I Felt Like A Complete Failure Of A Mom. Then A Doctor Said The Words That Transformed My Life.

When my son was 4, I learned about the “basket hold.” What sounds like a method a mother would use to cradle a newborn baby is, in fact, a technique used to restrain a child who is so physically out of control that he’s a potential danger to himself and those around him.

Sitting behind my son, my legs wrapped around his, I’d hold his tiny wrists crisscrossed across his writhing body, pressing my head against the back of his shoulder to prevent him from landing a head butt. I’d hold him this way, “gently but firmly,” as the parenting books suggested, for anywhere from five to 15 minutes until, finally, the thrashing and screaming would stop. Then he’d happily resume his Lego building, and I’d slink away, trembling and baffled.

Other preschoolers had tantrums. My son raged. As he did, I struggled to maintain the cool veneer of calm that parenting gurus promised would soothe him. Once, I was so overwhelmed while fending off his ferocious slaps that I pushed him onto the bed and screamed, “What is wrong with you?!”

Remembering that moment — the fire running through my body, the shocked terror on his little face — absolutely kills me. So does recalling what my daughter refers to as “the time with the book”: when her big brother was 6 and became so enraged over something that no one can remember, he hurled a 250-page coffee table book across the room full force into her tiny back. I’d lunged to stop him, but I was too late. I held an ice pack to her bruise while she sobbed. Afterward, I cried and consoled myself in a locked bathroom.

Nothing I did seemed to help my son with his outbursts. No amount of breathing exercises, meditations, timeouts, rewards or punishments was enough to stave off his inevitable explosions. At