This is an excerpt from The Tantrum Solution:

Most children cease tantrum behavior after the age of three. Four-year-olds and older, who continue to tantrum, almost always have difficulty with emotional regulation. Most children, who have difficulties regulating emotion and continue to tantrum past the age of three, confine their tantrums to the home. Very few of these children “lose it” in school.

Children learn from kindergarten on to avoid embarrassment. I have always told parents, “Most five-year-old children figure out early on that they don’t want to be seen by their peers laying on the kindergarten floor kicking and screaming in a tirade.” Having worked for years in the schools, I observed that children who are known to tantrum at home most certainly experience frustration in school, but they don’t tantrum there. I hypothesized that the frontal lobe of the brain (the problem-solving; reasoning; organization; planning part of the brain) was controlling their proclivity for tantrums in the school setting. Later, when working on the FAST treatment program, I set about to devise the Tantrum Solution. The frontal lobe can and does issue control over tantrum behavior. I know this because the Tantrum Solution has been proven to work. The frontal lobe just needs the right thought-schema to issue the control.

Research has borne out that the primary and most frequent positive reinforcement for the tantrum is adult attention. Over the years, I would instruct parents to stop giving tantrums any fuel by paying attention to them. Paying attention to a tantrum might include talking to the child; removing him/her to another room; trying to reason with the child; touching the child to soothe; asking the child questions during the tantrum or just simple eye contact. All of these serve to reward the tantrum. We know this because when these parental behaviors are removed, tantrums decrease. Disconnecting and ignoring was good advice, but it never fully eradicated the tantrums.

After treating Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and observing treatment efficacy by externalizing the “OCD Monster” (March, 1998), I reasoned that a similar approach should work for tantrum behavior. I liked the idea of using a Tantrum Monster to externalize blame when showing a child a video of their own personal tantrum. I hypothesized that if a message was simple; associated with some emotion (“The Tantrum Monster is making you act just like a baby”) to ensure recall; prompted to elicit recall and then praised while the child was regaining control and praised again after the child had regained control, the child would learn to issue self-control over an entity that he/she did not want to be controlling him or herself. The Tantrum Solution was born.

Initially, I asked a good number of parents of children ages five and older to keep data (a frequency and duration count) on their child’s tantrums. At that point in time, three parents of seven-year-old boys agreed to participate in the study. I designed a study that falls under the umbrella of Applied Behavioral Analysis, using what is called “single-case subject design.” The pattern of final self-control that these three boys exhibited was replicated time and time again for well over one hundred children, who attended the FAST program. The replications also always included the typical extinction burst that is present in each set of data.

To read more about this and view the entire program download the full solution here.