Parents are responsible for kid’s tantrums…and this is why your tot’s terrible twos are YOUR fault

I’M likely to be hung out to dry because of what I’m going to say.

But I think that we only have ourselves to blame for some of the “awful” behaviour that is seen and heard in shops and on High Streets these days.

Which parent wouldn’t be happy to take praise for raising a “good” child?

But at a time when saying, “I’m sorry, I was to blame” is the hardest thing, which parent is prepared to take responsibility for getting it a bit wrong?

I’m less interested in criticising parents than in getting them thinking and hopefully wanting to do their bit for the future wellbeing of their own kids, as well as the future wellbeing of society.

Anecdotally, and according to some research, British toddlers are among the worst behaved in the world.
So, what’s been going wrong in recent years?

It starts early because even before giving birth, mums still “go for it” and hardly let up.

Why should a little thing like pregnancy slow us down?

So the “soup” of hormones that pre-birth babies swim in is often packed with the anxiety hormone cortisol.

This means that babies too often come out into the world primed for hyperactivity.

And then what do we do? Leave them to sleep quietly and wake slowly, to soothe themselves with softly waving reflections and shadows of trees on the ceiling?

Only tots taught to wait do really well

Nope, we surround them with noise, colour and stimulation, either because we think it’s good for them and their developing senses and creativity or because modern life is just so busy and we have got to be somewhere ten minutes ago — and they have to come with us.

With us — in our world and at our pace.

In our cars and to our places of interest.

And it doesn’t stop. Ever.

So by the time these hyper-stimulated little ones hit two, they’re fully set up for speed and impatience.

It’s only the ones who are taught to wait, to “delay gratification”, that have been shown across the board to do really well in life — psychologically, emotionally, physically and financially.

If you want to see the evidence, take a peek at the fascinating work done by Walter Mischel and his team at Stanford University in the US.

For those who have been prepped and primed to feel stim­ulated and experience things (including sweets, toys and all the rest) “coming at them” all the time, any frustration will be exper­ienced as an outrage on their personal entitlement.

At age two a child has developed new skills.

It has a sense of its own personal identity and — no longer absolutely tied to its unconscious biology — can choose how to respond to outrages against itself.

And, boy, don’t we know it!

Trouble is, too much of what we expect from them is unreasonable, and too much of what we lead them to expect from life is also unreasonable.

We expect them, having first been taught that objects are to be touched and experienced, to then be able to understand that objects in shops cannot just be touched and experienced.

We suddenly say no to them.

How very confusing.

Or that food, happily splashed around at home and even made available on demand in many nurseries, now has to be confined (quietly) to plates in a cafe, pub or restaurant.

How very unreasonable.

At the same time, sometimes in the same places, we will give in to their screams and demands and buy the very things that they have just been told cannot stay in their hands. Hmm . . .

Placing so much focus on individual rights, on our individual entitlements to feel good about ourselves and to do things “my way” — or not to conform, ’cos that’s for doormats — all adds up to a very “me, me, me” world — the world of the US and the UK.

Put together the hyper-stimulation I’ve been talking about with the idea that me as an individual is more important than me as a small part of a bigger whole (that the grain of sand is more important than the beach) and what we have is an awful lot of wired-up kids who think that the whole world can somehow be made to do things their way — and right now, otherwise they’ll really kick off.

Sad, isn’t it, to think how unhappy they are going to be when it doesn’t quite work out that way?

Don’t we owe it to them, and to the rest of the beach, to shift their expectations a bit and to shift our own quite a bit further?

Less really may be more when it comes to expectations.

And slower really may be faster when it comes to growing up happily.

• Gillian Bridge is a former teacher turned therapist. Her book The Significance Delusion: Unlocking Our Thinking for Our Children’s Future is out now.