From the Annals of ‘It Can Always Be Worse’

Whoo boy:

A nine-year-old Florida girl is facing four felony charges after she allegedly threw a tantrum yesterday on a school bus, spit on the driver, threw rocks at the bus, and tossed a patio chair at a cop, who she warned, “I will f***in kill you!”

With the caveat that this could be the result of some kind of medical condition (not betting on it), here’s the logical result of poor parenting. Two possibilities: a) her parents are never around, or b) she’s behaving just like her parents do in that situation. Either way, massive parental failure. Based on the article, I’ll go with ‘a’ since the only mention of the parents is that she was released to them.

Note the problem is not that she, clearly, has a temper. The problem is that once it got going she lacked the self-control to either reign it in, or temper it. There’s really only one place a child can pick that up- a parent(s). Either from watching a parent get mad and then not going thermonuclear on everything within reach; or, from having a parent correct them when the child starts to go off.

I’ll also add that, IMHO, this was pretty much the worst possible way to deal with her tantrum. When kids lose it this way, I believe their’s an emotional gratification component when the response is highly dramatized, with more drama providing more satisfaction on an emotional level. In my own experience, the best responses are stone cold calm. Not that it’s easy, and I don’t blame the officer for how he was forced to deal with a bad situation.

At any rate, something to make the rest of us fumbling parents feel a bit better about our own efforts.