Most toddler behaviour that drives adults up the wall makes complete sense from the child's side. The trick is learning to read it. Here is the question I ask, what the brain science says about meltdowns, and the small number of things that genuinely help.
When my son was nine months old, I picked a spoon up off the kitchen floor for the twenty-sixth time before breakfast and decided, with some confidence, that he was doing it on purpose.
I was right. I was also completely wrong, and the difference between those two things turned out to be the most useful idea I have come across in more than a decade of working with young children.
"On purpose" is how we describe an adult who has wronged us. Deliberately, knowingly, with intent, and the intent aimed at us. But "on purpose" also just means there is a purpose. And if there is a purpose, there is a question you can ask that is far more useful than the one most of us start with.
The usual question is: how do I get them to stop? It is a completely reasonable question, and it is nearly useless, because it assumes the behaviour is the problem. The behaviour is usually the receipt.
The question I ask now is four words long. What is he practising?
Behaviour is information
When I finally sat and watched, rather than retrieving, I noticed he was not doing the same thing twenty-six times. He was doing twenty-six slightly different things. He dropped one from the height of the tray and the next from up near his shoulder. He used his left hand, which he hardly ever used for anything. He tried a blueberry and then the spoon again, and I am fairly sure he was comparing them. Every single time, he watched the object all the way to the floor and then looked at my face. He was varying one thing at a time and holding the rest steady, which is exactly how you run an experiment.
That is a pattern I see over and over, at home and in early childhood centres. The things toddlers do that look like defiance are very often practice. Practice at cause and effect, at independence, at testing where the edges of the world are, at being the person who decides. A child who insists on doing the buckle themselves, takes twenty minutes to put on one shoe and screams when you help is not trying to make you late. They are practising being a person who can do things.
Understanding that does not mean you let everything run. You still have to leave the house. But it changes how you respond, often without needing any technique at all. "You want to do it yourself" lands very differently from "we don't have time for this", even if you still end up doing the buckle.
Why do toddlers have tantrums?
Tantrums are a different thing, and I think it is important to separate them from ordinary testing.
A useful way to picture a young child's brain, borrowed from Daniel Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson, is as a house built from the bottom up. Downstairs arrives more or less finished. It handles the body, and it includes an alarm system that is fast, loud and fully working from birth. Upstairs is where the reasonable things live: planning, waiting, impulse control, seeing another person's point of view. Upstairs is under construction for a very long time. Adele Diamond, in her review of the research on these skills, describes them developing right through childhood and into adolescence. In a toddler there is a floor, some scaffolding and an extension cord.
When the alarm goes off at full volume, the connection to upstairs does not work very well. That is true of adults under acute stress too. It is just much more pronounced in a two-year-old, who has far less upstairs to begin with.
So "calm down" is an instruction addressed to a floor of the building that, in that moment, nobody is on.
That is also why I think it helps to separate two things that can look identical from across a supermarket. A child who is negotiating is using the upstairs. The volume goes up and down. They check whether you are watching. They can stop quite suddenly if the answer changes. That is real, and it does happen. A child in a full meltdown is not doing any of that. There is nothing being calculated, so there is nothing to reward. Comforting a child in that state does not teach them that screaming works, any more than comforting an adult in a panic attack teaches them that panic works.
You do not have to give them the thing. You can stay close and hold the limit in the same minute.
How common are tantrums, really?
Very. In a study of nearly 1,500 children aged three to five, Lauren Wakschlag and colleagues found that 83.7 percent had had at least one tantrum in the previous month, according to their parents. Tantrums are an ordinary part of being small.
The same study is also useful for the other direction. Daily tantrums were not typical at any age: 8.6 percent of children had them every day or several times a day. The researchers suggested that what matters is the pattern, not the single event. How often, how long, how intense, and whether they happen with lots of different people or only in particular situations.
So if your child is having tantrums most days, very long ones, ones where they hurt themselves or other people, or if you are simply worried, it is worth talking to your Well Child provider, your GP or PlunketLine. That is not because something is necessarily wrong. It is because you deserve support, and they can look at the whole picture in a way an article cannot.
What actually reaches a child in the middle of it
If words are an upstairs technology and upstairs is offline, the obvious question is what works instead. The honest answer is you. Your body, your voice, your speed.
Young children borrow regulation from the adults around them, and they do it by reading what you are actually feeling rather than what you are performing. This is the hard version of co-regulation. It is easy to stay calm with a crying baby you feel sorry for. It is a different sport when you are embarrassed in aisle four and the person setting you off is ninety centimetres tall.
A few things that tend to help, none of them magic:
- Fewer words. I give myself about eight words for the first couple of minutes. "You wanted to do it." "That wasn't what you wanted." Then I stop talking.
- Lower voice, lower body. Kneel. A large person standing over a small person on the floor is, at a body level, a threat display. Kneeling also drops your own voice without you trying.
- Name it once. There is reasonable evidence, including a well-known brain imaging study by Matthew Lieberman and colleagues, that putting a feeling into words takes a little heat out of it. "You're so frustrated." But the effect is real and modest. If naming the feeling does nothing, you have not failed. You have found out how big the effect is.
- Do not fix it. A running list of offers (another banana, a different cup, an explanation) keeps a child in the state longer, because every offer is something new to reject.
- Pick your child over the audience. You cannot manage your child and a supermarket full of strangers at the same time. Most of the people who turn around have been there themselves.
Look upstream
The last thing is the least glamorous and probably the most useful. A lot of what looks like a behaviour problem is a logistics problem wearing a costume. Before concluding anything about your child, or about yourself, check whether anyone in the house has eaten, slept or had a minute of quiet today. KidsHealth New Zealand lists tiredness, hunger, a busy day and big feelings without words among the most common triggers, and in my experience that list covers most of what happens in a kitchen at 5.30pm.
Behaviour does not happen in a vacuum. It happens in a particular room, at a particular time, with particular adults in it, and the adults are part of the picture. Not as culprits. As the most adjustable part of the situation.
None of this makes parenting easy. What it does, in my experience, is make it less baffling. Most of what wears a parent down is not the hard work. It is doing hard work in the dark, with no idea what any of it means. Asking "what is he practising?" does not switch the lights on every time, but it switches them on more often than anything else I know.
Sources
- Wakschlag, L. S., Choi, S. W., Carter, A. S., Hullsiek, H., Burns, J., McCarthy, K., Leibenluft, E., & Briggs-Gowan, M. J. (2012). Defining the developmental parameters of temper loss in early childhood: Implications for developmental psychopathology. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 53(11), 1099-1108. doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2012.02595.x
- Siegel, D. J., & Bryson, T. P. (2011). The whole-brain child. Delacorte Press.
- Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421-428. doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x
- Diamond, A. (2013). Executive functions. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 135-168. doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143750
- KidsHealth New Zealand. Tantrums in children. kidshealth.org.nz/tantrums-in-children