Is it harmful to suppress a child's temper tantrums?

This is often a question involving the adult's survival. A parent can hardly resist trying to stop a temper tantrum if it occurs at a crucial time. This is, of course, often the case: the child stages a tantrum at precisely the time when it feels neglected in the parent's involvement with an urgent project such as preparing for an outing, making a meal, wrapping an important present for someone other than the child ... I say "stages a tantrum" because of the quality of deliberate drama and trying for effect which often enters in. But this does not mean the feelings are faked. They are usually genuinely intense, but in a child the flow of feeling is so strong but fluid that it can often be directed to a specific effect, although it is impossible to stop. Many parents hate themselves for the harshness of their own voices or gestures in response to a tantrum, or to the whining period which so often precedes one, when the child's voice mounts higher and higher in pitch and seems to drill into the skull. Or the parents wonder if there is something wrong with a child who has tantrums. But this is unlikely. Any child, but especially an energetic one, will whine when frustrated or tired or hungry, and have outbursts of temper which become tantrums.

EFA measures are irrelevant to a tantrum. The emotions are in full flow. And it is a mistake to try and focus a child's anger prematurely, since a child's needs tend to be naturally huge and confused at times. The child is almost never frightened during a tantrum, unless threatened. So, there is no problem of sorting out fear from anger. Instead it is the adult who often feels the most emotionally disturbed—by impulses to hit the child, to throw it out of the house, to dash out and leave the child behind, or to smash the nearest dish.

It is most damaging to frustrate the child's frustration. In practical terms this means it is necessary to distinguish between denying a child's wish, and denying its emotional expression. The first does no lasting harm, although of course the child may be temporarily sad or angry as a result. (This is assuming there is no systematic denial of the child's vital needs.) The second, however, adds insult to injury, in attacking not just the child's wishes or projects, but the child's feelings, which is to say the child itself. So, in principle, I think it is wrong to try and stop a tantrum. I cannot advise people how to bring up their children. Personally, if I know the tantrum is going to drive me to my adult equivalent of a tantrum — a sudden explosion of shouting and protest which may be frightening—I tend to pick the child up firmly and carry it to the playroom and close the door. The tantrum can continue in there — but it seldom does. It is important, though, in sending a child to its room for a period of time, that the lights are on, and that there are toys to play with and books to read. You an even bring some to the child, thus showing that you are not being vengeful, or punitive of the child's rage, but simply acting in self-preservation.

Do emotions act against clear thinking?

This question, in one form or another, is quite common and betrays how much society has come to expect a machine-like or computer-like quality in decision-making. But clear or original thinking has probably always been more rare than the dutiful repetition of learned opinions or formulas. It is this latter, mechanical type thinking, which is most threatened by emotion. Remember the old phrase "the excitement of discovery." Or the idea that the best teaching is through excitement. At university I had to study 1,500 lines of an AngloSaxon epic called Beowulf, in Old English. Twenty years later I only remember the first few lines. I remember them because I can hear them in the voice of J. R. R. Tolkien (of Lord of the Rings) who was normally a dry-as-dust lecturer but would begin his lecture series by declaiming the first lines of Beowulf with emotion.

This is a scientific age, and science aims for a precision which rules out emotion. Some scientists retain an emotional enthusiasm about their work, even if not in it. But remember the first man on the moon's words: "one short step for man, one great step for mankind." They could have been moving. But Armstrong uttered them deadpan, as if feeding the information to a computer. It seems left to artists and writers to embody human emotionalism. There is such a thing as poetic thought, a kind of "feeling thought." Robert Graves has stated: "A poet finds himself caught in some baffling emotional problem, which is of such urgency that it sends him into a sort of trance. And in this trance his mind works, with astonishing boldness and precision, on several imaginative levels at once." Whether poets or not, many people have experienced some moments where emotional excitement and mental illumination combine in a rush of insight. Even scientific discoveries are often conceived this way. But these moments may be denied, or not respected, if the person lacks emotional self-confidence. Instead of computers being seen as devices which liberate human beings from the drudgery of endless calculation, "computer-like logic" has become a model for thought, and even the brain is thought of as a computer in spite of ample evidence it is not. Perhaps this is only a stage.

But Graves' statement raises another question: could EFA harm the creative process? If this depends on emotional problems which resolve themselves through the creative work, then the resolution of the emotional problem might (as Graves put it in another discussion, of psychoanalysis) "kill the goose that lays the golden eggs." But I believe emotional problems will always exist, since life presents us with so many conflicts. What EFA can do is help sort out the unnecessary emotional confusion which occurs when an emotion presses for expression but is blocked. Blocked emotion often leads to blocked thinking. If a person is helped to become open to emotion, this means that genuine emotional problems, which involve urgent conflicts of values or needs, are no longer sunk in the swamp of repression, but can emerge to demand resolution in the clear air of conscious thought.