Headbanging & Tantrums - Part 1

Headbanging? Huh.....That's what I would have said had we not experienced this horrific sight and sound coming from our toddler's head repetitively hitting our tile floor 42 times several times a day for a year and a half. So why are there not enough authoritative articles or parental anecdotes on the subject? I pride myself in having a Masters in Library & Information Science and being a good librarian, so I armed myself with resources and went on the hunt for information that must be out there. But there's nothing worse to a librarian than when something hasn't been written, therefore, cannot be found. If you are lucky to find it in an index of a book on child behavior, then you'll read one paragraph or less, with no information. If you go online, you'll find people who are asking the same question with no follow up answer. If you ask your doctor, they'll you to ignore it, that it will go away on it's own because it's an attention getting tactic - although children who suffer from Autism often display this behavior.

My son, Liam, had been a sensitive baby, but after year we knew what it took to calm him down, in most cases. When he was about 15 months old he started getting his molars and he is really sensitive to pain. He started slapping his cheeks a lot. As the quick learner that he is, he soon figured out that this got our attention very quickly. Well, when this stopped working, he moved on to headbanging - this in a matter of one week. Then he started doing it every time he was frustrated or upset. This came along with rolling around on the floor, screaming at the top of his lungs, kicking, turning purple, hitting, and biting for one hour and fifteen minutes. It was the most horrific thing we've ever witnessed as parents. No one would believe it unless they saw it. Naturally, we thought it was still because he was teething and often said, "Wow, it looks like it really hurts." So we waited for those molars and checked many times per day. But no sign of those pearly white sheers of pain. So what did we do? We gave him Tylenol and took him for a long car ride, as that had often called him down in the past.

That worked after a few minutes, but we thought, "Was it the Tylenol or the car ride, because if it's the car ride, then it can't really be pain." So what do good parents do when something is wrong with your child and it's persistent? We took him to the doctor. What did she say? "Welcome to the terrible 2s," followed by "Ignore it, and he will stop when he knows it doesn't work to get what he wants. He will not hurt himself." Well, she doesn't know my persistent, head strong, stubborn as hell child. When we ignored him head banging 10 times on the carpet in our bedroom, he moved on to headbanging on our living room floor, and when that didn't work, he'd bang on the glass sliding doors, and when that didn't work, he literally walked over to the tile floor in the kitchen and did it there until I couldn't bear it anymore. Surely, if the doctor had seen her child do this she couldn't have either.

Of course, my son, smart as he is, learned the threshold very quickly and it became his method for getting what he wanted. And because he lived with a permanent black and blue Klingon (Star Wars reference) bump coming out of his forehead, we had to protect him physically before he gave himself a concussion the doctor was sure wouldn't happen. We had to hold him down on the floor and keep him from hitting us, kicking us, biting us, or himself, while holding on to his head so that he couldn't bang it forward or backwards. All the while he was strongly rolling to the sides, screaming at the top of his lungs for over an hour. This would happen anywhere from 2 to 8 times per day. And yes, I'm a stay at home mom, by choice. Yes, I wanted someone to shoot me most of these days. We read the book "The Happiest Toddler on The Block," by Dr. Karp, since we'd read the baby one and it had worked. And we instituted the techniques but it still was not that effectual for us. I went back to the doctor and she told me to read a couple of other books... or if I was at the end of my rope, to go see a child psychiatrist. Scary. For a two year old with angst, really? And I thought, "Well, I have angst, and I've seen a psychologist, she's helped, I've got nothing to lose but my sanity to gain here." So we went.