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Summary: Crying cures infants of early trauma
Review: <dd><b><i><font size="+3" color="#990000">T</font>ears and Tantrums</i></b> is Dr. Solter's third book. Subtitled: <b><i>What To Do When Babies and Children Cry,</i></b> it could just as well have been subtitled, Preventing Neurosis in Children and Resolving Birth Trauma. The Swiss-American developmental psychologist has written what may well be her finest work and which should be widely read and more importantly put into practice by all parents. Her advice about what to do with crying and rageful children is clearly explained and could easily be applied but unfortunately most mothers and fathers raise their children the way they were raised. But don't necessarily look to primitive cultures for guidance to learn how to raise a child. According to Dr. Solter, some of these primitives have their own cultural taboos which are as detrimental to their children as some our own misunderstandings are to our children. One theme runs through <b><i>Tears and Tantrums</i></b>. and that is that preventing babies and young children from crying is not something which should be done automatically. If you find out that your infant is not hungry or thirsty, his diapers don't need changing and he is not in physical pain --- then let your baby cry and rage while you lovingly hold him or be attentive to him. Do not be deceived. It is difficult to not nurse, to not allow use of a pacifier, to not give in to excessive demands for attention, but to lovingly hold your child for as long as it takes for your child to relive and release early repressed feelings and current hurts through crying jags. Common sense and perhaps your need for peace of mind tells you to try to stop the crying! Common sense also tells you when driving a careening car on an ice slick highway, not to steer in the direction the car is traveling. In both cases, following common sense is neither correct nor helpful and may be detrimental. The author believes that the child must go with and through the pain instead of avoiding it. Too frequent nursing to prevent crying is called a "control pattern" by the author. It is a defense; a way of containing feelings, even traumatic birth feelings which are pressing for release. Besides unneeded nursing and thumb and pacifier sucking, other control patterns are hyperactivity, head banging, and excessive clinging. Some infants and young children constantly demand attention and entertainment. When this happens, a child is using still another control pattern, Solter believes, and is another way the infant or child keeps his feelings and crying at bay. What the child really needs is to connect to his feelings and not to defend against them. The parent should remove the pacifier, discontinue giving in to the child's demands for continual entertainment and attention and let the child feel its sadness and misery as completely as possible. But never ignore your baby by leaving him to cry alone. Support the infant's or child's raging grief occasionally with holding but always with loving attention. Later in life crying is strictly used as a release of tension, but infants and young children use crying in a two-fold manner. It is up to the observant parent to know whether the child has a real physical need or using a defense to keep from feeling earlier hurts. Since babies have only one method of communication, sometimes the message is not that clear. If you can't resolve or remove the hurt without resort to a control mechanism then allow your infant to cry, but always in your attentive presence. When very minor hurts trigger crying one should remember that the child is not being manipulative, but that its repressed feelings were very close to the surface. Sometimes it only takes a very small stimulus to trigger crying. This is what happens, for example, when someone else's eating of the last cookie provokes a disproportionately responsive crying reaction. Sometimes parents give in to their child's whims to stop the crying. But if this continually happens, the "attentive good parent" may cause their young child to become a demanding older child, adolescent and adult as their defense of choice continues over the years. The result will not be that your child will still be using a pacifier during high school graduation exercises, but its years of using its defense of choice will help to prevent resolution of earlier hurts which would otherwise have been resolved or lessened by the withdrawal of his control mechanism. Remember, children are not demanding because they have been spoiled, but "because <b><i>they never have had an opportunity to release pent-up feelings by crying and raging</i></b>." (Emphasis in the original text) As in her other two books, <b><i>The Aware Baby</i></b> and <b><i>Helping Young Children Flourish,</i></b> Dr. Solter recounts interesting examples of what to do taken from interactions with other children and her own children. To be a good parent, you don't need a Ph.D. in developmental psychology like Aletha J. Solter, but you do need to be able to resist the temptation to give-in and have peace at any price and do like your parents did it to you when your child cries. Dr. Solter did not write this but I believe that the price your child may pay for your mistakes in their upbringing may well be lifelong neurosis for them which may be ultimately handed down to your grandchildren. The author's <b><i>Tears and Tantrums</i> </b>has many interesting sections. Some of them concern dealing with physical hurts, crying during separations, dealing with violence, bedtime crying, helping children heal from specific traumatic events, as well as a practical applications chapter which includes a section on questions which Dr. Solter frequently hears at her workshops given in this country and in Europe. <b><i>Tears and Tantrums </i></b>also contains extensive references, suggestions for further reading as well as letters from happy parents who have successfully used her techniques. Crying is not just for babies. The author believes that everyone can and should use that mechanism unless they are too shut down. Three books and three successes! <hr> </td></tr> </table>
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Summary: Opening up my Mind and Heart
Review: "Tears and Tantrums -- What to Do When Babies and Children Cry" is a book that takes into consideration and advocates *attachment parenting* (ala Sears, Liedloff, McKenna, Thevenin, and others), *non-punitive discipline*, and *understanding and meeting our children's emotional needs*. Babies are not born with repressed feelings, but they are vulnerable to stress from mishandling and trauma from high-tech interventions. Efforts should be made to assure that babies come into the world in the most peaceful and humane way possible. It is quite passe to believe that infants feel no pain, unfortunately many babies do suffer trauma at birth, my firstborn did. What Solter's writings did for me and my husband was to open our minds and hearts to our little boy's crying. Not just the whimpers and cries to signal immediate needs (nursing, warmth, attention, closeness, being comfortable), but also to the cries he had when he was trying to recover from his hurts, or shed any stress that he was feeling. In this process, we became more attached with our son, and subsequently our daughter, too. I learned how to be present and empathetic, and nurture a close connection when my children were upset and no "fix" could be found. I took it to heart that no baby or child should ever cry alone and that one should always pick up and hold a crying baby. Solter's work gave me the confidence to try co-sleeping. When my son began to wake in the night as he approached the crawling stage, we heard about a method by Ferber but quickly rejected it, and instead we took our child into our bed so that we could better meet his needs. This book challenges some mainstream ideas about children and about the meaning of tears, I think it's an eye-opening and thoughtful book, very much worth a read.
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Summary: What a bunch of ...!
Review: ... I bought this book on a recommendation. My son throws tantrums and fits since he was 9 months old. I don't think there's been a day since that he's had a forehead without a bruise from his headbanging. This book is a bunch of [stuff] and no help whatsoever. Hopefully the 2 Dr. Sears books will provide insight.
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Summary: It really made me saddened...
Review: ...to think some parents might actually believe and use this approach.
As a breastfeeding mom to a 19 month old I found it appalling how she approaches the subject. She considers comfort nursing to be a control pattern, right up there with pacifiers. My son was an avid nurser from birth and I found that her generalized statement that older infants (by her definition 3 months old) should go 3-4 hours between sessions to be completely false. And although it is biologically proven that breastfed infants naturally wake more at night she falls back on the old standard "after 6 months they should be sleeping all night long". She states, as an aside, that there are situations where they will nurse more often, and lists them all, the problem is most of them are really common. Like growth spurts, teething etc. Again and again she contradicts herself this way.
It turns the breastfeeding mother/child relationship into a very emotionless exchange, as if it's only for food and nothing else.
In general I was appalled over and over with how she states it's not a "cry it out" method. Well, it is a cry it out method. If your child is allowed to get increasingly more distraught (which she says is proof that it's working) until they just give up from sheer exhaustion after 2 hours or so), then I don't care if you are holding them calmly the whole time. What is the difference between holding them and not listening to their wants and putting them in a crib and not listening to their wants? Is it so bad if they want love, and comfort, and human closeness? This book will tell you it is.
I took it out from the library so I didn't waste my money, I'd recommend the same if you are still remotely curious.
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Summary: Tears and Tantrums
Review: Aletha Solter deserves an award for this book! Ever since I read this book I feel like a whole new world of parenting has been opened up to me -I no longer get stressed about my baby's crying now that I understand the 'why' and putting him to bed never takes more than 10 minutes and is effortless. This is a book for everyone -not only for parents -it will help you to understand your children better and put parenting into proper perspective. This book should be mandatory for every new mom!
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Summary: Why Children Cry
Review: Crucial to the job of parenting is the necessity to create safety for a child, both emotionally and physically. This book so compassionately-and scientifically-brings that message home. My husband and I, like many parents, have struggled to overcome decades of child-rearing conditioning that told us in a zillion ways "children are to be seen and not heard." Historically, child rearing practices have advocated punishment, including corporal punishment, humiliation and pain as a way to teach children to learn, among other things, empathy, compassion, respect and responsibility. In addition to such punitive practices, there has been a cultural aversion to children expressing strong emotions, such as sadness and anger or 'tears and tantrums.' In this book, Solter lays the scientific groundwork-no doubt a product of her biology background-for the need to learn to comfort children when they cry or rage, rather than to try to stop the emotional release. Comfort, most likely, is something we would offer an adult friend who had an emotional outburst of sadness or anger, but it is not the common response given to children releasing the same emotions. In an empathetic voice, Solter explains the need to cry and rage to release stress begins at birth and never really ends. That's because all humans-including babies-have emotions and experience stress, and sometimes trauma, from the womb on. The need to cry and rage serves as a biological stress-reducing process, a necessary component of our nervous system. One profound piece of scientific research she mentions in her book to illustrate this is that researchers have discovered stress hormones, such as ACTH and cortisone, in tear drops released for emotional reasons. The stress hormones were not found in tear drops released because of an irritant, such as cut onions. That's one biological reason why we feel better after a good cry: We are eliminating the chemicals of stress from our body. Just as going to the bathroom several times a day is a necessary process of our species' waste elimination system, so is the need to cry, she contends. Just as our skin has a need to sweat so do our emotions need to be safely released. Overcoming decades of conditioning isn't easy, though. In the book, Solter also offers insights for us parents on how to deal responsibly with our own strong emotions that tend to rise up when our children cry or rage. My husband and I read this book when our son was 2 years old. He's 7 now. Putting into practice the skills outlined in this book has helped us to handle our son's emotions so much better. We see on a daily basis the amazing and wonderful results of how treating our son with respect for his emotions, his body and his 'being' helps create warm, non-adversarial bonds between us. We are parenting more the way we want to parent, with compassion, understanding and respect, and we are very thankful for that. We consider this book one of the best-if not the best-books on parenting!
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Summary: Tears and Tantrums
Review: I recommend this book to anyone who has ever been a child (not a typo!). Not only does it explain why babies and children cry, it shows us how we can support them in expressing their feelings. For those people who had their crying repressed in childhood and now have their own children, it is a revelation.
Babies and children are little people and they need to be respected as such. "It is important to know that children need the most love and attention when they act the least deserving of it".
Aletha Solter has written a book which will allow so many children to grow up as well rounded, healthy individuals, able to express themselves fully. It also gives scope for healing in adults too, "It is never too late to begin". I see it as a bright future for humankind.
I have gone from feeling inadequate as a parent to feeling I am doing the very best for our child. We have a very happy, alert baby who cries when he needs to, in our arms and with our love and full attention. It is very satisfying to see him drop of to sleep so peacefully and even sometimes with a smile!
Thank you Dr. Solter, I can see that one day what you have written about will be the advice parents are given. I just hope that day is soon.
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Summary: Tears and Tantrums
Review: I think anyone who didn't "get" the meaning of this book shouldn't be a parent! I read this book when my son was nearly a year old. I wish I had heard about it before he was even born, then we (my husband and I) would have been much better parents. We, like many others, have always been taught not to let babies cry and that something must be wrong if they do. We tried everything to try and get our son to stop crying. Unforuntately it was only after reading this book that I realized that we were doing more harm than good. I tested her theory when my son was about a year old and it worked for us. I held him for nearly an hour just letting him cry and talking to him. When he was done, he looked at me and smiled! However, this was no "ordinary" smile, if he could talk I'm sure he would have said something like "Thanks mom, I needed you to do this for me, I now know that I can cry and that you will be there for me." Our relationship had just changed, changed for the good that is. No words were spoken, but we both felt it. He now cries a lot less and when he does, I know exactly what to do. Anyone who has a healthy relationship with themself knows that crying is good for the body, especially when you have someone who is strong enough to sit by you and hold your hand.
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Summary: Crying is good for babies?
Review: I would give this book no stars if that were possible. Babies need to cry for their emotional health? No one would ever think of telling a distraught adult some of the things written about in this book. I do not understand how any normal person could treat a baby like this. Where do these "repressed" feelings the baby needs to express come from? The womb? What could a baby have possibly gone through that is so traumatic it just needs to cry? You create a situation where a baby needs to cry by not cuddling and nursing often. Even an adult would cry in that situation. Consider reading James McKenna's studies or Dr. Sears' books as an alternative.
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Summary: Crying is good for babies?
Review: I would give this book no stars if that were possible. Babies need to cry for their emotional health? No one would ever think of telling a distraught adult some of the things written about in this book. I do not understand how any normal person could treat a baby like this. Where do these "repressed" feelings the baby needs to express come from? The womb? What could a baby have possibly gone through that is so traumatic it just needs to cry? You create a situation where a baby needs to cry by not cuddling and nursing often. Even an adult would cry in that situation. Consider reading James McKenna's studies or Dr. Sears' books as an alternative.
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