02:47:00
Why has traditional temper tantrum advice, both historically and currently, failed to help parents totally eliminate their children's temper tantrums? The three faulty concepts behind traditional temper tantrum advice are partly the reason. The first misguided concept is that children under one year or six months old can't experience real anger or have real temper tantrums. Many child development experts perceive newborn babies as not yet emotionally functional-or not yet capable of experiencing real live emotions. The expressions of angry sounds that babies make aren't real anger, we're told. They're simply the babies' instinctual crying responses to hunger, pain, and other discomforts.
What could these experts possibly believe magically happens at the age of six months or a year that allows a baby to finally be angry when sounding angry? I'm guessing that it's something like a baby gradually acquiring fine-motor skills or gradually learning a language. I realized many years ago that I disagreed with this concept and I wondered how these experts could believe that babies were pre-functional in their emotional expression. It isn't like we can actually see that a screaming baby is or isn't angry just like we can see whether or not a baby can pick up tiny objects. According to its definition, an emotion is an un-seeable state of mental being, and we can only process our perception of it.
If, for example, spouses appeared to be angry with each other, it wouldn't be a guarantee that they were. Conversely, if spouses appeared to not be angry with each other, it wouldn't be a guarantee that they weren't. It's really easy to imagine adults who are experiencing alternative emotions from what they appear to be experiencing. Only the people experiencing the emotions can for sure know what is going on for them emotionally. And that applies to babies and children, too.
I'm not sure how our current theorists arrived at such a scientifically unproven concept of emotional pre-functioning. I'm thinking, though, that they must have been taught these ideas at a university graduate level. That's where they studied the accumulated learning of the previous generation of child development experts. That generation, likewise, may have gleaned this belief from their own ancestral scholars who were behaviorism-based and generally viewed all subjective phenomena (such as emotions) as irrelevant-even for adults.
It seems to me that someone, somewhere, sometime simply made up this concept out of thin air and then most other theorists just went along with it. Even though we've had a lengthy social failure to understand babies and young children as fully functional emotional human beings, the newer understanding can help parents recognize their infants' real anger and temper tantrum behaviors.
What could these experts possibly believe magically happens at the age of six months or a year that allows a baby to finally be angry when sounding angry? I'm guessing that it's something like a baby gradually acquiring fine-motor skills or gradually learning a language. I realized many years ago that I disagreed with this concept and I wondered how these experts could believe that babies were pre-functional in their emotional expression. It isn't like we can actually see that a screaming baby is or isn't angry just like we can see whether or not a baby can pick up tiny objects. According to its definition, an emotion is an un-seeable state of mental being, and we can only process our perception of it.
If, for example, spouses appeared to be angry with each other, it wouldn't be a guarantee that they were. Conversely, if spouses appeared to not be angry with each other, it wouldn't be a guarantee that they weren't. It's really easy to imagine adults who are experiencing alternative emotions from what they appear to be experiencing. Only the people experiencing the emotions can for sure know what is going on for them emotionally. And that applies to babies and children, too.
I'm not sure how our current theorists arrived at such a scientifically unproven concept of emotional pre-functioning. I'm thinking, though, that they must have been taught these ideas at a university graduate level. That's where they studied the accumulated learning of the previous generation of child development experts. That generation, likewise, may have gleaned this belief from their own ancestral scholars who were behaviorism-based and generally viewed all subjective phenomena (such as emotions) as irrelevant-even for adults.
It seems to me that someone, somewhere, sometime simply made up this concept out of thin air and then most other theorists just went along with it. Even though we've had a lengthy social failure to understand babies and young children as fully functional emotional human beings, the newer understanding can help parents recognize their infants' real anger and temper tantrum behaviors.
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