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[quote=Anonymous]It could be concerning and it might not be. To share my own experience:

When my DD was 3, she had one extremely disturbing and upsetting tantrum that lasted a long time and where she simply could not calm down essentially until she had exhausted herself. It happened on vacation and the trigger involved potty training, which was a really challenging event for this particular child. I was convinced that she had autism that was causing both the potty training issues and the tantrum. This was the only tantrum she had like that but it was really, really intense and I was certain something was wrong.

However, while we were waiting on an assessment (waiting lists can take months), we worked with another specialist on the potty training and finally resolved that, plus we did some reading on parenting techniques for highly emotional children (the book The Explosive Child was useful, as was How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk) and started using some different tactics that helped a lot to avoid tantrums. We also started more intentionally teaching her emotional regulation via modeling techniques, creating a "quiet calm corner" in our house that we also sometimes used during conflicts to calm down, and utilizing some of the tools from the reading we were doing to give her other ways of expressing her emotions and resolving situations.

By the time the assessment came around, she was 4 and basically a different kid. Fully potty trained, actually pretty emotionally mature (like could identify emotions, including mixed emotions, that she was feeling and speak intelligently about them with the therapist who she had just meant -- the therapist said that she was among the most articular kids that age she'd met regarding emotional expression). We had a bunch of good systems in place at home that had eliminated a lot of our conflicts that had previously given rise to tantrums. Just all around better place.

She didn't get an autism diagnosis. They think it's possible she might have ADHD but she isn't scoring within the range for that yet (it's been a couple years and we may get her tested again soon because we are seeing some signs of inattention and hyper focus since she started school). She's just a pretty emotional kid for whom age 3, which is hard for many kids, was extra difficult.

Very hard to say if this is true for your kid or not, and go ahead and pursue the assessment because I think it's useful information no matter what. But in the meantime, maybe my experience can offer you some other tools to help. It's tough and it can be hard to just have no idea what is causing the behavior -- maybe autism, maybe something else, maybe just being three. It really could be any (or all) of the above. But there are things you can do to help get through it. Good luck! My kid is wonderful and while I wouldn't say tantrums are totally behind us, I feel like I have a lot more resources for dealing with them now and I can't remember the last time we had one that felt out of control like that since the big scary one.[/quote]

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