The first time my son ever went in a car, aged three months, he screamed so hard he foamed at the mouth, turned purple and then passed out for an hour. In a good light, you can still see the self-inflicted nail marks in my thighs.
Now, researchers have drawn up a neat little formula to explain precisely when such a tantrum (in this case known as “T”) may rear its head during a long car journey.
According to Dr James Hind of Nottingham Trent University, who I’m sure is also extremely busy calculating, oh I don’t know, how to alleviate poverty during a time of inflation, T = 70 + 0.5E + 15F - 10S where E is entertainment, F is food and S is siblings. So, you’ve got 70 minutes, plus whatever time you can buy with entertainment and snacks, minus the knee-kicking, snot-wiping, humming, farting, vomiting effect of other siblings, also in the back seat.
While it’s nice to see higher education institutions putting money and resources into early years research – a cure for colic, anyone? Proper data on maternal mental health? Analysis into sudden infant death syndrome, recurrent miscarriage, the effects of insecure housing on brain development? – I probably didn’t need a mathematician to explain why children have tantrums in cars. The fact that there is a high correlation between hunger, boredom, annoying siblings and nuclear meltdowns is news to perhaps one man called Derek who lives in Sunderland, has no children, few friends and has devoted his life to collecting early two-valve record players. Most of the rest of us know. Trust us, we know.
I don’t particularly remember the flavour of my own childhood tantrums. I was, I fear, more of a sulker. I could seethe with a clammy, purple warmth that was so delicious and so awful that sometimes I just longed for someone to run over and kick me hard so I would have a reason to sulk a little longer.
My son, on the other hand, is a weapons-grade, titanium-plated tantrum-missile ready to launch himself at the ground or tooth-first at my legs whenever the opportunity presents itself. And it doesn’t necessarily need the heady, carbon monoxide climate of a hot car on a crowded motorway with the faint whiff of your sister’s bile to bring about such an opportunity.
My son once had a 45-minute screaming tantrum in the middle of the woods, on a gently overcast spring day, surrounded by nothing sharper than a primrose and nothing louder than a cuckoo. He moaned so incessantly that after about 20 minutes a concerned dog walker came over to check I wasn’t actually amputating one of his legs with a keyring. This boy, who was about three at the time, stood in the middle of the path, like some great monolith of incoherent rage, his fists balled, his cheeks burning, until eventually I gave up on the idea of a lovely day out, carried him over my shoulder back to the bike and rode home. Two hours later, as we sat on the floor in something like companionable quiet, I asked him what had caused such a scene: “When we walked over that stream, you told me to be careful.”
Well, you can see his point, I suppose. There are few slights more wounding, few aberrations more acute than being gently warned by your primary caregiver, during a nice walk in nature, not to accidentally fall into some knee-depth water. Cowboys have been shot and regimes toppled over less.
But Hind and his team have missed a trick. What hasn’t been studied in nearly enough detail for my liking is how to predict and, most importantly, alleviate parental tantrums. Those times when we, the grownups, lose it.
I know I am not alone when I tell you that once, while my son merrily gurgled through a refused nap, eating clumps of sheep fluff from the inside of his buggy, I had to walk away from his prone form and kick the hell out of a tree. After nearly 20 hours of sleeplessness, and with no E, no F and none of my Ss around to forestall the fury, I went hell for leather against that steadfast chunk of bark until the red mists cleared, the local children’s centre finally opened for its afternoon session and I was saved.
Give me a formula to solve that and I, for one, would be thrilled to see how it all adds up.
Nell Frizzell is a journalist and author of The Panic Years
