Feeling absolutely defeated as a parent.

So yesterday was our oldest son's 2nd birthday. We had a small party for him at our local My Gym (similar to Gymboree), with 8 other 18mo to 2 yr old kids in attendance. While the other parent's kids were incredibly well behaved and gladly participated in the activities, our son only did what he wanted to do. When we took him away from whatever he was doing at the time, it was an all out tantrum. A good example: He was playing in the ball pit when they announced it was time to cut the cake and sing happy birthday to him. I had to get him out of the ball pit and bring him to the cake and he went full on tantrum, kicking, screaming, crying. There was just no consoling him. The worst part was near the end of the party they had every parent sit in a circle with their child and performed a puppet show. Every other kid in the room was quietly sitting with their parents while our son was running around playing with all of the toys. We tried several times to get him to come sit with us, but he was just not having it. When we pulled him away from the toys, he threw another tantrum.I'll be honest, when we left the party, my wife and I were seriously questioning if we were good parents or not. We've both read No Bad Kids and How to talk so kids will listen and we try to mold our parenting style after those methods. But I'm not sure if we're doing something wrong or if this is just normal for this age. He often throws the same kind of tantrums at home, and we usually have a very difficult time getting him to calm down. We try acknowledging his feelings and consoling him, but he often just pushes us away and will run to another room, sit down in the middle of the floor, and scream and cry. It usually takes 20-30 minutes for him to get over it and move on to something else. I should probably also mention that he's not talking much at all for his age and we think a lot of the tantrums might stem from him not being able to communicate his feelings to us.Does anyone have any advice at all? What can we do to better help our child get over these tantrums? via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/2IyEykS