easy going, so that you almost never notice them. Others may be too friendly, and you worry about strangers stealing them from right under your nose. Some children are dare devils; some could care less. But every child has a temper that is exposed from time to time.

When my children were little, I used to read them stories about things like sharing, working as a team, noticing their environment. I would to talk to them about feelings, both good and bad. We played a game where I would ask them to show me how it looked to be happy, silly, angry and mad. When we played this game with anger feelings, they would make a very mean, ugly face. Sometimes they would stomp their feet. Most of the time, they would make guttural sounds with their throats. We would have contests to see who could sound worse.

Once my children understood what it looked like to be so angry, we would talk about how it must feel to get really angry. We would read stories with characters who regretted getting mad, and I would let my children tell me how those characters dealt with their feelings. This was extremely helpful because my children learned to verbalize their feelings. They began to understand that talking about your feelings is sometimes better than acting them out.

Some of the skills my children developed from this were asking for what you want. They learned to determine what they were after, and then decide how to go about getting it. They also learned to calculate risks. My son rarely tried to take something from his sister without asking. She was six years older, and he already knew what she looked like when she got angry from the game we played.

Another thing I used to do was make up my own stories that I would share with my children. I would come up with fictional names, and odd scenarios. Then I would begin telling them a story at bath time. Throughout this little story, I would mix in anecdotes relating to their behavior. I would get them so involved in the tale, and then I would let them finish the ending. One day, my older daughter had been so angry that she actually threw something at me. I ducked, the window shattered. I screamed. She ran to her room. At bath time, after the window had been replaced, I made up a story. When she finished the ending, the angry dinosaur did not throw anything at his mommy. Instead he

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