Living With Live Wires

First, try to identify and stop the trigger when at all possible.  When children are experiencing a spill-over tantrum they often cannot stop themselves.  They need us to help them gain control and calm down.

Mary Sheedy Kurchinka (2006), in Raising Your Spirited Child, has several suggestions to help parents deal with spill-over tantrums:

Stop the Flood

Stay With or Near Your Child

Touch Your Child

Try Distraction

Give Your Child Space

Encourage Your Child to Move

I have personally tried all these techniques before reading this book out of instinct.  I spend a lot of time making sure that our schedule is not overbooked with overstimulated events.  That usually works, but it takes a lot of vigilance.  I consider staying with your child and touching your child very important, especially for younger children.  As they get older, they may want some space.  My son does need to move around to work out the tension and overstimulation at times.  It is like getting the fire out of the body.

Overall, keep a list of options in your mind to try with your child to see what works best to control their environment and what is effective to calm and soothe them.

See part 3 of this series for more ideas on how to deal with spill-over tantrums.

For more detailed instructions and for much more on how to deal with spirited children, get the book by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, Raising Your Spirited Child, .

For the “normal” tantrums, follow the traditional advice.  But, if you are experiencing a spill-over tantrum with your spirited child, a few other strategies are needed. 

Mary Sheedy Kurchinka (2006), in Raising Your Spirited Child, states:

A spill-over tantrum can’t be stopped by ignoring it because your child is dealing with a tempermental issue that has triggered a physical reaction and sent him squarely into the red zone.  Your child needs you to help him discover the source of the emotional flood and stop it.  He needs your direction to help him calm himself and regain self-control.  Without that direction, he can rage for hours because his inner restrtaints have busted, letting loose a hurricane of wild emotions.

How do you begin to handle spill-over tantrums since they can begin in infancy and continue throughout childhood?

Identify Triggers and Keep Your Cool

Kurchinka continues,

It’s much easier to keep your cool when you can quickly identify the reason for the spill-over tantrum.

Identify Peak Times 

Kurchinka advises parents to keep track of the times that there children tend to have more tantrums.  It could be a day of the week, or a particular time of day.  Late afternoons are prime time for melt-downs after a full day of stimulating activity.  Also check for times when your own stress is high. Kids go through developmental surges when change in their bodies can be rapid.  Check around the time of their birthday and their half birthday for times when they are more cranky and uncooperative.  Check for difficulties during transition times, such as getting up and getting out of the house.  And, be aware of empty energy banks.  Introverts may need more time alone to recharge, and extroverts may need more time to play with friends.  

I know from my own experience that it can be crucial to make sure your child is fed on a regular schedule to avoid low blood sugar. Activity levels may need to be adjusted to avoid overstimulation.  It is a common practice of some parents to have their kids run around to burn off extra energy.  But with intense spirited children, you may be fueling the fire and setting them up for more stimulation.  It may look like your child is relaxing while they are watching TV, but TV and video-games may be adding more fuel to the overstimulating fire.  

Engage your best observational skills and see if you can identify triggers.  The first defense against tantrums is to try and prevent, or modulate their intensity before they get out of control.

What if your child is already into a spill-over tantrum?  Check out part 2 and part 3 of this series.

Recently I posted a few comments about how to handle Four-Year Old tantrums.

Part 1
Part 2

Those posts included some of the traditional advice for parents to use to handle tantrums. And, there are many times that advice works quite well. But, do gifted children have different types of tantrums that require different strategies?

Yes they can. Many gifted children are highly sensitive. This sensitivity can be to many things – physical sensations and aversions (tags on clothes, seams on socks, loud noises, bright lights, crowds of people, overstimulating environments), stress from multiple sources (home, school, social settings), and most of all, emotional intensity and sensitivity in response to the other stimulating situations.

Many of the intellectually gifted kids also have emotional overexcitabilities.  This means that a lot of gifted children are very emotionally sensitive. Some kids are introverted and withdraw, others are more outwardly intense. Whatever the temperament of the child, the emotional sensitivity to various overstimulating and stressful situations can cause a melt-down.  Mary Sheedy Kurchinka describes sensitive, intense and persistent children as “spirited.”

Mary Sheedy Kurchinka (2006) in Raising Your Spirited Child, describes spill-over tantrums that many spirited children experience,

Beth’s tantrum looked like a classic temper tantrum.  it sounded like one, too, but it wasn’t.  As I talked with Beth’s mom, I relized that Beth’s tantrum had nothing to do with power or getting attention.  It wasn’t even meant as a personal attack on her mother.  Her tantrum had been building for hours, even days.  for the last three weeks her father had been locked in negotiation meetings from six in the morning until well past midnight.  Alone at home with three preschoolers, Mom was exhausted and short on patience.  Beth is spirited.  Beth is temperamentally sensitive.  She absorbed the stress and strains her family was experiencing until she reached her limit.  Then she blew, literally knocking her mother down in the process.  This is a spill-over tantrum.

Kurchinka continues,

Dr. Stella Chess and Alexander Thomas were the first to describe spill-over tantrums.  In thier now-classic book, Know Your Child, they define a spill-over tantrum as “an outpouring of emotiontion in a disorganized way.”  The genetic makeup of spirited children that fosters a tendency toward steamy reactions makes them much more vulnerable to spill-over tantrums – a flood of emotions that overwhelms them and pushes them beyond their temperamental ability to cope.  In my experience, most of the tantrums experienced by spirited chidlren are actually spill-over tantrums.  They are not premeditated.  They are not intended to manipulate.

So, if spill-over tantrums are so common in sensitive and spirited children, how do you handle these tantrums differently?

This week, the math assignments included learning how to tell time in 24 hour time, which I have always called, military time, since I used it during the years I was in the Air National Guard.

Sean was a little resistant to learning the new way to read time until I thought of a creative way to integrate it into their lives that made sense. Sean and Sophie often imagine they are secret agents and Sean has announced recently that he plans on becoming one when he grows up. The themes of agent life have become commonplace in our home.

I told Sean that if he wanted to become an agent, he would have to use 24 hour time to communicate with the other agents. I explained the reasons why they use that method of telling time to reduce errors in crucial moments, such as war plans and secret missions. We went through scenarios of what could happen if they didn’t use 24 hour time to communicate with each other. Their missions and people’s lives could be at stake if they got the time mixed up by not understanding if it was a.m. or p.m.  I also took the opportunity to share a few stories about my military days which fascinated them. I haven’t talked about those days much. Those personal stories added a new layer of meaning to these lessons.

All this really made sense to Sean and Sophie and they were very excited to learn something that secret agents relied upon in their communications. It lead to an engaging discussion. They have been using 24 hour time now for days.  And, I’m glad I could contribute to their training to become secret agents.

This was a small part of their lesson that could have been just another exercise in memorization. But, with a little creativity it can become a meaningful and fun new adventure that has become effortlessly integrated into their knowledge base and imaginary play.

Whenever possible, I look for ways to integrate their studies into themes and life experiences that already carry meaning for them. That way, the new information has something to hang on and becomes more permanent and meaningful.

Several gifted education authors talk about the creative characteristics of gifted children, from divergent thinking, to dealing with complexities to perceptions and learning styles, to having high sensitivities. These characteristics are ideal for the actualization of high creativity.

A gifted child’s view of the world is often non-traditional and divergent; he sees numerous possibilities hidden to others (Webb, Meckstroth, & Tolan, 1982)

Being able to see, hear, feel and experience aspects of life that most people miss is a necessary part of creative production (Dixon, 1983)

High levels of sensitivity may be what drives intellectual giftedness; they allow the child to pick up on vast amounts of input from his environment (Freeman, 1985).

Generally, when children are allowed to learn creatively, we unlock powerful and amazing learning potential (Rivera, 2002)

What does all this mean for me and my children? It means that we do not have to put our noses in books and worksheets to be learning and preparing for the future. We can relax about taking on creative projects that have sometimes felt like an indulgence of our time. We can relax and let the natural curiosity of the children take us to places we wouldn’t have thought of.

I place a much higher emphasis on exploring nature, of nurturing their natural abilities to closely observe differences in detail. I encourage their natural bent of divergent thinking. There is plenty of time for convergent thinking in our studies, and now I encourage, with equal emphasis, plenty of time for divergent thinking.

I attend to their observations of the world, ask more questions about what they see and feel. And, I describe to them the positive side of being highly sensitive and imaginative because of the creativity and beauty they can bring into the world. This is a completely different way of talking to and working with children than in previous generations that preferred to toughen children up and putting them down for pursuing creativity.

I pursue my own creative work  in writing, sewing, photography and whatever arts and crafts projects we try.  I let my kids see what I am doing and discuss it with them. We begin new kinds of art together and struggle through the learning process together. We appreciate the creative works of others, whether art, music, dance or drama. We love to go to plays and concerts. I try to add discussions before and after to increase their appreciation of the beauty of the performance and the hard work that goes into it.

[excerpt from my Minnesota Council for the Gifted and Talented State Conference presentation: Don't Fence Me In - Mastery, Creativity, and Adventure in the Home Education of Bright Children]