Developmental Stages, and Rages
My friend JV emailed me, wondering if my elder was screaming more than my younger, as his were. I replied that I am painfully, head-splittingly familiar with this scenario. Drake, at nearly 4yo, screams frequently. His screams are like grenades that set off adjacent sound bombs in Guppy, and soon we’ve got a full-circle echo screamfest. That is usually the point at which I think despairingly, “I like quiet. My life used to be quiet.”
My husband, G. Grod, theorizes that it’s because Drake has recently begun thinking ahead to what he thinks is going to happen. When things don’t go his way, he has only limited vocab and emotional experience to deal with it, so he starts to scream out his frustration. In other words, G thinks that he’s learning the painful lesson that “expectations are pre-planned resentments”.
I’ve got a very bare toolbox for the screaming. I try to empathize, use a calm voice and ask for quiet politely.
The more I communicate with other people, and other parents, the more I realize how non-unique we are. Yeah, we’re all individuals, but at some level, in many ways, we’re not. As the cook notes in one of our favorite picture books, Two Eggs, Please, “Different, but the same.”