DADWAGON

The baby is crying, screaming, thrashing, limp. The kid is in a diaper and socks, writhing on the floor, in the car seat, arms and legs alternately flailing and stiff. The kid is inconsolable, possessed by demons, a blubbering spastic.

These children are, thank goodness, not mine. They’re on YouTube, the stars of a little-discussed genre: the meltdown video. These pure, unadulterated temper tantrums have been eating up my spare time, minute by minute, since I discovered them last summer. I’ll  sit and watch them even while my daughter, Sasha, is crawling on the floor at my feet, begging for attention. There’s something fascinating about these snippets of other people’s miseries.

Fascinating—and horrifying. My first reaction was: What kind of awful parent is it who, when their kid flips out, instantly picks up the videocamera and hits “record”? But as I watched the temper tantrums unfold, often triggered by the most innocuous of events (failure to blow out a birthday candle, or Mom saying, “Sorry, bud, I said no”), I began to understand that impulse. After all, what can you actually do when the kid is freaking out? No words can mute the true temper tantrum, no hug can stifle the fit. The best you can do is wait it out and watch.

That didn’t explain my own obsession, however, but after a while I began to realize: I was searching for a glimpse of the future. Sasha, who at 11 months is only just developing a sense of what she is and isn’t allowed to do, will without question become that nuclear meltdown baby before too long. How can I be so sure? Because both my wife, Jean, and I were temper-tantrum kids.

I don’t know what Jean’s fits were like, but I remember all too well the rage that overtook me, the way that the conscious mind would recede and the animal within would explode, whether I was at home or in a toy store or the supermarket or wherever. In a way, part of me still wants to give in to that pure physical anger—which is probably why I like to go running now; with enough exertion, my brain simply goes away, leaving me oddly at peace.

Afterwards, I can—as I used to do when I was little, after my parents had sent shrieking me to my room—eventually re-emerge, all murderous urges purged, and announce, “I’ve calmed down now.”

The world is safer for it.