Autism tantrums vs normal tantrums1/20/2024 ![]() Within the aggressive behavior, 4 factors could be distinguished: destructive aggressive behaviors, self-injurious behavior, nondestructive aggression, and oral aggression (i.e., biting or spitting). Another study of 279 3- to 6-year-old children 4 included a wide range of aggressive behaviors: kicking others, hitting others, throwing objects, breaking objects, hitting self, head banging, holding breath, biting self, nondirected kicking, stamping feet, hitting wall, biting others, and spitting. 12 Investigation of the underlying structure of these behaviors yielded 5 factors: high, intermediate, and low anger distress and coping style. A study that coded tantrum behaviors from parental narratives describing their children's tantrums as they occurred derived the following behaviors: crying, screaming, shouting, lowering the body/falling to the floor, kicking, hitting, pulling/pushing, running away, freezing, stamping, whining, throwing something, and clinging to someone. Problematic tantrums may be further distinguished by the type of behavior that children display. TEMPER TANTRUM BEHAVIORS: FACTORS AND PROFILES At the same time, children become less easily distracted, which may also help them to sustain their tantrums for longer to try and achieve their goal. 10 This may lead children to become even more frustrated when their goal is blocked and at the same time may result in more instrumental tantrum behavior that is aimed more toward trying to get caregivers to give in to them. However, duration may increase because children become more goal-directed as they get older. 6 Duration was not differentiated by age here, but perhaps the higher percentages of longer durations were due to the inclusion of older children, although one might expect that as emotion regulatory capacity increases with age, overall tantrum duration would decrease. Another study, including children from ages 12 months up to 13 years, reported a duration of less than 5 minutes for only 8% of cases and a duration of 5 to 10 minutes for 47% of cases. 9 reported a duration between 1 and 5 minutes for 75% of children, with the average duration increasing by around a minute per year from around 2 minutes for 1-year-olds to 4 minutes for 4-year-olds. In addition to tantrum frequency, we propose that tantrum duration might be an informative indicator of potential problems because children who display especially long tantrums may be getting stuck in a negative emotional state, unable to regulate out of it. More knowledge about temper tantrums is necessary to allow for a distinction between normal and abnormal presentations of dysregulated temper, helping parents and professionals to evaluate when they may need to worry about children's behavior. Daily tantrums may be more normative for children younger than 3 years, making this a less informative indicator for this age. 6 More research is needed to establish how temper tantrum frequency is distributed for different ages. Another smaller sample study (N = 132), including children younger than 12 months up to 13 years, found that 21% of children had daily tantrums, but this estimate was not differentiated by age. However, this study did not include children younger than 3 years, leaving unclear whether tantrum frequency peaks earlier. 5 Overall, tantrums were most frequent for 3-year-olds and declined thereafter. A large-scale study of 1490 children between the ages of 3 and 5 years showed that most children (83.7%) had displayed some form of tantrum during the past month, but only 4.4% of children had displayed tantrums daily, indicating that especially daily tantrums may be problematic. 4 Although temper tantrums might be a first signal of problematic development, surprisingly little is known about their prevalence. ![]() At the same time, tantrums are considered early symptoms of disruptive behavior problems 1, 2 and are implicated in the development of both behavioral 3 and mood disorders. Temper tantrums are generally believed to be a normal phenomenon that naturally fades as children grow.
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