What can you do to tame your child’s tantrums? No matter what age or stage your child is at, tantrums or BIG reactions can often happen out of nowhere. Understanding why they happen and how to respond effectively can create peace quickly for both you and your child. Here are 6 steps that work to help you respond to a child as they experience big emotions, flip out and enter tantrum mode.
Tantrums come in all shapes and sizes. And can often spring out of nowhere. They are more likely to occur in children between the age of 1 and 3 because children’s social and emotional skills are only just starting to be developed around this time.
However, many parents often believe that their kids will grow out of this stage and tantrums will ease as they get older. This is true for most children but parents need to know that older children can have tantrums too.
Why? Simply because they have not yet managed to respond effectively to their emotions and have not yet learned to manage or express their feelings in appropriate ways. This was true for our 8 year old daughter who recently decided that slamming doors was an effective way to vent her frustrations about her younger siblings. Totally unlike her, she began acting out and behaving erratically in sudden bursts of strange and angry behaviour. As I like to call it, her INNER HULK would take over and she had not developed the skills to talk herself back down. So, I researched like crazy and developed steps to put in place for our whole family to implement when any of our ‘INNER HULK’ appears.
And yes, that includes us adults too.
Taming tantrums 101- 6 Steps to taming your child’s INNER HULK
What to do #1: Stay calm yourself- (Or at least pretend to be)
Ever heard of the term equanimity? It means remaining calm even in the face of chaos.
Calm breeds calm. Anger breeds anger. Simple right?
Well, I don’t know about you, but no one in the world has ever made me feel as mad as I have sometimes than my own children. They can wind and wind and wind me up until I feel like I am going to explode. The thing is, in every experience I have ever had with any of my children that I have returned that anger or frustration back at them, it has NEVER worked to solve the problem! It only ever exasperates the emotions that are being thrown around and leaves everyone in a bad mood.
But did you know that you can train yourself to be in control of your own emotions so that you can be a role model for them?
Ask yourself this ……
- How is your own emotional well-being?
- How well do you respond to difficult situations in front of your kids?
- Do you respond to challenge effectively?
- Or do you tend to make mountains out of mole hills?
Are you a person who has learned to either consciously or unconsciously respond well to a crisis situation regardless of how big the ‘crisis’ actually is? Or does something as small as a glass of spilled milk set you off and send you into frustration?
If you have a tendency to fall into frustration or anger in front of your kids you can change this. Your behaviour is YOUR choice just as much as it is theirs. And the best way to teach your kids how to deal with their BIG emotions is to model it for them.
So what can you do instead of reacting or overreacting in front of your kids?
Train yourself to think about everyday challenges and situations with determination, problem solving and calm. You can learn to attack ‘crisis’ situations and see them as learning opportunities for growth instead. More importantly, look for these opportunities with your kids when they arise. Use them as teaching points and get them to focus on how to solve a problem rather than fixate on it. Remind yourself in the moments that you are struggling to keep your cool, that frustration and anger serve no body. If you need to step away and take a few deep breaths before responding to your children, do it. I often leave the room in order to compose myself before returning to help resolve the situation if still needed. Choosing to respond instead of reacting, or overreacting will create a better result for everyone in the end.
TIP: We include affirmations regarding how we respond to our children in our daily routine. Every night before bed, my husband and I listen to our recorded affirmations and within them, we hear ourselves saying ‘I respond to my children with calm and compassion.’ This is a thought that is triggered regularly throughout the day whenever we encounter challenges with our children. And it works.
What to do #2: Teach Your Kids how their brain works to process emotions
If you are looking for a great way to teach your kids emotional regulation, ‘The Yes Brain,’ by Dan Seigel and Tina Payne Bryson is a great place to start. They teach strategies to help children develop a balanced, integrated brain. Or what they call, ‘The Yes Brain.’
You can teach your kids about the brain and the function each part has in helping them make decisions. The movie Inside Out is also a great movie to watch with your kids to teach them about how a brain functions when processing emotions. Let them know that their brains don’t have the pathways YET to be able to process new or BIG emotions and that they often need help from someone else in order to do so.
This is what is called co-regulation.
When we step in to help our kids process emotions we help connect those pathways from one part of the brain to the other so they can learn to function out of a balanced brain. Here is how you can learn more about the functions of each part of the brain. Teach your kids how it works too and this can help them understand what it is that happens when your brain tries to process emotions and connect the parts together to make sense of a situation.
These are the 3 main parts of the brain that your kids can learn about.
How do we teach kids to emotionally regulate?
The trick to teaching kids how to emotionally regulate is to teach them about how their brain works and the function of each part of the brain. Once they understand the science of the brain it is more possible to teach them how to go about developing their emotional responses. Tina Payne Bryson and Dan Siegel like to use the idea when explaining how the brain works to kids, that the brain is like a house.
The Upstairs Brain takes time to evolve as a child grows but is not fully constructed until a person reaches his 20’s. A child is more likely to function out of their Downstairs Brain because it is more developed which can lead to tantrums and impulsive behaviour like slamming doors. What you want to teach your children is to be able to access all areas of the house and be able to use their whole brain in harmony to tackle whatever comes their way.
Once you and your child understand how the brain functions, you can take the next few steps to help co-regulate and process their emotions WITH them.
What to do #3: Teach your kids about the Zones of Emotions so they can identify and express how they are feeling
It’s a good idea to have one of these diagrams displayed somewhere which is easily accessible for your child in your home.
The Green Zone
The Green Zone- Everyone has a Window of Tolerance. Some people’s ‘Window’ is larger than others and within that window we are able to tolerate whatever is happening to us easily. A child’s window of tolerance is a lot smaller than that of an adults. (Depending on the adult). Within the window of tolerance or what they also call, the Green Zone, everything seems like it’s going right and we are able to handle ourselves well. Sometimes, when we start to feel BIG emotions like anger or frustration we can move out of our window of tolerance and can step into the Red Zone.
The Red Zone
The Red Zone- is where we might feel really mad, scared or nervous and may want to cry, yell or slam doors. I like to call this, the Hulk Zone.
The Blue Zone
The Blue Zone- Sometimes, when we get upset we can go inward. This is where we might feel so upset that we pull away from everyone, want to be by ourselves, close off and don’t want to talk about it to anyone.
You can teach your kids about these zones and get them to label emotions that fit into each. Stick a visual of this graphic up on the wall and write all the labels of different emotions that fit into each section. This gives them the vocabulary to explain emotions depending on what zone they are in and can help them learn to express themselves verbally when they enter any of these zones.
Once they can recognise what happens when they are in each zone, you can start to come up with ideas to help them deal with emotions that lead them back into the green zone when they happen to fall out of it.
Once you have equipped your kids with the knowledge they need to understand how the brain processes emotions you can now learn what you can do and what strategies you can use to tame your hulk when she steps out of the green zone and needs you to help regulate her emotions with her.
So now when Hulk appears, what can YOU DO to help your child through it?
What to do #4: Validate and name the emotions your child might be experiencing in the moment. Let her know that you are on her side.
This morning my 8 year old Hulk used every opportunity to make mountains out of molehills. I think she experienced every emotion there is in the process of getting ready for school. In the past, everyone of those opportunities probably would have led her back down that hallway and slamming that door behind her. But this morning, I managed to talk her through each one of those mountains. And managed to keep her brain balanced enough to get through it.
So how did I do it?
Every time I noticed her battling with one of her ‘crisis’ situations I named the emotion I thought she may have been feeling. As she sat in front of my incredibly slow laptop to do her homework, I could see her frustration mounting. Instead of instructing her to stop bashing the keyboard so hard I simply mentioned how frustrating I find it to work on myself, before asking her if I could step in and help to get it working.
Frustration successfully labelled.
Then, when she whined about how she hated wearing her school shoes, I agreed with her and reminded her that I don’t like wearing shoes either. I told her that I find them uncomfortable and annoying and take them off as soon as I get the chance to. But I know that I have to wear them sometimes. So she put on her shoes.
When her sister then ruined one of her new felt pens by aggressively dotting her paper I stated that I could see that she was angry that her sister had done that and that I was sorry that it was ruined. When she could see that I could feel her emotion, that I had stated what she was feeling and that it seemed I was ‘on her side’ it took the power out of the emotion for her.
What was it that worked here?
I put myself in her situation and I validated her feelings. You can put yourself in their shoes. try to understand their side of the story. And even if you don’t get it, simply name their feelings and validate them. Ensure that you are using positive forms of communication like listening without getting defensive.
This technique is called Name it to tame it!
Name it, to tame it is a term coined by Dan Seigel. He explains that simply naming the emotion removes the power that it holds over you and allows the logical part of the brain to make sense of what is happening. Have your child retell his or her experience and name the feelings that come along with it. This is where the Zones of Emotions chart can come in handy. And try to see it from the child’s perspective. Using compassion for how they are feeling really helps to settle them down when they know that ‘you get it.’
Often a temper tantrum will stop here and you can use the next step to talk about what is happening.
Quick tip: Don’t minimise your childs feelings. What can seem little to you, can seem really BIG to them. Saying things like, its not a big deal. It’s nothing to get upset about can lead them to feeling like you don’t value how they feel and often makes them less likely to come to you for support. in the future.
What to do #5: Create calm, connect and use breathing to bring down your child’s Inner Hulk.
Once your child understands that his feelings have been validated by you and you are ‘on her side’ or ‘with’ her in this, you can now use calming techniques to talk them back into the green zone, if in fact they are not already there.
Note: teaching opportunities and problem solving cannot take place until you bring your child back into the green zone, when their logical brain can be reconnected with the rest of their brain.
What is interesting however, is that scientific experiments have shown that it is absolutely impossible to feel fear, anger, anxiety or any negative emotions of any kind while the muscles of the body are kept perfectly relaxed.
So how do we bring our kids back into this state of calm?
We tend to send our kids away to their rooms to calm down and fail to realise that it is actually a connection that they are in need most of. Remember, behaviour is communication and it is your child’s way of asking for help. Sit with them, cuddle them if they are in need of physical connection and stay with them until they are ready to connect and breathe to calm down. You can use techniques like pretending to blow up a balloon of frustration with your kids and letting it go to watch it and their negative feelings fly away. Or blow out some imaginary feeling candles that light the flame of negative emotions.
TIP: You can get your child to practice breathing when they are in a calm state, with one hand on their heart and one on their belly. In ‘The Yes Brain’ they advise that parents practice this breathing technique with their kids at night before bed, when they are most relaxed. You can get them to put one hand on their chest and the other on their heart as they take slow deep breaths. Get them to describe how they feel as they do this. e.g. relaxed, calm. When they need to bring themselves back to the green zone if they step out of it, they can use this technique that they have practiced when they are in their calm state. The more they practice this when they are calm, the deeper the neuro-connection becomes and the easier it is for their brain to take them back to feeling calm again.
What to do #6: Only when they are back in the Green Zone can you help solve the problem
It is only once they have returned to feeling calm that you can problem solve with them about whatever it is that made them upset in the first place. Get them to come up with their own ideas of how they could respond or what they could do next time if the same situation arises. Remind them that you are always there to help them if they need it. It’s better for them to own their solutions rather than you trying to solve a situation for them. This is also the time that you can discuss consequences and behavioural limits that need to be pointed out.
You can print out a visual and stick it up somewhere to remind you of the steps you and your child can take to minimise the effect of their Inner Hulk.
You can download all of these printables here.
Things to remember, in their moments of ‘Crisis’ or tantrums.
- Stay calm- Behaviour is communication
- Co-regulation- They need support to use their Whole Brain and that is YOU
- Name it to Tame it- Validate and express emotions- Use the zones of Emotions Visual
- Connect and create calm
- Problem solve when they move back in to the green zone
The key message in all this is …. Most parents never learn how to nurture their children’s brains- but this useful knowledge is essential in raising our children. When you and your child can understand the whole brain you can use these effective techniques to integrate each room in their house (brain) so they can become more self-aware and in control of themselves. And their Inner Hulk becomes less likely to slam doors.
So why is it important to respond effectively to your children when they thro w tantrum?
Remember that YOU are responsible for building those tight connections with your kids. Sometimes it feels like kids overreact over the smallest things. But being there in those broken toy moments, gives you a ticket to those broken heart moments later in life. If your kids feel comfortable coming to you about the small things now, they will feel comfortable coming to you about the big things when they need to. So think of these BIG tantrum moments as moments of connections the next time your child flips out and needs your help to get through!