ABSTRACT
Managing challenging or 'different' behaviour can be a stressful time. This chapter provides ideas for supporting parents, carers and each other. Despite the pleasures and rewards of working with young children, it can be very stressful when one has to manage extremely challenging behaviour, day in and day out. The chapter introduces some of the strategies that can help and also look into how we can also support parents and carers better as they go through phases of their children's particularly difficult behaviour. Stress, anxiety and anger are closely linked because they share the same physiological reaction in our bodies. This reaction is sometimes called the fight or flight reaction and is chemically based and controlled by a complex and finely balanced system within the brain and the nervous system. Temper tantrums are like intense storms of feeling and can be as alarming for a young child as they can be to us when having to deal with them.
