Ep 12: Three Ways to Turn Toddler Tantrums into Teachable Moments
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:00] NV: Sawadee ka, and welcome to the Come Back to Care podcast. I am your host, Nat Nadha Vikitsreth, a decolonized and licensed clinical psychotherapist, somatics and social justice practitioner, and founder of Come Back to Care. Adopt connector, norm agitator and lover of liberation.
If you're on a journey to transform your daily parenting into a social justice practice that nurtures your child's development and promotes intergenerational family healing, I am so glad that you're here. On this podcast, we explore how social justice, child development science, parenting, and family systems intersect with one another. If you've been looking for ways to align your parenting with a social justice values, you're in the right place. Together, we find our way back to our true home. We come back home to our body and the goodness within. We come back to our lineage and come back to care together. So come curious, and come as you are. Let's move at the speed of care, and let's do this.
[EPISODE]
Welcome to Season 2 and Episode 12 of the Come Back to Care Podcast.
I’m so excited to be in conversation with you again so that you and I can continue to explore different ways to make parenting deeply decolonized and intentionally intergenerational. So that when you raise your child, you’re modeling the values of compassion and liberation you want to live by and pass down to your child…instead of unintentionally repeating outdated family cycles you’re trying to break or reproducing oppressive social conditioning from patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy. To say it differently, you can make parenting an act of social justice and liberation through your daily parenting…most of the time (because well bye perfection).
This episode is part one of the discipline series. In this episode, we’re going to unpack toddlers’ and preschoolers’ tantrums and meltdowns. We’re going to rethink 3 common behavior management techniques. These 3 techniques we’re compassionately agitating in this episode are 1) decrease the bad behaviors, 2) be consistent, and 3) ignore the tantrums.
We’re not canceling any of these techniques. Rather, we’re going to take a closer look at these techniques in the context of child development, brain development, and social justice practice…because techniques or strategies alone are incomplete and even ineffective without considering context. After we explore each technique, I’ll offer an alternative way to think about tantrums and meltdowns.
If you like this episode and want to dive in deeper, I have recorded a self-guided workshop where you can sign up for and listen to for free at comebacktocare.com/tantrums and that’s t-a-n-t-r-u-m-s. come backtocare.com/tantrums.
Why Tantrums
Tantrums and meltdowns, like colic, feeding and sleep difficulties, are moments in parenting where emotions run really high. There’re lots of tension, friction, and eventually conflict.
You already know that in moments like tantrums many of us go back to our old habits or conditioning. We go back to what feels familiar whether or not it’s outdated or adaptive. That’s one reason you might snap at your child and sound exactly like your parents when you were little, even though you promised yourself you’d give your child a different childhood from the one you had. Or, you might set an intention to never enact the kinds of violence you see in the prison industrial complex but end up using a version of that carceral punishment with your child to quote unquote control them when they’re out of control during meltdowns.
It's so easy to practice social justice when things are calm, and the kids are not screaming or throwing lunch on the floor. How about when our kids are hard to like, for example when they’re overwhelmed with intense feelings during tantrums and meltdowns? These moments are mini conflicts in many ways. They can stir up our wounds, both inner child wounds and internalized oppression wounds.
How can we make conflicts generative and abundant with opportunities to stay rooted in our values of compassion, justice, and liberation instead of control, coercion, domination, and punishment?
Malidoma Some wrote quote “Conflict is the spirit of the relationship asking itself to deepen,” end quote With this teaching, let’s deepen our social justice practices during our toddlers’ tantrums and meltdowns.
#1 decreasing bad behaviors
The first common technique or myth we’re going to re-think is this idea of “decreasing bad behaviors.”
When a child is screaming, crying, biting, or throwing their body on the floor during a tantrum or meltdown, many of us feel this intense urgency to gain control over the situation and to gain control over the seemingly out of control behaviors. We feel a need to “decrease the bad behavior” or stop this crying or cut out this disrespectful behavior. But we usually end up controlling the child instead of first meeting them where they’re at.
The tantrums and meltdowns that I’m talking about in this episode are when your child is overwhelmed by their intense feelings and they can’t cope by themselves. If your child’s trying to cope in ways that could hurt themselves like hitting their head on the floor and so on, safety definitely comes first. You might have to stop the self-harming behaviors right away then address the underlying needs.
In cases where safety isn’t an immediate concern, when we rush in and focus only on how to decrease or fix the behavior itself, we often miss the full context. When we focus so much on what to do, we often miss asking why…why is this behavior taking place?
And what happens when you tell your crying child to stop crying or go give an empty apology to their friend or take their toys away? I often see the child’s grievance get louder. Now the screaming match begins. You quote unquote teach your child louder. Then, they scream even harder. The cycle goes on. You get the idea.
In this scenario, you might be so focused on controlling your child’s screams and cries that you miss seeing that you both are now locked into a power struggle.
In Thai there’s a saying “Hoo muead tah mua” which translates ears go blind, eyes go blurry. I think that’s such a good way to describe power struggles. You are caught in a battle with your child where they want to declare their independence and you want to make the screaming stop. And they want to be who they are and you want them to listen and follow your directions. It’s a battle of who can dominate, control, and have power over the other.
By trying to fix the tantrums and meltdowns without considering the underlying why, what are we communicating to our children when they ask us for help? Are we pathologizing or blaming their emotional outbursts because crying and screaming are the only things their immature brain and nervous system can do? What if we shift the focus from trying to get them to act right to trying to tell them that they are loved even though they’re a mess emotionally and overwhelmed neurologically right now?
I have two invitations to share with you.
First, let’s replace the question of “what do I do to fix the behavior?” with “What are my child’s unmet needs underneath this behavior?”
Is the unmet need boredom? Or sensory overload- because the sound, sight, touch, movement- in the environment is too much, too fast, and too unpredictable? Or is the unmet need a bid for connection?
Once you know your why, you can let that information guide your next steps. This way you have the discernment you need to look at the tools in your toolkit and pick when to use time out, or time in, when to ignore the behavior or take toys away and so on.
It’s like you’re putting a detective hat on and whipping out your magnifying glass to find the clues in your child’s cues. With your magnifying glass, you look at the cues or tantrums closely. Once you do, you’ll see that underneath “defiance” there’re unmet needs.
Second, let’s shift away from power struggles and dominance to power-with. And there are two parts to this power-with. First, you power-with your child who’s in need of your help so they can navigate their intense feelings with you. For example, a simple gesture like squatting down to your child’s level to communicate that you’re here and you love them even though you’re not sure what to do.
Then there’s power-with with yourself. Power struggles don’t just take place between you and your child. They also take place between your INNER child and your child. Your child’s behaviors often activate your inner child wounds of rejection, abandonment, unworthiness and so on. It’s usually very helpful to know which wound is getting stirred up so that you can name that and set it aside while you’re trying to be present with your child during their meltdowns. This way you can notice and name that “ahhh, I’m feeling a sense of shame from my inner child wounds of unworthiness. This shame makes me want to yell at my child to show who’s really in charge here. But that wound is from the past. I now have a tool to be with my shame so I can be present with my child right here, right now.”
When you quickly check in with yourself and your inner child before you help your child navigate their meltdowns, you can show up in your full dignity instead of shaming and blaming yourself or getting stuck in the power struggles.
Doing your inner work or inner child work can support you to be anchored in self-trust rather than losing your grounding in the intensity of your child’s meltdowns.
Doing your inner work and inner child work can also support you to see your child’s unmet needs clearly through the tsunami of tantrums so that you respond intentionally to your actual child instead of knee-jerk reacting out of past pain to your inner child.
If you can’t quite name the inner child wounds on top of your mind for whatever reason, I have prepared a few reflection prompts for you to think about your childhood experiences in trauma-informed and resilience-oriented ways. You can listen to this recorded self-guided workshop which is a deeper dive of this episode for free at www.comebacktocare.com/tantrums.
To recap, the urgency to rush in and fix the behaviors can be pathologizing and winds up blaming our children for feeling their feelings. We can replace the question “what do I do to fix the behavior?” with “what are the unmet needs underneath this behavior?” And when the timing feels right, do your inner work and try to understand your parenting trigger by exploring which inner child wounds get activated by your child’s tantrums and meltdowns. You might ask “what are the unmet needs of my inner child?”
#2 Be consistent
Alright, next let’s talk about “consistency” which is the second common technique or myth we’re going to unpack and reframe together.
When I see advice on tantrums online, every suggestion usually comes with another piece of advice which is “but you have to be consistent, otherwise it won’t work.”
For example, if you choose to do a time out with your toddler and have them sit in a kitchen corner for 3 minutes by themself, you need to always use that same kitchen corner and do it for 3 minutes.
This one makes absolutely no sense to me because a) how are you going to use time out when your toddlers crying for different reasons? A crying toddler who just fell down and scraped their knee, a crying toddler who’s hungry, and a crying toddler who wants to push all the elevator buttons…these three toddlers need different things and timeout- no matter how consistently you do it- isn’t going to meet the toddler’s needs, let alone be effective.
Plus, development is so dynamic because it changes all the time. Your toddler is busy learning new skills, integrating them and refining them. There’s no one-size-fit-all strategy.
And I know you know this too and you’re probably having a “duh, Nat” moment. I get it. But I have to talk about it because in the heat of the moment…amid all the uncertainty and intensity of a meltdown, it’s such a human thing to grab onto something concrete. And it might look like “oh I don’t know if this time out in the kitchen corner thing is going to work. My toddler keeps getting up and out of that chair. But if I can just be consistent. Maybe, maybe this time it will work.” And the “it will work” in this example means the timeout will be successful not that you’ll meet your toddler’s unmet needs underneath the tantrum, right?
I fell into this trap too when I was a new classroom teacher. I remember learning about “time in” and that was eight years ago. I memorized all the steps and all the scripts because I wanted to get this new technique right. I was so focused on doing this time in thing that I forgot to assess what my students actually needed from me.
Perhaps, “be consistent” should be “be consistent if the function of the behavior is the same.”
So my invitation is for us to replace rigid consistency with balance.
When we consider a toddler’s development, we can see that an internal struggle at this stage is the push and pull between becoming their own person and getting freaked out about losing the connection they have with their caregivers. So on one hand our toddler is confidently saying “I’ve been a baby for so long. Now I want to be my own person. I can do anything myself. Me Mine. My turn. Let me help.” On the other hand, they’re not sure if you’ll still love them and be there for them if they break off and become their own person. That’s why we often see toddlers run off and explore the toys and engage with their friends only to run back to you for a quick snuggle to recharge. Then, they go off to explore the environment again. Any of this resonate with you?
So developmentally speaking there’re two needs at play here: one is the need to be independent and the other is the need to connect with those they trust.
To honor these two needs during a tantrum, you can replace consistency with balance, which is a balance between giving your toddler some room to be independent and connecting with them. To support their emerging independence, you might validate their feelings by naming them, saying “wow you’re really upset right now.” Or “when I feel upset, I cry too. I’m here with you.” Then, to support their need for connection, you step in and set boundaries or limits. You might say “but I need you to have some food first before eating ice-cream.” Or “you can throw a ball outside but not inside. I need to keep you and your baby sister safe.”
A common misconception is that honoring connection means letting our toddler lose so they can do whatever they want. Uh, no. A toddler who runs the house is usually an anxious one because they’re too young to know how far they can push your button. With limit setting, they know how far they can go and they can relax within that perimeter you set lovingly and firmly for them. They know how to be, how to act, and even fall apart because they know someone they trust has their back.
So it’s a balance between validating their feelings and their need to be their own person AND setting some limits and boundaries when you need to.
We, grownups, need that kind of limit setting too, don’t we? I remember the first time I have ever had a fancy French meal. There were 17 utensils on my left, my right, and in front of me. I was so stressed the entire meal about the right fork to use and I couldn’t even enjoy the meal.
You know I also love word play. So another way to think about this is first co-reg, which is short for co-regulation, then correct, which means correcting the behavior. I’ll say it one more time: First Co-Reg then Correct. You use co-regulation to communicate with your toddler that you see them and their feelings matter. So that their fight-flight-freeze stress response can relax enough for their thinking brain or neocortex to come back online. Then and only then you “correct” which is teaching consequences with whatever discipline tools you have in your toolkit.
When we’re stuck in that power struggle, we just want to teach, teach, and teach or correct, correct, and correct without co-regulating first. But our toddler’s brain isn’t ready and available to process the information we’re teaching. It’s all about timing.
You can take a deeper dive and learn more about how to match your discipline strategy to your toddler’s brain development by signing up for the free audio self-guided workshop at comebacktocare.com/tantrums. I love talking about brain development in relation to social justice action.
#3 “Ignore the tantrum”
The final common technique that we’re going to re-think together is the idea that you should ignore the tantrums so that you’re not encouraging this behavior by paying attention to it.
It’s true that when a behavior receives no attention it wilts away like a tree without water.
But let’s look at this act of withholding attention through our children’s eyes and you can decide if this feels right for you.
Remember that through the lens of development and infant mental health, tantrums and meltdowns mean that your child is asking for your help so that they can cope and navigate the intense feelings they’re experiencing with you. Tantrums and meltdowns are not your child’s willful behavior to get you, to annoy you, or to manipulate you.
When this literal cry for help is ignored, it leaves a child wondering if you love them. If they don’t look or sound happy or well-mannered, will you still love them?
When the cry for help keeps getting ignored over and over and over again, I see children adapt to this rejection and abandonment in at least two ways.
First, they hold their emotions in. Toddlers and preschoolers are so good at blaming themselves for not being worthy enough to earn their caregivers’ attention. This kind of early attachment injury becomes an inner child wound down the line where you constantly try to excel, be perfect, give, give and give without boundaries hoping to earn love. Because when you don’t provide value, you wonder if you’re valuable.
Second, children externalize this cry for help, turning it into aggression towards others. It makes sense, right? If your cry isn’t being answered, how else are you going to make sure you’re seen and heard? You escalate the cry to aggression. Because even though this aggressive behavior is met with punishment or negative attention, it’s much less painful than no attention at all.
Besides these wounds, ignoring your toddler’s cry for help isn’t discipline. Discipline means to teach. By ignoring the behavior, the behavior might decrease in the short term. But your child still has no clue of what to do instead to replace the behavior that you don’t like. For example, when your preschooler’s having their tantrum, you co-reg (or co-regulate) and 30 minutes later your preschooler feels safe and connected with you aka regulated. Then, you’re ready to Correct or teach and your preschooler’s neocortex feels safe enough to listen to you and learn from you. So you can practice with your preschooler that instead of taking their friend’s car and running away, they can say “hey do you want to play tag together?” or sign “play together?” whatever fits with your child’s developmental needs.
So when your child is asking for help through tantrums and meltdowns, what can you do that’s not ignoring this legitimate and intelligent attention-seeking behavior? What can you do that doesn’t abandon them to their own immature devices (like time out) and doesn’t take away objects that are helping them cope like a pacifier, blanket, toy, stuffed animal?
I believe that you can meet this cry for help with compassion in whichever way suits your culture, your voice, and your style.
You love your child, I know that with my whole heart. I trust that you know how to communicate to your child that you love them even though their crying and screaming make it so hard for you to like them. But you’re here with them to make sure they feel loved even though they’re not at their best.
If you assess what the unmet needs underneath this tantrum are, you discover that your child is in need of attention.
I have two invitations for you.
First, can we destigmatize attention seeking? Why is it a bad thing? Our toddler’s sense of self can only emerge when their caregivers reflect how they feel back to them. When you say to your toddler, “you look upset. What do you need?” Your toddler learns that a) their experiences are valid and can be separate and different from yours, b) they matter, and c) they learn that this feeling inside their body has a word and it’s “upset”. Only when someone sees, validates, and affirms our experiences, do we become an individual. In other words, your personhood is born out of a relationship. Individualism is such a myth. I’m saying all this to say that our toddlers need our attention and validation as an important part of their development of sense of self.
Second, can we teach our children to ask for attention just like we to teach them to ask for milk, cookies, and apple sauce? Many parents who’ve worked with me over the years choose a variety of words to teach their toddlers (and partners). Some examples are a snuggle, a love cuddle, a boost. In a sentence it can sound like: “Instead of crying when you want my attention, you can ask for a snuggle instead.”
Summary:
In closing, just like we’re re-imagining parenting to be deeply decolonized and intentionally intergenerational at Come Back to Care, in this episode, we’re re re-imagining tantrum discipline to be less about punishment and more about compassion and interdependence.
We examined three common behavior management strategies: “decrease bad behaviors,” “be consistent,” and “ignore tantrums,” and we talked about how all three pieces of advice are incomplete because they don’t account for the context of your child’s behavior. Instead of focusing on behavior, my invitation is for you to see tantrums as an invitation.
First, tantrums are an invitation for us to see the world through our children’s eyes and let this awareness guide our next steps. It’s not so much about managing the behaviors as understanding the underlying factors which contribute to the tantrums. These factors could be your toddler’s sensory processing abilities, their biological constitutions, their birth history, their personality, your energy level, your history of mental health, your inner child wounds, your cultural resources, your family patterns, and more. But these complex nuances get reduced down to a behavior to be fixed. By considering the whole picture of our toddler, the care is more complete.
Second, tantrums and meltdowns are invitations for us to do our inner child work. All those parenting triggers stem from some of our pain from the past. If you have someone you trust to listen to your story, specifically how your past pain keeps getting repeated in the present, that’d be amazing because healing inner child wounds doesn’t have to be your burden to carry alone.
If you want to dive deeper on this topic of inner child wounds and parenting triggers along with developmentally informed discipline, please sign up for a deep dive self-guided audio workshop at comebacktocare.com/tantrums.
In the next episode or part 2 of what we just discussed here, we’re going to connect the dots between transformative justice and discipline.
As always, in solidarity and sass. Until next time, please take care.