Tantrum Report

This last week has been a bad one for tantrums.

Thursday night, at bedtime, he had one of the worst tantrums I've ever seen. It lasted an hour but felt like an eternity. Screaming, crying, door slamming, "mom and dad aren't being very nice to me! If Mom and Dad aren't nice to me, I'm not going to be nice to them! Butthead farthead poopoohead peepeehead idiot jerks!"

He went into this "must have control" mode around bedtime. The first demand was that I sleep in the same bed as him, and of course I reminded him I couldn't do that. He knows that. And I would let him go to sleep in the same bed as me, on special occasions, if not for the fact that it's against foster care regulations in the state of Georgia and he could conceivably be removed for it, which is something I am never, ever, ever going to risk. So he basically used the refusal of an impossible request as the trigger to start a huge tantrum. We tried talking it out, we tried ignoring, I tried locking myself in my room... nothing seemed to work. Finally, after an hour, when he was much more tired, we laid down the law and told him he was just about to lose his Gameboy, his 6-year birthday present from his foster mom. We were going to mail it back to his foster mom and she could give it to one of his brothers or sisters. That snapped him out of it and we were able to put him to bed.

He was fine the next day and had pretty good behavior in school and then through the weekend.

Then this morning he had another fit. It started with him having a nightmare at 5:30 in the morning and wetting the bed. He came in our bedroom to tell us. I just told him to put his pad in the basket, change his pajama bottoms and go back to sleep. No one was angry at him. I gave him a big hug.

Then he kept yelling "goodnight!" and "see you in the morning!" at us. For half an hour. And knocking on our door to ask us questions. Could he listen to the radio. Sure, whatever he wanted as long as it wasn't too loud. What time were we getting up. Seven. Did he have to take a shower in the morning. Yes. The last time he knocked on our door we both yelled "STOP YELLING AT US!" and then it was on. "Mom and dad aren't being nice to me! Idiot jerks!" And the door slamming... we'd turned on the house alarm the night before, and he slammed his door so hard that it set off the alarm and a piercing siren woke up half the neighborhood before Guy could race to the panel and turn it off.

As a consequence, after school today he is going to have to knock on the doors of our closest neighbors and apologize for waking them up at 6 in the morning.

What a crappy morning. He apologized and was subdued for a while, then had another mini-fit when it was time to go to school. I always refuse to take him to school when he has an issue like this (it actually isn't very common). I just tell him I won't take him to school -- I'll simply wait -- until he has calmed down and made up, and if we have to be late, we'll be late, and we'll go to class together and tell his teacher exactly why he's late.

There's a song he likes from Wow Wow Wubbzie that goes "don't lie, don't lie, don't blame it on the other guy." I told him that he needed to take responsibility for not controlling his anger better. When he blamed his tantrums on "Mom and Dad not being nice to me" that was like lying and blaming the other guy.

My husband feels terrible. He knows he's not supposed to let his buttons get pushed, but says getting called things like "poopoohead" by his son is unavoidably painful. He gets really, really hurt and angry. I don't lose my head, but I've noticed I have a tendency to go into a cold, resentful state, like this morning. I didn't hug Sunny goodbye before school, and I should have. I know it's going to bother him that I didn't.

I don't know if there's anything we can do to prevent the tantrums. They're a difficult mix of calculation and uncontrollable emotional surges. They can't consistently be hugged away or reasoned away or bargained away. They're exhausting, but they don't fill me with despair like they do to my husband. We're having family therapy tonight and I think most of it is going to be for Guy.

He keeps worrying that Sunny will have violent rages as a teenager and physically attack us. I think that's really unreasonable. You also have to understand, Guy has also worried about the future too much. This is someone who gave a two-year leave notice at his last job. Oh yes, and he started worrying about getting divorced before we ever got married. We didn't even have any relationship problems, he just had this premonition we might get divorced, and to this day has the occasional nightmare about it. It's a character trait I've gotten used to.

Nevertheless, the last thing I want to hear when I'm in bed at night worrying about Sunny is Guy's detailed scenario of how Sunny is going to start punching holes in our wall as a teenager, we'll have to spend all this money on fixing the holes, then we'll have to call the police on him, and we'll want to send him to military school but they won't take him and blah blah blah.

I'm a fatalist, not a pessimist. I expect things to muddle through. If something bad happens, it's going to happen, so I might as well not worry about it. I've made it clear to Guy that I think all his scenarios do is send him off down a depression spiral.

Plus, military school is not going to happen and I find the whole concept bizarre. I used to be in an environment where I heard a lot of gossip from military boarding school, and the gossip was all about -- can you guess? -- homosexual rape and prostitution! Military school is almost as bad as prison or a freaking pirate ship! I think whether you're actually gay or straight is irrelevant in those environments... it's all about unhealthy power imbalances and hierarchies. Anyway, this is probably more detail than I intended, but I'm against single-sex education, even for girls. It's true there are certain advantages for girls that there aren't for boys, but ultimately, children need to learn how to have friendly, respectful, diverse kinds of relationships with the other half of the world that doesn't share their sex. I think that's a crucial goal, and sex segregation does not lead towards it.

Anyway, rant about military school aside, Guy is a a great husband and a great father and needs to stop tormenting himself, and in the process, exhausting me because I keep having to tell him to stop tormenting himself. However, on the positive side, at least we talk about this stuff between the two of us. It's a simmering pot but the lid isn't clamped down.

Sunny has been doing well, it's just these tantrums really color my perception.

His 1st grade ITBS scores came back, and they were pretty good. The majority were in the top 25th percentile. The scores that were bad all had to do with listening. I'm sure he's capable of much better when his focus increases.

I've decided on a place for neurofeedback and am setting up an initial appointment.