How to Deal With a Toddler Tantrum – For You & Your Child

When a child has a toddler tantrum, they can express themselves through screaming, shouting, hitting or intense emotions, it can bring out the same in us, if we don’t check in with our experience.

It can trigger your own inner child’s wounding, and you may lose control, or feel like you’re about to. 

Hitting, shouting and screaming can be a very overstimulating and triggering experience. Especially if you’ve experienced abuse or trauma within your life, or you weren’t loved unconditionally for your big emotions as a child. Inside every parent who is triggered by their children’s behavior, is a child who didn’t feel safe when they behaved the same. 

To learn about re-parenting yourself for your inner child, and for the health of your family, you can read along here.

You are only human. Making the best out of the resources and parenting values that you were given. 

But they too, are just little humans, having an extremely normal physiological response to brain development.

What’s not known enough, is that toddlers of this age are experiencing immense hormonal changes, heightened awareness, new found intelligence and curiosity of the world around them.

This stage of their life is actually comparable to a ‘mini puberty’ called Adrenarche, leading them to become easily dysregulated when they want something or have an unmet need. You can read more about this here.

Why do Toddlers Throw Tantrums

Toddler tantrums are developmentally normal. Contrary to popular belief, we don’t need to stop, or change them. This is how children express their wants and needs. 

The big emotions that arise during a tantrum may be overwhelming or not make sense to you, but this is your children expressing their difficulty to connect with us through language. 

Consider for a moment… How difficult would it be if your mind knew what it wanted/needed, and you felt you were voicing this to your loved ones, but no matter how hard you tried, they weren’t understanding you?

How hard would it be to see others around you walking, shopping, climbing, cooking, playing or eating certain things, but you weren’t allowed the same?

Imagine their brain has finally awoken to this newfound awareness of the world, and a fresh freedom, but they’re not able to access it fully yet. This would make me emotional too!

At the core of a toddler tantrum, is our children telling us they are hungry, tired, bored or overstimulated. These things can happen so fast to these sensitive beings, you haven’t done anything wrong and nor has your child! They are communicating with you. 

Going back to where I said that toddlers realize their freedom and want to embody their independence – this is also a contributor to toddler tantrums. My daughter gets so upset when she is helping me bake by mixing the ingredients, but isn’t allowed to cut up anything with the knife yet. And I get it. She must wonder why she can’t help with it all. I am her role model, she wants to copy mummy in all the ways. They want to live like us more than anything, but they’re unaware of their vulnerability. 

Toddlers also throw tantrums when they are in need of attention. Of Course as parents we can’t be with our child all hours of the day, but ensuring you find the majority of your time together is fuelled with connection, love and play, this can alleviate the frustration. 

My daughter’s tantrums can be triggered when I have to clean up or cook dinner as she doesn’t have my undivided attention. Because of this, I’ve begun to get her involved in these aspects to teach her life skills and soothe her mental state. 

There is another great resource here: Tantrums: why they happen & how to respond | Raising Children Network

How to Handle Toddler Tantrums

1. Invite the toddler tantrum

You may have been told indirectly or directly that a toddler tantrum is to be fixed. That they (and you when you were a child) need to calm down. 

You want them to feel better and for the overstimulation to be soothed so you can think clearly. So you try and stop it. You may not want the chaos, the scene, and most importantly, you don’t want them to feel upset. 

Instead, I started a different approach. I started to invite the tantrum. To hold the tension within myself, so that my child can express herself the way she needs to.

Although we have learnt to distract them and to calm them down, we need to normalize them not being calm all the time. Frustration is normal. Tears are normal. Rejection is normal. Having constantly changing needs and emotions is normal, and we need to start embodying this within ourselves too. This is how we nurture emotional intelligence and our children’s ability to self-soothe. Tears and stamping their feet is how they are trying to regulate their nervous system. They do not need to be distracted or tamed all the time. 

Allow them to feel their emotions, without ignoring them. Ignoring the tantrum will only make the cycle go on for longer, and will cause a lot more pain for the child as they are expressing their desires or needs.

2. Ensure their safety

Ask your child or observe if they are safe. Sometimes, a toddler tantrum may occur in a dangerous situation, like on the stairs or alongside a road. In these instances, you may need to intervene if they’re experiencing big emotions whilst crossing the road etc, you can say “You’re very frustrated, I know. I’m going to have to pick you up now, as this road isn’t safe. We can walk together and talk as soon as we’re in a safe space.” Always communicate what you’re doing and validate them, even if they are too young to understand. As they grow, you would have wired this into their minds so that they truly do understand. 

3. Look for the essence of your child

Honor the true spirit of your child. Separate their stress response and current behavior from the reality of who they are underneath it all. Remember that this behavior is imperative to their growth, their primal need for survival and the only communication they know. Instead of taking your child’s behavior to heart, become compassionately curious about what unmet need your child is expressing.

4. Release Childhood Myths & Honor Your Maternal Instincts

There is a big myth that states comforting a child during immense emotion is rewarding their behavior, spoiling them or “making a rod for your own back”, but this is far from the reality of emotional regulation. It’s actually the complete opposite! It’s guiding your children to regulate through co-regulation, which gives your children the ability to self-soothe with independence in the future. Here’s the blog post about releasing childhood myths where I go into this deeper. Your body is physiologically wired to want to be close and to want to meet your child’s needs when they cry. That’s because it’s a primal need for both mother and child. Listen to your powerful motherly instincts.

5. Emphasize & validate their emotions

Try not to ridicule or discount your child’s emotions. Even if it doesn’t make sense to you, it is very real to your child. Children need to be heard and seen within their fullness in order to feel safe to express themselves. Validate and name their feelings so they understand how to express themselves as they grow. “I can see you’re upset because you wanted __”, “I see you’re frustrated because __ happened.” or “Wow, I see how hard this is for you, sweetheart. You have really big feelings around this. It’s hard when things don’t go my way too.” Name their feelings. Give compassion to them and normalize them. 

6. Honor your inner child, be aware of your triggers & regulate yourself as a parent 

This is probably one of the most important things that you can do for your child, and leads to the rest of the points becoming second nature. Honor your own experience and tune into the clues of your body. How we react to our children’s behavior has more to do with us than what they are doing. 

The ultimate dream isn’t to have a calm child. It’s to teach your child emotional regulation. It’s difficult to guide your child through a practice you haven’t learnt yourself. 

If it’s possible, when you’re triggered surrounding your child’s behavior and you feel your body becoming activated, put some space between you both. Let them know that you’re close if they need you. Let them know that this is hard for you too, and that mummy/daddy need to breathe a moment. 

Take a moment of silence to come into your body so you don’t react. Relax your shoulders and your neck. Put your hand on your belly or your heart so that you can physically check in. Breathe deeply through your nose and into your belly, holding it at the top. Then release it through the mouth for as long as you can. Repeat 3-5 times. Delve deeper into nervous system regulation practices for mothers and children, by reading this blog post. Or download my free guide at the end!

Get to know and integrate your own inner child through re-parenting practices. I share more detail and powerful tools for this within the post I shared at the beginning. You can find it again, here.