Kindergarten Kids - Ignore It

Problem: 

Even though your kids (by which, of course, I mean my kids), are making great strides toward become actual rational human beings, they still turn into puddles of teary snot when you don't give them what they want. (And you don't know why. You swear they've never gotten anything that way.) Usually you count (and 1, 2, 3 Magic didn't work at all for you, by the way--again, by you, I mean me), or reprimand them, or yell (yuh huh, you do too sometimes), or send them into time out. But they seem insistent on doing this crying thing that gets them nothing but negative results.

Solution:

Warning, this comes from my pediatrician, who is not a child psychologist, but it does seem to be working so far.

If your kids are like my kids, and are still having these silly, drawn-out, toddler tantrums (although, again, it's much less often these days thank God.) apparently, according to my ped, they're not doing it for positive results or to get what they want, but only for attention. And all the the above things I mentioned in the problem section give them a bit of attention.

She suggested completely ignoring it, which I've been doing.

And it works great for me, too, because now I don't have to deal with them when they're being total jerks.

(IMPORTANT: Don't do this until five. We tried doing this on our own about 18 months ago, and then when our kids entered preschool, instead of talking things out with her words, she'd trained herself to run away and cry until she felt better. Which you can't do in school. At that stage, the girls still needed to learn to use their words and face their problems. They do that now, and so this method is working better.)