• I thought I had the whole parenting thing figured out when I raised my oldest son.
• But my youngest son is having dramatic tantrums often, and I'm struggling to deal with them.
• I learned parenting is not one-size-fits-all, and I'm learning to adapt.

My youngest son has a temper, and it comes out at odd times.

Outside the home, he's a popular and high-achieving 7-year-old. He's funny, athletic, smart, and well-behaved; his report cards have whole paragraphs praising his behavior.

But when he's home, he can get angry over the smallest things. Can't have a snack before dinner? Outburst. Stuck on a hard part in a video game? Outburst. Being told to knock it off with the outburst? Bigger outburst.

Learning how to help him manage his emotions has made me better equipped to address his emotional needs, adapt to his brother's needs, and provide me with a better understanding of parenting.

I thought I was prepared for my second kid

As a father, I started out unsure of how to handle my youngest's temper tantrums. After raising his older brother, I thought I already had all the parenting experience I would need to handle the outbursts.

And I had done pretty well, too. The oldest had turned out to be a gifted student and was praised by teachers for his creativity, his intelligence, and his sweet and polite nature. That must mean I had parenting down to an art, right? So, what else was there to learn?

It turns out that my youngest had the gall not to be a new version of his brother. Because he was a different person, many of the parenting techniques we had employed for his older brother didn't produce the same effects.

I got frustrated, my wife got aggravated, and the youngest got louder. Nothing seemed to work.

Clearly, a new parenting approach was needed. While we were trying new techniques for the youngest, we also had to adapt our parenting for my oldest.

I'm learning to adapt my parenting

My oldest has reached middle school, having achieved some self-sufficiency in terms of basic human needs and hygiene, so we tend to focus more on the youngest. But we also have to stay available for the oldest. As a middle schooler, he's becoming more familiar with school stress and social pressure, and he struggles with how to handle his emotions in the face of those challenges.

Suddenly, we have two kids at two different emotional paces requiring equal attention. Some days, it feels like we're trying to drive a bus and a motorcycle at the same time. While that can be daunting, I've decided that my best way forward requires me to be more open-minded about parenting techniques.

One of my favorite learning methods? Watching how other parents work with their kids.

Years ago, I would have watched another kid's emotional outburst with a feeling of relief that it wasn't my problem. I would thank the heavens that it wasn't my kid throwing milkshakes at his mother. These days, whenever I see a child having an outburst in public, I find myself turning to watch so I can make mental notes on how the parents react.

I try the stuff that looks effective, ignore the stuff that doesn't, and frequently confer with my wife. We also chat with other parents to learn how they handle their kids' tantrums.

So far, we learned that when my youngest needs to calm down, we make him count to 20, sometimes several times. If that doesn't work, we require some basic calisthenics like jumping jacks, pushups, and sit-ups. Wind sprints in the front yard have been very effective, especially when we offer to time how fast he can go.

I have a whole new outlook on parenting

I've discovered that parenting requires a bigger empathy bandwidth, especially when raising multiple children. While it's important for my kids to understand how to handle their emotions, especially in public, it's become equally important for me to understand what I can do to guide them through it.

I also realized that parenting is not one size fits all; what may work for one kid may not work for the others.

But the most important thing I can do is be there for both my children and hope the temper tantrums will end soon.

• I loved going to Disney World as a kid, experiencing the freedom of the parks.
• Now that I bring my kids, we feel bogged down by apps, crowds, and restrictions.
• My kids don't know what they're missing, but the parks have changed so much for me.

Visiting Disney World was an annual experience of my youth. For decades, my family would spend a long October weekend at the Fort Wilderness camping resort. We'd run around the parks and skip through the numerous resorts and restaurants sprinkled throughout the Lake Buena Vista campus.

The Disney parks somehow felt futuristic and cutting-edge while also being nostalgic and magical. The trips made such an impression that I still find myself every September doing house chores with the animated "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" playing in the background or watching YouTube videos of park workers setting up the fall decorations.

So when my wife and I started taking our boys to the parks, I fell into the nostalgia trap of hoping their experiences would be just like mine. Time and economics had other plans.

A Disney trip requires too much planning now

I never appreciated the high level of planning it takes to visit a theme park until I became a parent. Ride line length and bad weather were my only concerns as a kid — with some minor concerns about food.

But as a parent, I find myself overwhelmed by the sheer number of pre-visit requirements.

When you take pride in your theme park survival knowledge, nothing will humble you faster than trying to navigate the Dos and Don'ts of visiting a Disney park in the 21^st century. Visiting a park these days requires weeks of planning, constant communication with everyone traveling in your group, and downloading phone apps just to enjoy certain parts of the park.

Further complications include things like Lightning Lane passes, blackout dates, rope drops, ride reservations, and premium annual passes — all things I never had to think about that have since become standard operating procedures for park visits.

My favorite part of visiting the Magic Kingdom used to be seeing the castle once I got through the front gate. Now, it's the bar stool at the resort because it doesn't require a reservation (yet).

I wish my kids get to be more free at the parks like I was

In addition to the annual October visits, I frequently visited the parks through school field trips or group events like Grad Nite. I have memories of racing through the parks with my friends, sprinting from ride to attraction with minimal crowds to slow us down, feeling like those feral kids from "Pinocchio" before they got turned into donkeys.

The sheer volume of the Disney park crowds these days makes that notion impossible. Our boys have fewer opportunities to behave like wild, unaccompanied minors.

This reality doesn't bother me too much, especially since I get the feeling park security would be less tolerant of unaccompanied minors than when I was a kid.

Thankfully, my kids don't care

Of course, none of these differences mean anything to my kids. I have no idea how they really feel about visiting the parks, but I know they enjoy it, and I'm getting better at letting them have their own life experiences without comparing them to mine.

That's fine because those comparisons didn't matter to me as a kid, either. Historians refer to the 1970s and 1980s as Disney's Dark Age, the years when the company produced some of its darkest films and the parks were not the IP-heavy juggernauts of today. But that didn't matter to a late-stage Generation X kid who watched "Robin Hood" and "Winnie the Pooh" until the VCR ate the tapes.

Visiting the parks felt like stepping into a pocket dimension where all the lands and characters showcased by Disney could be seen and touched. The Disney I experienced was the correct Disney, just as the Disney my boys currently experience is also the correct Disney.

Plus, I can feel them rolling their eyes whenever we talk about how much the parks have changed since we were kids.