Living With Live Wires

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?