ABSTRACT. Although tantrums are among the most common behavioral problems of young children and may predict future antisocial behavior, little is known about them. To develop a model of this important phenomenon of early childhood, behaviors reported in parental narratives of the tantrums of 335 children aged 18 to 60 months were encoded as present or absent in consecutive 30-second periods. Principal Component (PC) analysis identified Anger and Distress as major, independent emotional and behavioral tantrum constituents. Anger-related behaviors formed PCs at three levels of intensity. High-intensity anger decreased with age, and low-intensity anger increased. Distress, the fourth PC, consisted of whining, crying, and comfort-seeking. Coping Style, the fifth PC, had high but opposite loadings on dropping down and running away, possibly reflecting the tendency to either submit or escape. Model validity was indicated by significant correlations of the PCs with tantrum variables that were, by design, not included in the PC analysis.
Temper tantrums are common in children between the ages of 18 months and 4 years. 1-3 Tantrum behaviors range from commonplace crying to less-frequent, attention-getting events such as breath holding and head banging to spectacular displays of dysregulation in presumably normal children. There are children who grunt and growl and those whose shrieks reportedly sound to their parents like the cries of a prehistoric bird. Parents have told us about children who scream so loudly and so long that capillaries in their cheeks burst and their eyes become bloodshot. Others scream until they vomit or become rigid as statues with tension, even to the point of toppling over if unsupported. 4
Unfortunately, tantrums are more than a source of fascinating observations. They are among the most common childhood behavioral problem reported by parents. 5,6 In extreme cases, when tantrums are frequent, prolonged, or involve object destruction or serious aggression, parents can become angry with or even frightened by their child's behavior; they then may become anxious about their own feelings. 7 Frequent tantrum throwers are reportedly more likely to be abused. 8 Tantrums are an item on a number of scales identifying externalizing psychopathology in childhood 9,10 and in older children may predict future antisocial behavior. 11 There is, correspondingly, a clinical literature on tantrum control 12,13 and an abundance of sometimes contradictory advice to parents. The reasons for such contradictions are easy to find. Although surveys of childhood behavior have identified some important psychosocial factors associated with extreme tantrums, such as minor illness, the presence of other behavior problems, corporal punishment, maternal depression, and low social class, 14-16 remarkably little is known about the organization of this important phenomenon of early emotional life. The sole English language monograph on tantrums, Goodenough's Anger in Young Children, was published 70 years ago. 17 More recent, seminal work on stimulus and reinforcement contingencies controlling aversive and coercive parent-child interactions identify some individual tantrum behaviors, but often treat tantrums as a single, undifferentiated member of a class of coercive behaviors. 18,19
Our perspective is that of naturalistic emotion research; we are interested in tantrums as a window on emotional processes of an intensity rarely accessible to direct study. Our earlier analysis 4 and descriptions in the literature indicate that tantrums throughout early childhood may fit a general behavioral pattern. If such a general model of tantrum organization can be elucidated, sensible inquiry could then be made into potential modifier variables such as gender, age, the nature of the conflict triggering the tantrum, the level of autonomic activity during the tantrum, and parental reactions. Lacking an a priori definition of what constitutes a tantrum and concerned about prematurely excluding any particular observation, we proceeded inductively, using parental accounts of tantrums in a prototype or script approach, which has been found useful in other emotion-related domains. 20
Because tantrums vary greatly among children, examination of a large sample was necessary. To do so within a manageable period, we solicited narrative descriptions of tantrums from parents. Such parental observations have been found to provide valuable, reliable information on salient but low base-rate problem behaviors seldom seen by outside observers. 21 Here we report our methodology and findings on tantrum behavioral composition; analyses of time course will follow.