by dana gonzalez 2010
Like an earthquake, Toddler Temper Tantrums should have a scientifically measurable scale of severity. It might be based on the amount of damage done to immediate surroundings or injury to dumb people who attempt to intervene. Perhaps by the degree of temporary hearing loss to anyone in earshot. Or, most importantly, the of objective embarrassment and humiliation caused to the owner of the Furious Little Richter.
The latter is the criterion I use in China. Because here, even in cosmopolitan Shanghai, as “round eyes” (lao eyes), we attract attention standing still – not even asking for napkins in a restaurant or gallivanting about the crosswalks thinking that cars will stop, slow or – Christ-I-have-a-baby-carriage-here – swerve to avoid having to clean foreign bits off their grill and windshield wipers.
At this particular moment, I had one smallish beast, nearly five, who according to the books, is about to clear toddler-hood. The other, almost two, stays awake nights surfing the internet, sketching out matrices on graph paper and Skyping peers around the world to learn about the many different ways she can ruin my life. In public.
Regardless of how my own children choose to dismantle my motherly confidence, I am noticing that Americans raise their children in a different way than the rest of the world.
It’s subtle. But, I’ve seen that the Turks, the Chinese and the Eastern Europeans kowtow to their kids’ every whim. Confrontation is unheard of. In China, children might not eat dinner, but “auntie” (ayi) will chase them around the apartment with a plate full of food watching for opportunities to shove a bite in here or there. At the playground you can see all the ayis stalking their charges with a Tupperware of fruit on toothpicks, so the kids can get fiber at their convenience. They go to bed when they want, leave the playground when they are good and ready, and, do pee pee wherever they happen to be.
“Chinese children are potty-trained by the time they are able to walk.” I heard this a lot. No. Their parents or ayis/guardians have become attuned to their elimination habits and hold them over whatever surface is available so they can do their business. I’ve seen ayis hold kids over planters inside of apartment lobbies! On sidewalks I’ve seen children – not babies – do poopy in bags. This is not potty training. This is mommy/daddy training.
I can also see that raising a child in China is instinctive, and directed by generations of parenting by not one or two adults but possibly a mom, dad, aunt, grandma, grandpa and a few older sisters. They don’t parent by the book. They parent by culture and tradition. A crying baby is a baby who needs picking up, who needs soothing and who needs to go back to sleep before he is put down again. Americans parent at the opposite end of the spectrum. Yes, we love our kids. Yes, we profess ‘our children are the future.’ We might even brag that our children bring out our inner child.
But if our children need to pee, they do it in one of two places. In a diaper or in the potty. If they need to eat, they sit down at a table at mealtime and eat what is put in front of them or go hungry. Ok, sometimes the ones that ‘go hungry’ end up with a snack before bedtime, but that is strictly against all laws of traditional Western discipline.
Ayis are stunned to see us place our children in remote corners of the house for ‘Time Out.’ They do not understand that when mealtime is over, a plateful of uneaten food is simply removed from the table. When our children are asked, asked, asked, told and finally threatened to clean up a mess they have made, you can see ayi visibly twitching on the sidelines, waiting until you leave the room so that she can take over the job of cleaning up.
As my daughter reaches the pinnacle of Terribly (Awfully) Two, I am reading yet another book about how to deal with tantrums. Even my own mother, way back in the olden days knew to just walk away. And everything I read says that shaping good behavior means that you do not reward the unpleasant.
During a recent trip to the Cloud 9 shopping mall in Xujiahui, I took my lovelies to a playland on the sixth floor. When it was time to go, Diva-in-a-Diaper took offense. She wasn’t ready to leave. But my elder had to pee and he was hungry. Meanwhile, Little One wouldn’t let me put her shoes on so I finally picked up my screamy angel and carted her off towards an escalator.
We drew crowds one floor at a time. Because she was writhing so strenuously, I put her down. She wobbled off in a martyred crawl, one leg dragging behind the other, her baby thoughts likely focused on the denial of her one true chance at happiness – interspersed with howling.
I desperately wanted to laugh – the girl is a professional. Stifling my snickers, my son and I had to let her go. Until she started climbing into a window display and I had to physically remove her. Cue hysterics. Setting her down and again triggering cinematic howling, I walked away and instructed my son to do the same, knowing it went against his all of his instincts to poke and prod the angry, snot-covered, lump that is his little sister (mei-mei.)
By now we had formed a partisan audience – one side made of, well, us. The mortified-but-who-must-observe, as she is, unfortunately ours. And, then, standing about not even trying to be subtle, the audience of local shoppers who form the rest of the crowd. All no doubt waiting to see what strategy of child-rearing could possibly involve a mother watching as her daughter writhes on the mall floor, screaming at the top of her lungs and then, and THEN, actually walking away.
One of the fathers in the group took an order ’round the spectators for tea and ran off to the restaurant across the way. Not wanting to disappoint, I threw in a “You’re getting a BIG Time Out when we get home, missy!” But, when my sweet ball of fury didn’t get up and follow us I had no choice but to once again to attempt to collect her and her flailing limbs off the floor.
At this point I was appalled to notice there were cheering sections among the gathered. The smallest, by a wide margin, for mommy. Then a rather boisterous crowd, sporting helium Sponge Bob balloons, rooting for my daughter. Bending to gather her up, I fumbled a bit and she rolled into some idiotically placed wall and hit her head. The crowd, (both sides): “Ooofff.”
Again, “Up we go sweetheart,” as I clumsily scooped her and her dark cloud of misery into my arms and we hobbled off, leaving our skeptics with their hot tea, balloons and a week’s worth of tales for friends and neighbors. For us, the untidy end but a mirage as we navigated toward the mall exit. We still had several floors to go.
If you’ve been in Shanghai for any amount of time, you quickly learn to never try getting on a mall elevator. My secret dream had always been to do it with a screaming child, but on this day I simply did not have the devious energy left to deliberately inflict her on others. Approaching the escalator, however, Diva wants to walk onto it by herself. I put her down in her still shoe-less feet.
I know. But what could I do? We were beyond discipline and while I was sort of toying with plain old survival, we still had to get into a taxi and there was also the first floor and a bit of pavement ahead of us. What if an angry mob took my screaming child from me?
What if they didn’t?
Disembarking the escalator, Ms. Diva was still inclined to walk by herself, but alas, only in her socks. I tried to insist she wear shoes but she started that purple-faced stomping again and so, before we stole the show from the Sony Sound demonstration going on next to us, I picked her up once again to whisk her out of the Shopping Mall of Horrors. Ahh right. The screaming. I put her down and out we toddled into the thankfully dry weather, she in her socks and me wishing I were very far away. At this point, even teenaged boys were staring and pointing at the lao eye baby walking outside without shoes. I could hear the tssk tssk in their heads. An okay response, given that I’d have been arrested in the US.
What have I learned? Never leave the house with my daughter until she’s old enough to refuse to go anywhere with her mother. Stick to my disciplinary techniques and locals be damned? Inject coffee directly into a vein so as not to be burdened by the cup during an “episode.” Or maybe carry tickets and a velvet rope around at all times in case either of my curious young specimens decides to make a scene. Which they surely will. Don’t miss it! Coming soon to a crowded and not-easily-escaped venue near you!
The Overhead Bin 
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