But hey, at least it’s better than the days I lock myself in my room to cry because I’m a failure as a mom. (Because I just screamed at a then-three-year-old that he should start picking out new parents because obviously we’re not any help to him. Yes, I know. The screaming is a problem.)

What do you think? What constitutes a “good day” for you? What’s your favorite “mommy tantrum”?

Photo by Neal

Of course, the things we choose to battle over will vary from mom to mom and child to child. But I think there are at least a couple things we can agree are worth fighting over—and a few that will only end in tears all ’round.

Worth fighting for

• Anything involving a real safety issue
• Serious property damage (Hayden’s entering a destructive/accident-prone stage!)
• Violence toward people or animals

Like banging your head on a brick wall
As Hayden becomes more and more fierce in his independence, I’ve realized there are some things that you shouldn’t or really, truly can’t make someone else do.

• You can’t make someone eat—at least, not safely. And bargaining (eat two more bites of vegetables or no dessert!) is supposed to reinforce the undesirability of the already-hated food item. Stupid psychology.
• You can’t make someone sleep—at least, not without drugs.
• You can’t make someone calm down—but I have picked up some great tricks here. My favorite is when Hayden is getting upset or whining and it’s the beginning of a downward spiral, I take a deep breath and blow it out in his face. Then I have him do it back to me. He almost always does this because he thinks it’s funny—but I just got him to take a breath.

Really, I guess, you can’t make people do anything, really, but as a parent we’re used to having some modicum of control (or being expected to have some modicum of control!).

These are just the first things I thought of—what have you found is worth fighting for? What’s not?

Hitting, biting and throwing I class together. He generally does them just for a reaction, it seems, or maybe because it amuses him to do it. Sometimes, though, he does it out of frustration (gee, I wonder where he gets that from . . . ?).

Tantrums aren’t new, of course, and we’ve been working on them for a long time. I tell ya, though, the kid’s tenacious. Distraction has to be mighty good for it to get him off that subject.

So, any good advice in these areas? (As a reminder, and for first timers, Hayden is not quite two years old.)

Part of Works-for-me Wednesday, Backwards Edition