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3 TIPS TO FOR STAYING GROUNDED DURING A TODDLER TANTRUM 

By: Lia Garvin   |   September 28, 2021

You’re about to walk out the door to rush into the car for morning drop-off, with a full slate of meetings on deck for the day, when you notice the shoes. Two different shoes, wrong feet, wrong season. Calmly and lovingly you ask your little angel to pick a different pair, ideally two of the same, and that’s when the whole morning turns into a dumpster fire. 

Ah, tantrums. Everyone will tell you that they are totally normal and that every toddler has them. But somehow, when you’re in the middle of experiencing your child’s wrath, it can feel like you’re the worst parent on earth. Well, I’m here to tell you that you're not, and to offer three tips for staying grounded, in even the worst situations. 

An escalated parent cannot deescalate an escalated child
In the fantastic book No Bad Kids by Janet Lansbury, she offers us a word to live by as a parent: unruffled. 

Knowing that toddler tantrums are all about testing limits and sensing if we as parents are able to model safety and stability by being unshaken by bad behavior, it’s critical to remain calm in even the wildest of situations.

So how do you do that when you’re in the checkout line at Safeway and your two-year-old is kicking and screaming? Tell them you’re going to pick them up and gently remove them from the situation. 

The removal from the stimulating environment will go to great lengths to dissipate the tension. More importantly, it will allow you to keep calm and move into an environment where you don’t feel the pressures of being in public. Then, you can start to move into strategy number two. 

Are they hungry or tired? Or — all of the above? 
When our daughter was just a few months old, my husband and I often found ourselves frantically running around the house trying to figure out what we did wrong to upset our precious new baby. We’d marvel when we realized, again and again, that it was always (and I mean always) that she was either hungry or tired. 

This never changed, even two years later. When your child is losing their marbles, there is a high likelihood that a wave of hunger or exhaustion has come over them, even if they just ate or took a nap. The cure? Remove them from the situation and hand them their favorite snack. It might mean retrieving it from the other side of the parking lot a time or two after they’ve thrown it in anger, but once you get them eating, there’s a high chance things start to normalize. If they’re tired, getting them back into the car or somewhere quiet and playing a calming song on your phone can often do the trick. 

Remember, their brains are still developing
In the end, having empathy can be our biggest tool for staying grounded and managing a tense situation calmly. 

Dan Siegel, psychologist and author of a wide range of parenting books, reminds us that our children’s brains are still developing, well into their teen years. It's no surprise if your 18 month old isn’t able to keep it together after their fourth trip in the car.

By asking questions and helping our children “integrate” what Siegel refers to as the upstairs brain (rational/thoughtful) and downstairs brain (reactive), we help them build emotional resilience and understand how to communicate their needs. We start to do this by naming what we are seeing, “I notice you got frustrated when I took away the magazine, it can be frustrating to not get a magazine. Let’s read your books when we get home.”

Labeling emotions makes your child aware that you see them and have empathy for what they are experiencing and that emotions are okay. By not just giving in, you show that you value boundaries.

Keep calm and tantrum on
Tantrums are a normal and completely expected occurrence for all children. As a parent, it is also normal to feel frazzled when you find yourself swept up in the midst of the worst of them. 

More often than not, the key to successful tantrum deescalation is to keep calm and remain, as Lansbury says, unfrazzled. I invite you to call on these three specific tactics to help you re-discover your calm, even during the most tortuous of tantrums.

Lia Garvin, mother of a smiley and rambunctious toddler girl, is on a mission to arm people with tools and skills for living the best versions of themselves. She has almost a decade of experience working in some of the largest and most influential companies in tech including Microsoft, Apple, and Google. As a Senior Program Manager at Google and executive coach, Lia leverages her leadership coaching and program management skills to examine the challenges holding teams back from doing their best work. Learn more about her coaching at www.reframewithlia.com

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