How to Stay Calm During a Toddler Meltdown
By Mary Welch
When our toddlers melt down, it is so easy to find ourselves getting sucked into the collapse right alongside them. This is because when we are confronted by someone else’s difficult, upsetting behavior—even when that someone is a child we dearly love—we become triggered and so our own wounded child within us takes the wheel. This means we are often coming to the meltdown from a similar wavelength as our toddler, with limited access to our more cultivated inner resources. But there are ways we can keep calm during the chaos.
The teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti wrote, “When I understand myself, I understand you, and out of that understanding comes love.” When we understand, as parents, that during a meltdown we feel young and helpless too, we can adjust our expectations, loosen our self judgment, and bring more compassion for ourselves and our child to the equation.
Big feelings, like frustration or anger, want to be expressed, not managed. So in the heat of the moment with our little ones, when we feel activated by their refusal to listen or cooperate, and we feel that sharp uptick in stress as our patience evaporates, we need to seek out ways to lower the volume. Here are some tools we can use to work through our difficult feelings and stay grounded in the midst of a storm.
Pssst…check out 5 Techniques for a Stressed-Out Parent
Acknowledge the Feelings
This may sound obvious, but actually most of us, when we’re in acute stress and our brains have clicked into fight or flight mode, struggle to name what we’re feeling. The feelings can seem more like waves crashing over us than signals coming from within our own bodies. But being witnessed helps. We engage in this kind of mirror work for our children all the time in order to calm or reassure them. We validate our children’s feelings by articulating them: “I understand you’re feeling upset.” Or: “I get that you’re disappointed.” We can extend this same kindness to ourselves in the heat of the moment when we feel our temper raging. Naming our feelings internally soothes that young part of us and we can also get granular about every single detail of our physiological experience: “Feeling anger. Hot in my cheeks. Stomach clenching. Feeling it rise. Hot. Tight chest. Anger, anger.” As we name and acknowledge what we’re feeling we are also staying rooted to our bodies. We can recognize, in these instances, the difference between judging a feeling and allowing ourselves to simply, fully feel it. There is real relief in this, and it’s a key factor in staying calm during a meltdown.
Breathe
As we name our feelings, we are also taking deep, intentional breaths. These two practices together help us to anchor into our bodies and reduce the risk of flying off the handle in the heat of the moment. I highly recommend a breathing practice for relieving stress and re-engaging our body’s parasympathetic nervous system (the opposite of fight or flight mode). It’s called the 4-7-8 breathing method. This is how it works:
- Do a big exhale breath through your mouth like you’re blowing out candles on a cake.
- Then relax your jaw and place the tip of your tongue behind your top row of teeth.
- Next close your mouth and inhale gently through your nose as you count to four internally.
- When you reach four, hold your breath for seven seconds before releasing it.
- After seven seconds, deeply exhale your breath through your mouth as you count to eight. Imagine a balloon completely deflating inside of you. Engage your stomach and feel it working to release every last bit of breath.
- Try to repeat this cycle four times if possible.
Shake
Animals figured this one out and put it to good use every single day. Think of a pack of lions moving across the Sahara together. They get into kerfuffles regularly, break apart, and then shake their bodies to clear the energy. After a good shake, they come back together into pack formation and carry on with zero resistance or chips on shoulders. The act of physically shaking our bodies moves energy and transforms our moods. When we are experiencing intense anger or stress we tend to tense up both our muscles and our mindsets. As we shake we disperse the stuck-ness, opening a new lane so the traffic gridlock can move again. We can make this practice silly and invite our children to join us for a good, thorough shake session. “Let’s shake it out,” is very different language than “Cut it out”, “Stop it”, or “Knock it off.” There’s a playfulness to it that most children can’t resist, and it will help both of you keep calm, even in the midst of a meltdown.
If your child won’t come down from their position and join you, you can still model for them what it looks like to breathe out, stomp out, and shake out the feelings to clear the moment and reset. It will support you immensely in feeling better, and it will offer your toddler a skillset they can keep and practice over time.
Psssst…check out How to Be Calm and Reasonable
Mary Welch is a life coach, writer, and thought leader in the field of emotional intelligence and personal development. She happily lives and works with her 2 + 4 legged children in NY’s Hudson River Valley. Read more IG/FB: @marywelchofficial or marywelch.com