Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen tells a simple family story with an unusually strong payoff. His first child threw tantrums. He and his wife used a specific technique, and the tantrums stopped. His second child threw tantrums — same technique, same result. By the time the third child tried it, the two older kids turned to their sibling and said, essentially, “Don’t bother, it doesn’t work.” The family never had another tantrum in the house.
What was the technique? Nothing complicated — just total, unshakeable consistency. “If you establish a very clear, rock-solid, unmitigated, no-compromise policy — we do not give in to tantrums, ever — the tantrums stop,” Kelemen explains. Once that policy is airtight, all that’s left is ordinary discussion, and discussion is something you can actually work with. What you cannot negotiate with is a child’s implicit threat: “I will cause you pain until you give me what I want.” That message gets zero response, every time, without exception.
The hardest test of this policy isn’t at home — it’s in the market, the shul lobby, the middle of a crowded simcha, when a tantrum erupts in the least convenient, most public place imaginable. Nearly every parent has lived this moment. The temptation to give in just to make the noise stop is enormous precisely because an audience is watching.
This is exactly where Rav Wolbe’s foundational principle comes back in: don’t ask much of your child, but never back down on what you do ask. A tantrum policy is a perfect test case, because it only works if it works everywhere, every time — not just when it’s convenient for you to hold firm.
A practical way to start: decide, in a calm moment before any tantrum happens, exactly what your response will be — a quiet, repeated statement like “I hear you’re upset. The answer is still no,” repeated without escalation, without negotiation, in the market exactly as it would be at home. Consistency across settings is what actually teaches the lesson. One cave-in at the checkout line can undo weeks of firmness at home.
It won’t feel dramatic in the moment. But like Kelemen’s own kids discovered, once the policy is truly unbreakable, the behavior it’s designed to stop simply stops being worth trying.
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This blog was co-written with Artificial Intelligence.