Webinar length: 31:48
Speakers:
- Maggie Walsh (Chief Academic Officer)
- Shelley King (Senior Director of Classroom Experience)
Welcome and Introductions
Hi there, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Shelley King, and Maggie Walsh and I will be sharing the conversation with you today about managing meltdowns and tantrums. We realize how important your time is, and we’re just grateful that you’re sharing it with us today for this conversation.
Welcome, everyone, and thanks so much for joining us today. We are really thrilled that you’re here for the second in our parenting webinar series. With more than 30 years in business, Cadence Education has established itself as one of the premier early childhood educators in the United States. We proudly serve over 30,000 families across the country.
At Cadence Education, we really value the partnership between school and home, and we’re committed to providing meaningful communication to support your child’s development. We’re excited to offer parent webinars to help you navigate common parenting challenges while supporting your child’s growth and development. Thank you for spending time with us today as we manage a topic that many parents face: managing meltdowns.
Big emotions, sometimes leading to tantrums or meltdowns, are extremely common, and they’re just indicative of the cognitive and emotional developmental phase that children are at. The good news is they can be effectively supported with the right tools and strategies. So, let’s get started.
Over the next half hour, we’ll focus on understanding the developmental stages of children’s emotional development and how to support your child with many resources and strategies. We’re also excited to provide you with some resources that we’ll be sharing following today’s session. Make sure to submit any questions that you have to our Q&A. We may not have time to answer those questions during the session, but we’ll make sure to add them to our FAQ that we’ll be providing in our follow-up resources.
Make sure to stay tuned for our follow-up email that will be providing you a copy of today’s recording as well as the resources that we referenced. So, no need to take detailed notes. We’ve got you covered.
Meet Today’s Speakers
Before we dive into the content, let me take a moment to introduce myself and my colleague. I’m Maggie Walsh, the chief academic officer at Cadence Education. I bring over 27 years of experience in instruction, teacher and leader professional development. Joining me today is my colleague Shelley.
Hi, Maggie. Thank you so much. My name is Shelley King, and I am the senior director of classroom experience here at Cadence Education. Essentially, what that means is I have the honor and joy of working with our leadership, school leaders, and educators, both virtually and in the classrooms, as we strive to provide you peace of mind while providing your children with exceptional education and fun-filled days. Today’s conversation is one of very great importance to you, and we’re just so grateful and honored that so many of you were interested and came to join us for the conversation. So, we have a lot to cover, and let’s go ahead and get started.
Emotional Regulation Is a Learned Skill
As Maggie mentioned, we’re going to talk about meltdowns. Every child’s greatest innate resource is his or her ability to emotionally regulate. But this really is not a skill that just comes. It’s learned, just like math or reading. And truth be told, we could change this from saying “every child’s greatest innate resource” to “every human’s greatest innate resource.” It truly is a skill that we learn over a lifetime. So when we think about tantrums and meltdowns, we can remember that children are still developing so many skills at the same time.
What You Will Learn Today
Today we have just a few learning objectives related to this subject. First, we’re going to cover four key things. One is that we’re going to talk about emotional development from birth to five. That’s our first objective: to just share with you some of the science behind what’s happening inside your child’s brain and body as they’re developing.
The second is that we’re going to explain a little bit of how that connects to the nervous system, because the brain is connected to the way that we react, the way that we respond, and the way that we think and eventually communicate.
Last, we’re going to give you some ideas once you know a little bit more about what’s happening in the brain. How do we deal with that information? So it’s about helping to support the emotional regulation of our children. And not just from that concept, but when we put it all together, from the brain and the development, giving your child skills for emotional regulation that also connect to their communication and their cognitive skills that are going to last well beyond today.
We’ll also mention some resources. As Maggie said, we’re going to have a ton of resources that will be part of a follow-up email. So we hope you feel like all of this today really gives you the tools you need as you help your children.
Emotional Development From Birth to Age Five
Let’s begin by talking a little bit about emotional development. Today we’re going to focus mostly on the birth-to-5 age range. We’re going to spend time talking about first infants and then toddlers, and the brain development that’s happening that’s laying a foundation, or a freeway if you will, for thoughts, skills, and communication. Maggie is going to dive in a little bit and tell us about what’s happening in our infant brain that relates to this future development.
How Infants Communicate Through Reflexes and Cues
Yes, so infants are born with many cues that we often perceive as reflexes. They cry. They sleep, wake, startle, splay, arch their backs, and shift their eyes. All of this happens through reflexes during their sleep and their awake states. Sometimes those cues can be a little hard to read, but they are the start of their sensory systems becoming integrated.
Through their interaction with the world around them, infants are experiencing so many sensory cues through their brain and their nervous system. They may be expressing internal needs such as temperature, sleep, hunger, noise, movement, etc. If you take a look at this triangle on the screen here, this triangle of growth covers the years from birth through age six. During that time, children are growing from their ability to regulate their senses, and then their emotions, and then finally language expression.
For example, a young infant will cry to express discomfort. A toddler who doesn’t yet have language may show you their discomfort by tugging on a shirt or pointing. And then finally, when old enough, a child might be able to say, “I’m cold, and I would like my jacket.”
Basic and Self-Conscious Emotions
Based on the work of Erik Erikson and Stanley Greenspan, there are several basic emotions that are recognizable cross-culturally and appear to be hardwired in the brain. For example: happiness, anger, fear, surprise, sadness, and disgust. Around the ages of two and three, shame and guilt emerge as children begin to experience the world around them. They also develop self-conscious emotions as their sense of self develops, such as embarrassment, empathy, and jealousy.
Greenspan’s Milestones and Erikson’s Psychosocial Stages
If we take a moment and look at Greenspan’s six milestones on the left-hand side here, you will see from birth through 12 months of age is a trajectory from self-regulation and interest into blooming love and connection, communication, and then an understanding of self. And all of that comes before an emergence of understanding emotions.
Similarly, Erik Erikson’s psychosocial model shows us the eight stages of the human lifespan. If we look closely at birth through age 5, you’ll see that a child’s attachment in infancy to those around them is what helps them to develop trust. Then between 18 months and 3 years of age, they move into independence and will. And we all have met a strong-willed child before, which is the emergence of shame, doubt, and guilt. Guilt will continue all the way through the ages of 3 to 5.
We mention these here just as a way to show that a child is learning to identify simple to more complex emotions in just the first few years of life, along with all the other amazing physical development that they’re progressing through as well.
The Five Phases of Emotional Processing
So now that we have an understanding of the foundations of emotional development, let’s talk about the five phases of emotional processing that are true for any age, not just toddlers. For toddlers, it’s important to remember that this is often the first time that they’re ever experiencing this emotion at all and experiencing this whole cycle. It can feel really intense and overwhelming for them. The cycle follows these phases:
- First, allowing the emotions to exist.
- Then recognizing the perceived emotions. This will become easier as one’s association of the feeling and the emotion merge.
- Feeling secure in experiencing a range of emotions over time.
- Seeking support through coping strategies.
- Finally, moving on from the emotion by solving the problem or letting go.
Many times, even in adults, the cycle will get stopped or paused due to not wanting to have to feel the intensity of the emotion. So we can help our children through this by first understanding and second providing a calm environment and language to aid our child as they experience this strong emotion. Something as simple as saying, “You seem sad. You really wanted that book, didn’t you?”
A Social Media Break: Why Toddlers Melt Down
So, let’s take a moment to do what I like to call a commercial break or a social media break. I want you to think about some of the videos that we’ve experienced where parents share and apply this in a more real way. When we think about what we’re learning so far, we’ve all seen that video of a parent trying to explain why their child is melting down, and they show us the sandwich which their child wanted cut into triangles. When they cut it into triangles and presented it to their child, it wasn’t the right-angle triangle they wanted.
Another example that parents have shared with us is that their child wanted the blue cup for their milk, and they filled the blue cup for their milk, but by the time they got the milk full in the blue cup and handed it to their child, their child had already decided they wanted the purple cup, and the meltdown begins. These seem a little bit comical to us, but they are very real.
So when we think about it from the practical state, we need to understand that there are a lot of things happening with our infants and toddlers in terms of attachment, building relationships, building trust, that sense of safety and security, and then processing their emotions over time. As they grow into toddlerhood, they are beginning to explore and develop and build more curiosity. Maggie mentioned this a little bit in Erikson’s stages, but what this creates is a bit of this contradictory set of impulses and feelings and a tug-of-war within them. They have that independence and curiosity, but they’re also still caught between that pull and push between safety and exploration. This duality can create some big emotions.
We’ve all been there. We’ve all experienced this tug-of-war. And we want to remind us that we’re in a completely normal situation. This is very normal for children because they don’t yet have the skills they need to understand the emotions and then regulate. We’re going to talk a bit more about that. But as your infant moves from their first birthday into the world around them, their increase in curiosity and exploration brings a higher level of independence and wanting to make choices.
This is another thing that happens often. Toddlers want everything all at once. Not because they’re trying to make your life difficult or embarrass you, but they lack the prioritization skills that they’re beginning to experience. So think about when they lack those skills: how do we help them fill in the gaps and begin to compartmentalize what they want, need, and feel? These different emotions can create a very strong tug-of-war with very strong responses and experiences that we call meltdowns or tantrums.
What Is a Tantrum or Emotional Meltdown?
Let’s talk a little bit about what a tantrum or an emotional meltdown is. Basically, it’s difficult sometimes to witness and experience, but they’re just intense emotions responding to stimuli around them that is often disproportionate to us in terms of the situation. We may think that the situation does not require that much emotion. But to a child, it’s very normal to feel the big emotions and not know what to do with them.
These emotions can create experiences with them crying, throwing themselves on the floor, throwing objects, maybe hitting, pulling hair, or even holding their breath, which can be a little bit terrifying. Most of these tantrums are short-lived. They can feel long, but will last from 30 seconds to a minute, sometimes a little bit longer. They are completely normal between the ages of 1 and 4.
As your child is developing not only the cognitive skills and recognizing their emotions, but eventually communication, which we’ll talk about shortly, one thing we can do to help is just be available to them to recognize and communicate for them what they may be feeling, and then help them through this with emotional solutions.
Helping Yourself Before Helping Your Child
Now, you might be saying to yourself, “When I’m in this situation, I’m the one that needs help.” So we’re going to move again a little bit to talk about how you can understand what’s happening and help yourself before them. As you spend your time with your child, sometimes their emotional dysregulation requires a lot from you: support, patience, calm. Oftentimes, again, there’s not even a logical reason to help fix it. But the way that we react and the way that we respond is going to begin to build their set of tools, that toolkit that they’ll need for the future. So let’s dive a little bit back into the brain and what’s happening in relation to communication and how we can help our children as we help ourselves.
The Brain Science Behind Big Emotions
So, let’s explore a child’s brain and how it develops and why this plays a really crucial role in emotional development and regulation.
The Amygdala and the Prefrontal Cortex
Let’s explore the amygdala, which is the emotion center, and the prefrontal cortex, which is where rational thinking takes place. They both play key roles in how children react to situations. If you think of a fist as the model of the brain, the downstairs brain, or the bottom half, is the protection mode. The upstairs brain, or the top half, is the connection mode, which is where the amygdala is, on the inside of the limbic system, and that’s the alarm system and the gatekeeper.
Take a look at the picture on the left. This little bean-shaped part is called the amygdala. The amygdala processes emotions, often overwhelming children when they encounter new experiences. As we’ve learned, their ability to regulate emotions is still developing. Now, looking on the right-hand side, this is your prefrontal cortex, which is where higher-level thinking takes place. That part of your brain is actually developing all the way through the age of 24. Believe it or not, over time, children learn to connect emotions with logical reasoning, and they build pathways that bridge between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex.
The Amygdala Hijack
If somebody says something that upsets you, your body wants to react. If you’re really upset, you may react, and you may push or hit the person. This is called the amygdala hijack. In that moment, you have no access to your language or your problem solving. But as adults, we tend to have more emotional regulation, and we can access the higher-level thinking part of our brain before we react physically.
Intense emotions or experiences can trigger the brain’s survival response into fight, flight, or freeze. Young children lack the ability to self-regulate, and they require guidance to navigate these types of emotions. During this process, this reaction known as the amygdala hijack, the prefrontal cortex and the higher-level thinking can’t be accessed, which is really important to remember as we get into the next section.
“All Behavior Is Communication”
I’ll continue with this quote, which is simple and straightforward: All behavior is communication.
That’s such a powerful statement when you think about it just globally, from infants all the way through adults. All behavior is communication. Once we know that all behavior is communication, we can think about and recognize the time when we advocate or help create the communication for our child. Helping them recognize there’s a big emotion, validating it or labeling it, and then working it through with them, we are modeling future tools that they can use.
Every child is unique, and so not every approach is the same. But what we’ll talk a little bit about is strategies that we can use and approaches that do work. And then, of course, you can adjust those based on your child.
How Infants Build Trust Through Need and Response
When we go back to thinking about that cycle that Maggie mentioned before, let’s put it into a little bit more of a simple, real cycle that infants experience. The baby has a need. They have a feeling, whether it’s a physical or emotional feeling, and they begin to cry, and that is their communication. They may also splay, arch their back, or roll over, but they are communicating. The caregiver, the parent, recognizes that they are communicating and begins to work through the possible scenarios that that child needs, whether they’re hungry, cold, or tired, and they work to meet that need.
When they meet that need with communication, conversation, and calming, the baby senses trust. And then that fires neurons in their upstairs brain that’s connecting that upstairs and downstairs bridge that’s so needed for communication later. And then this cycle continues. The cycle continues, as Maggie mentioned, through becoming a toddler and continuing through our life. What we understand is even the youngest baby benefits in their emotional development when they provide cues, we respond to cues, and we meet their needs and help them.
Toddlers Are Still Learning Emotions From Us
As we think a little bit about that, we can’t always read the mind of our infant or toddler. When you’re thinking about an infant, a lot of times you’ve prepared ahead of time what you think that need might be. You know the timing of the day and the meal that they might need. That’s not always the case with toddlers. However, you can prepare how you want to react when a meltdown comes. Let’s talk a little bit more about that.
They’re still continuing to build the cycle, but there’s a lot happening in the world around them, and they’re lacking the language that they need to express themselves in the way they need. They also are lacking that skill to compartmentalize. So there’s still some circular dependence, but they’re also encountering new experiences and new emotions. They’re not born with all emotions, so they’re learning some of those emotions modeled by us.
For example, the feeling of embarrassment comes right about the age of 18 months. This is because at this time they’re developing a sense of themselves. They may even be able to recognize themselves in a mirror, but they’re also recognizing others, and they’re starting to build emotions and responses in the way that people react to them.
Name Emotions, Both Big and Happy
When we help our child provide some language or some solutions to the emotions that they’re feeling, we’re helping them build and add to that toolbox. It can be as simple as recognizing emotion when they’re frustrated, saying something like, “It seems like you’re having trouble opening that box. Is it hard? Are you getting frustrated?”
It’s also important not just to recognize those negative or big emotions that create frustration and anger, but also happiness and calm, saying to a child, “You look really happy. That must be your favorite book.” What we are essentially doing is helping to create some of those communication bridges that are going to be used later.
Notice Sensory Triggers
Another strategy, again, is to be very aware of their senses and how they react in environments. In a busy, bright environment, a child might get more frustrated, and we might not be able to control that environment if we’re at a busy grocery store or in a big place with lots of people, or a park with a lot of children and only one slide. But what we can do is communicate to them, use words, and help them work through calming down before we expect them to manage that emotion.
Essentially, what we want to do is slow down and help them manage through that cycle a little bit easier. As Maggie mentioned, that relationship, or that bridge forming between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, is not there yet. But our responses and our modeling can help those connections with the neurons upstairs and downstairs that will become the tools they will use later. Essentially giving them the tools and helping them find those signals now and work through them helps them later overcome big emotions. So we’re basically collaborating with our child to help build self-control and collaborating with them on the language that they need.
Shift From “Won’t” to “Can’t”
One way to do this is to shift our mindset a little bit between the idea of “won’t” versus “can’t.” This is something that Daniel Siegel teaches in a book that we’re going to share with you. When we think about our child having a meltdown or an emotion, we want them to regulate, we want them to communicate, and they won’t. It’s a little bit different when we understand that just developmentally they can’t yet. And when they can’t, then it can be a tool or an understanding that we can use to fill in what they can’t do yet. So we can understand when we perceive their behavior from “can’t” versus “won’t.” We know how to model the language and the reaction.
Comfort Without Condoning
A really good example of this is to think ahead of time what the emotion might be, or the frustration, telling a child as you head into the grocery store, “I know that you might want something at the grocery store today. However, we are here to just get a few things.” You can set it. If the meltdown comes with the busy store and the things that they see that they want, you may need to get them out of the situation first before you can regulate. So, a simple statement: “I understand it’s very exciting. There’s lots of things to see, but we’re not able to do that today.” And calming and then removing them from the situation.
It doesn’t mean you’re condoning. But comforting them and connecting with them does not condone the behavior. It allows the calm so that you can have the conversation, set boundaries and limits, and then model. Maggie’s going to talk a little bit more about the importance of mirroring when we think about how we behave.
Staying Calm: Mirror Neurons and Emotional Contagion
Yeah. So when meltdowns happen, the total chaos and the lack of control is showing in the child’s blocked integration. This can really create a dysregulated child who’s now in that fight, flight, or freeze mode. The behavior that we might see on the outside may look like crawling under a table, crying, screaming, kicking, etc.
So I want to think about mirror neurons and emotional contagion as well. A child’s intense emotion or tantrum can trigger a very similar stress response in the adults around them. It’s very easy for the adult to also become dysregulated and upset. But if the adult can regulate themselves by taking a few breaths and modeling and maintaining a calm presence, it can definitely impact and help regulate a toddler’s emotions as well.
Know Your Child’s Triggers: HALT
When you see your child’s emotional dysregulation coming, consider whether or not your child is hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. The acronym HALT, H-A-L-T. These four things are all very easy triggers into a meltdown. Sometimes when children are hungry or tired, for example, they do not have the awareness to always be able to ask for what they need. Normal everyday actions can all of a sudden become overwhelming and trigger huge emotions, which can lead to intense behaviors like not listening, throwing, and screaming.
Again, we’re not encouraging you to dismiss their behaviors in these moments, but in those moments, if you can try to help calm down and center yourself, if you’re able to see that the root of the behavior is something that they cannot yet control. If you can see the patterns at certain times of day or throughout the week, this can help inform your own routine and your environment to head off some of those behaviors before they get to that point. For example, maybe you’ve realized that you need to provide a heavier dinner and offer it earlier in the day and then an early evening snack later on, if your child’s appetite tends to be really strong at 5:00 p.m. rather than 6:00 p.m.
What to Do in the Middle of a Meltdown
These are some strategies that you can utilize when your toddler is experiencing intense emotions in the middle of a meltdown.
Connect First, Then Redirect
You can try to really focus on connection and redirection. You want to recognize this amygdala hijack when it’s taking place, when they just don’t have the ability to access their critical thinking skills. You want to try to stay calm and avoid power struggles in those moments. Use very simple and validating language, acknowledging the emotion, acknowledging how they’re feeling: frustrated, mad, or sad. This is going to help you connect first. Then later you can redirect by using a distraction to help a young child and address the behavior only once your child is calm again.
For example, you might say, “I see that you’re sad. It is not your turn with the Legos. I know that’s hard, because it’s hard having to wait for something that we want. Let’s go over here and play with these blocks instead.” This is a type of redirection.
Or if a child is doing a behavior that you need to stop, like they’re throwing the Legos at another child or grabbing them from them, you can still say, “I see that you’re sad because it’s not your turn with the Legos. Right now, Johnny is playing with them. I cannot let you grab them or throw them at a friend. Let’s go over here and try this toy instead.” This helps model what we want to see the child do and supports regulation as well. You’re setting a boundary and the expectation around the behavior, and you’re also helping your child transition.
Ground Yourself With Questions
As we mentioned previously, this behavior can be very triggering to adults as well, especially when we’re out in public in places like a grocery store. Some questions that you want to try to remind yourself of in the moment that can help ground you might be like, “Why did she do that? What is it that I really want to teach her in this moment? How can I try to teach that lesson?”
Reframe a “No” Into a “Yes”
Using this acronym from Daniel Siegel’s No-Drama Discipline, in thinking about the term redirect, it can be really helpful to pull some additional strategies. We’ve already talked about some of these, like reducing words and embracing emotions. The one I’ll focus on here is thinking about reframing a no into a yes. So really trying to give your child something that they can do in the moment as a positive alternative. For example, “You may play with these cars, but you may not grab them from your friend.” Always trying to look for creative approaches to challenging situations is really helpful as well.
Recommended Books on Tantrums and Big Emotions
We notice that we’re right upon our time and end, but we want to mention a few resources that we think are amazing. We’ve mentioned some of these authors in our conversation today, but the book No-Drama Discipline as well as Tiny Humans, Big Emotions can help just understand where your children are coming from, along with the emotional life of a toddler. And then there are some great strategies and tools in Positive Discipline for Preschoolers. These are just a few of the books and resources we recommend.
Additional Help and Follow-Up Resources
As we mentioned, in the coming days we will share some follow-up with you about today’s conversation: a link to today’s conversation as well as your questions and answers. We got so many, so we’d like to put them in a document and share those answers with you. Basically, we hope that today’s conversation, as well as the resources coming, will help you as you take this journey and navigate through this.
If you feel you need additional help, consider visiting with your school leader or your school director or teacher, and they can give you some ideas and strategies that we use at the school and talk a little bit about what are some of those things that you can do.
The last thing we want to ask you today is to share with us any feedback that you might have about our conversation today, and you can follow up with additional questions. Taking just two minutes helps us understand what we can do to provide information for you in the future. Again, a recorded copy of this session, along with all of those book titles and resources, will be sent out in the next week.
Join Us for Our Next Webinar
We also want you to put on your calendar our October 14th webinar, which is coming up, and we’re going to be talking about managing biting and hitting. We want to thank you so much for your time today. We hope you found it valuable, and we appreciate the investment you made. Thank you so much.
