What do you do when your son has a tantrum in public? There's always some book with a crazy answer

T and I were on our way to my sister's when we saw a cat in a petrol station car park. "What noise does that make, T?" I said conversationally, and he waved his arms frantically, as if someone had just asked what the capital of Turkmenistan is in a pub quiz, and by amazing good fortune, he happened to know. "Neeeeeeee!" "Yes, kind of ... a little bit more like meow." "Neeeeeeeeeee!"

Well, what the heck, we were stuck in traffic anyway, so I pulled in. I thought maybe we could poke the cat and make it meow, and that would prove my point in a memorable way. I mean, we have a cat of our own, but you know what it is like to live with a person/animal: you get inured to their racket.

This passed off well - until we had to go. Then T unleashed a rage inferno, dashing himself to the floor of the car park, arching his back and howling to the heavens. He saw my cliched parental response of, "Those aren't even real tears!", and raised me some real ones. It was weird; an absolute proto-tantrum that he could have got off Supernanny, except he has never seen it. How did he know that how it's done? You would think it would be like hang-gliding or snogging, that you would do it laughably wrong a couple of times, before you figured out how everybody else did it.

Yet again, the short answer to all this is: "I really should read a book." It is a relatively easy route, how to deal with a child having a tantrum in the car park of a petrol station. The options are limited - you can either pick the angry child up - or pick it up. There is probably a hippy injunction somewhere about not invading their personal space in moments of high tension, but when you are haphazardly parked because you only stopped in the first place to poke a cat, and the likelihood of incoming traffic is high because you're in a petrol station, then you pick it up, the angry elf. I have this gut sense that you should keep a neutral countenance and not, for instance, laugh, but once I noticed how much like an angry elf he looked, it was hard not to.

So anyway, we got in the car, drove off, and before we had got to S's, he had forgotten all about it, though he still had a fat tear under his eye, like a painting of a little malnourished Victorian urchin. Eating a HobNob. (I didn't placate him with the HobNob; that is probably in chapter one of the mythical book, "Don't placate them with food". He found it down the side of the car seat: a bit of a double-edged treat, or conceivably not a treat at all.)

There are times, though, when the solution isn't just to pick them up and run away. Say you've got more than one of them, or you've arrived at your destination and don't immediately want to leave. I read in the newspaper that you can't reason with them, it's a mug's game, but that they set great store by empathy and calm down if you repeat what they're yelling back at them, in a pacifying voice. That sounds reasonable enough, doesn't it? And I know I didn't misread it, because a cerebral friend of mine (I mean, "he reads books") read it in a book (Raising Happy Children, by two people called Jan Parker and Jan Stimpson).

And yet, try doing it. Go on, chum, go and find a toddler, screaming "I WANT A PEANUT BUTTER ONE" and repeat, soothingly, "You want a peanut butter one. I know, you want a peanut butter one. Poor you! You want a peanut butter one." You don't sound like a person who has read a newspaper/book. You sound like a sadist. Like one of those airport employees who takes perverted delight in telling a person, with a smile, that their passport has expired. I tried it on the common with my niece, and there was a guy doing press-ups staring at us as though he was thinking of calling social services. Ah! There was a time when I could have reported him to the social services just for being a man, doing press-ups near children, but that was before British Military Fitness.

Luckily, I am not yet there with T. All I have to do with him is repeat "Neeeee" in a soothing voice. Nobody thinks I'm a sadist, and T probably thinks I'm a cat.

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