Chip Chick
This 31-year-old woman is a stay-at-home mother who has a 3-year-old son and a 6-month-old daughter.
Her husband’s 19-year-old niece Jessica stays there with them a few days a week because the college she goes to is super close to where they live. Whenever Jessica is not there, she lives with her mother.
Although Jessica doesn’t pay them rent or help out with house chores, Jessica’s mother sometimes will send $100 or so to help contribute to any bills.
She describes her house as pretty loud because whenever she is not holding her daughter, her daughter will scream and cry. While she tries to keep her close at most times throughout the day, whenever she has to bathe her son, she will put her daughter in her crib, and she will scream so loud for 15-20 minutes.
Even though her daughter is completely safe, her tantrums sound over the top. Additionally, her son throws fits a lot, too, and has a super sharp scream that’s loud enough to pierce your ears. But while they are at home, she usually just ignores him and lets him wear himself out by yelling and having a tantrum.
“Sometimes I have to wear noise-canceling headphones and cover my daughter’s ears while he’s throwing tantrums. And he does it a lot, like 3-4 times a week; sometimes, it happens twice a day. He usually calmed down after an hour. The longest was two hours,” she explained.
One night, while Jessica was in the kitchen washing some dishes, her son was in the living room nearby, throwing a huge fit because she wanted him to say ‘please.’ If this tantrum had happened in public or at someone else’s house, she would typically put on a video for him in order to calm him down and distract him.
However, since they were at home, she thought it would be best to let him work through his feelings on his own rather than rely on a video.
So, her son screamed, thrashed around, and she sat there at the dinner table eating her meal. Every once in a while, he would take breaks from screaming, she would hand him some water, and then once he started yelling again, she went back to calmly eating her dinner. All of this continued for about an hour and a half.
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