I’ve struggled to get blogs written these past few days, as Dora is having a rough week. Reality has really set in. The novelty of being here is wearing off and the realization that she is really living in another family and not “just visiting” is hitting her quite hard. We had two long, hard sessions in the rocking chair today, with Dora dealing with her mad and sad in the safety of my arms. She asked to rock this morning before we did much of anything else. It was a harbinger of things to come.


A reader recently asked, “what form does the purging take?” The reader wondered if hitting, biting, screaming and kicking were involved, and what was required to access the feelings, if any, that were behind the tantrum. These are all great questions.


I once had a foster daughter whose meltdowns always included tons of cussing, biting, kicking, spitting and just about any other form of damage she could inflict. Dora’s are not at all that way, nor are Beth’s. Dora and Beth just cry or wail—sometimes with a primal sound that rocks me to my core. It is the sound of what I call “the blue baby.”


Although Beth and Dora’s meltdowns are far easier to endure physically than my former foster daughter’s tantrums, I suspect they all originate in the same place. These kids have many good reasons to be angry or sad. Healthy, happy children who have a sense of value, who live in structured environments with expectations and accountability, and who know they are loved don’t need to have meltdowns. That is not to say they don’t “fall apart” occasionally under stress or acute emotional experiences—only that regular tantrums are not a part of their daily repertoire. Certainly, I never experienced anything like that with Steph or Kyle, and I most certainly didn’t consider that to be a behavior that would have netted me any benefit in my family of origin.


I think kids tantrum because they have deep emotions that do need to be purged. A healthy toddler who is experiencing limitations on his freedoms is angry, and he has little control over his anger. The limitations may be very appropriate, but his anger is real nevertheless. Our kids have very real reasons to be angry, and often they have the emotional development of very young children. Compound that by the fact that perhaps few, if any, adults in their environment recognize these tantrums as a legitimate expression of deep emotion (but rather consider them to be just one more negative behavior on a long list of negative behaviors), and the result is often an explosion of frustration from the child.


Don’t get me wrong … I am not advocating allowing a child to kick, hit, bite or damage people or property in the “legitimate” expression of emotion. That is not appropriate. That is not a healthy response. However, I do think it originates in most cases from some very legitimate sources of anger.


I’ll address this more in my next post, and talk about ways to perhaps get some better mileage out of these offloading experiences.


By the way, I've become a "comment junkie" and all of the sudden you all quit commenting! Anyone out there? This is my lifeline to folks over the age of ten!


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