You need to start from the following premise:

The child has a point, we are just not getting it....

Then you need to exercise yourself trying to see things from their point of view. In time you will start guessing quicker what is upsetting them, but it will take a while and again easier said than done, especially when you're tired, just came home from work, trying to cook dinner and the kid is having a fit of rage or acting up and you think: I have no time or energy for this!

There are many ways to handle this, most of them have a lot to do with calm, so take your time. To communicate with children you need to take your time, you need to be calm, you need to look at them, you need to stop what you are doing.

When I'm in a hurry and I don't even stop when I'm answering my children, probably I don't understand exactly what they want from me or what they are actually saying, so they get frustated. When they get frustated, we all know what's coming...

Obviously there are times when you really can't attend to them and obviously they also need to understand that they have to wait... otherwise we would be raising spoiled brats that thought they were the center of the universe... But even then, I usually stop what I'm doing, look at them and tell them: "Please, you have to wait a little while, because mommy needs to finish this, once I'm done, I will talk to you, okay?" That way the child knows that she's not being ignored or overlooked, she just needs to wait.

Another important principle is that things that are unimportant to us can mean the world to them. We have been trained to find certain things important, like work, money, providing for our family, laundry, cooking to feed one's family. Well, children could not care less. But they find other things terribly important. We have to stop and think what can those things be and why? That way we will start understanding them.

My three year old daughter once told me she had a boyfriend and she was going to marry him. I laughed, obviously, as I found very funny that at that age she thought of those things. A few weeks after I asked her about her boyfriend and she told me he had "married" other girls ( at that age... boy, are things fast nowadays, or what).

Anyway, I told her not to worry, as there were many boys in the world and she would meet a proper one. I tried not to disregard the importance she gave to the subject, but apparently I was totally off.

My husband told me she was throwing tantrums every day, when he dropped her off at day care and no one understood why. So, finally, I came to the conclusion that it was the boyfriend matter, that was consuming her.

You see, what we all found so funny, having a boyfriend at three years old, and disregarded as a silly thing, it actually meant the whole world to her, she had her heart broken and she acted up every morning, because when she arrived at day care, she saw her "boyfriend" next to another girl. Silly to us, everything to them...

But it actually can be anything, a toy, something that they don't understand, a fact, an idea, doing something to the brother or sister and not to them (how come did he/she had this and not me?).

One day my boy came home and asked me if our house was Andrew's house. That threw me off for a while. Apparently he was very upset, because one of his friends had told me that our house was his house and this was confusing him and he was afraid we might have to leave, so his friend would move in. Now, try to explain to a three years old child that this makes no sense.