draught
07-05-2005, 20:03
We have just had a horrible day and I thought I would see if anyone else has had similar experiences, and whether this is normal 2 year old behaviour or whether we should be looking for larger problems. I have a 2 year old who screams when she is upset. She cries, her face goes red, her nose runs and she screams as if she is being tortured - ear piercing, loud and long. It happens as part of a tantrum, but also happens in social settings where it is hard to work out whether it is part of a tantrum, or because she is afraid of something.
Today's example was at the Qld Orchestra Kiddies Cushion concert (which is a great outing if all goes to plan). She baulked at going in, as she does in many situations when there are people in a room she has to enter, and once the music started, she starting crying, which quickly escalated to screaming. It only stopped when I took her out of the room. Various efforts to reintroduce her to the room didn't work - the screaming/crying started again. Other examples include swimming lessons, which we stopped because it happened every week. She was happy in the pool until the lesson started when she started to scream and cling to me, as if she was terrified, when she had been quite happy playing in the water seconds before. The most tortuous example was on a flight to NZ (tortuous because there was no escape for anyone) when she began screaming before we had left the terminal and screamed for one and a half hours.
When it happens at home I can normally see the causes (me saying no to something is the usual cause) and some time out in her room is the solution. In these social settings though, I can't work out if it is a tantrum, or if she is frightened, or both, and have no idea what to do. She normally upsets every other child in a large radius, so their parents are not impressed, and I feel like a complete failure, with everyone looking at me. Part of me wants to comfort her and part of me wants her to snap out of it - and neither approach is very successful. Normally the only thing I can do is get her to laugh at something, and that breaks the mood, but on days like today when she won't laugh, nothing seems to work. Any suggestions on how to manage this, and to help her, are gratefully received!
One thought we had was that she could be over sensitive to loud noise - does any one else have this experience?
Today's example was at the Qld Orchestra Kiddies Cushion concert (which is a great outing if all goes to plan). She baulked at going in, as she does in many situations when there are people in a room she has to enter, and once the music started, she starting crying, which quickly escalated to screaming. It only stopped when I took her out of the room. Various efforts to reintroduce her to the room didn't work - the screaming/crying started again. Other examples include swimming lessons, which we stopped because it happened every week. She was happy in the pool until the lesson started when she started to scream and cling to me, as if she was terrified, when she had been quite happy playing in the water seconds before. The most tortuous example was on a flight to NZ (tortuous because there was no escape for anyone) when she began screaming before we had left the terminal and screamed for one and a half hours.
When it happens at home I can normally see the causes (me saying no to something is the usual cause) and some time out in her room is the solution. In these social settings though, I can't work out if it is a tantrum, or if she is frightened, or both, and have no idea what to do. She normally upsets every other child in a large radius, so their parents are not impressed, and I feel like a complete failure, with everyone looking at me. Part of me wants to comfort her and part of me wants her to snap out of it - and neither approach is very successful. Normally the only thing I can do is get her to laugh at something, and that breaks the mood, but on days like today when she won't laugh, nothing seems to work. Any suggestions on how to manage this, and to help her, are gratefully received!
One thought we had was that she could be over sensitive to loud noise - does any one else have this experience?