My Journey in Handling My Children's Tantrums

What was the first challenge you faced as a mother during your parenting journey — and how did you overcome it?

The way I see it, parenting is challenges all the way through — daily ones, renewing themselves at every stage of a child's life. The first challenge I faced was handling tantrums and coming out of them "with the least effort and the least harm to the child".

I had a daily preoccupation: how could I get on top of his outbursts, anticipate them before they happened, prepare techniques and have tools ready for when they did — without draining myself emotionally, or leaving my son with a complex about the whole episode.

The first thing I did to overcome this challenge was intention, along with constant reading and learning and asking experts and specialists. It helped enormously, thank God…

Intention is the foundation. I had a serious, genuine intention to come out of these situations without leaving psychological scars on my children. The intention created a decision; the decision gave me a strong drive to read and to search for the methods that work best; and the reading built my own psychological awareness, until I could put my finger on the underlying problem on my side of it.

Asking and researching also helped me connect what I had read with what I was hearing from specialists. The knowledge settled more firmly, and it opened my eyes to facts about children's inner lives that I had known nothing about before.

I began attending lectures and enrolling in awareness courses, and that in turn led me to discover my own kind of intelligence (visual / auditory) — meaning information sticks in my head better from a lecture than from reading a book. So I turned to courses to save myself time and effort, gathering as much as I could in a short time and being able to apply it practically in my life.

Of course I have not given up reading and keeping up, but the greater part of the effort now goes into lectures and workshops.

Rasha Tawfiq — mother of three