One Day You’ll Thank Me podcast hosts Jenni Mortimer and Rebecca Haszard spoke to author, life coach and counsellor Rebecca Ballagh about what goes on in a toddler’s brain, and are sharing her top tips for parents to handle them.
Ballagh, as the mum of a toddler herself, explains that toddlers, just like us, “have that full landscape of emotions, but for them it’s usually their first time experiencing it. And so it actually feels really quite overwhelming and [like] quite a big thing”.
She notes there are different ways these emotions can manifest, too: “There are tantrums and then there are meltdowns, and then there are just big feelings. And so I kind of see it as - a tantrum can feel more like it has little behavioural elements. And then a meltdown is really when they’re actually quite dysregulated.”
When the latter takes place, Ballagh says what’s happening is a loss of ability to think logically or rationally, “not that [toddlers] have a lot of that anyway”, she points out.
“They’ve gone fully into their limbic system in their brain, which is the emotional centre. From that place, we’re talking about their nervous system being dysregulated. You would’ve heard of fight or flight. Tantrums and meltdowns are really just their experience of that: being totally overwhelmed by an emotion, maybe feeling like they’ve gone into that survival place of their nervous system, and they’re desperately seeking a way to regulate themselves - how can they calm down?”
What’s important to acknowledge at this point is that this experience can leave a parent feeling dysregulated too.
“One of the ways we can help them is for ourselves to recognise if we are starting to feel triggered or we are starting to feel anger rising. If we are feeling anxious or panicky around them, it’s going be really beneficial for them if we can also just take a pause, take a few really deep breaths.
“It’s really good to have little coping statements or a little mantra-type thing that you say to yourself in those moments. Something like, ‘Okay, my child’s having a hard time, but they’re not trying to give me a hard time’. Or, ‘My child’s feelings are not a reflection on my parenting’.”
Beyond this, in that moment in the shopping mall when they’re pounding their little fists and tears are streaming from their tiny, scrunched-up face, there’s not a lot you can do except “help them ride it out”, says Ballagh.
“Because in that place, just like when we are feeling completely angry or really, really anxious, if somebody tells us just to calm down or take a breath, it doesn’t really work. In fact, it often makes us feel worse,” says the author, who has written children’s books Big Feelings: And what they tell us and The Rainbow in my Heart, which discuss kids’ emotions and feature tools and activities to manage them.
“When I talk about how we navigate getting kids through that stuff, it’s often setting up the building blocks before that even happens, before they hit the big tantrums.
“And then when the big tantrums happen, just knowing that the emotion will pass and it’ll pass a lot quicker If we can sit with them in it and be as regulated as possible ourselves.”
For more tips on how to manage your child’s tantrum moments and keep calm yourself, listen to today’s episode of One Day You’ll Thank Me below.
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