Tips on dealing with tantrums

Unfortunately, tantrums happen from time to time. Even if you have done everything ahead of time to try to prevent them from happening. Here is what to do if you find yourself in the middle of a tantrum.



Stay calm and neutral
When your child is having a tantrum, it is important to keep calm yourself. First, make sure everyone is safe. In a calm, neutral voice you can state “You are feeling sad”. After this, sit near your child (but not touching them), keep your body still. Try to be silent or say very little, until your child is calm. Children are not able to taken in verbal information when they are upset.

Do not reinforce the tantrum
As a parent our first instinct is to do whatever we can to make the tantrum stop. But it is important that this behaviour is not rewarded. Some things we do can be rewarding to a child, even if you wouldn’t think so. For example, yelling at the child can be reinforcing because they know that they angered you. That is why it is important to stay calm and neutral.

“When your calm we can talk”
For older kids with good comprehension you can say “When you’re calm we can talk”. When I say this my son will immediately stop crying and say “I’m calm, “I’m calm”. Even though he stops crying I know he still needs some time (He is still breathing heavy and fidgety). I might follow this by saying “I will know you are calm when your arms and legs are still and you are breathing normally”.

Quietly start another activity
For younger less verbal children you can start quietly playing with another activity that your child may find interesting. Do not actively draw attention to the actively (ie Don’t say “Come over here an play”). The idea is to for your child to decide they want to stop crying and come over without reinforcing the crying.

Talk it out
Once your child is completely calm you can talk about what happened. Usually, my son’s threshold for another tantrum is much lower. Depending on the situation you may decide to prompt your child to say the appropriate response and then reinforce it (“Can I have a cookie” and give them a cookie”). However, if the tantrum is occurring regularly you may say “Next time you’ll remember to ask nicely”.

Try to figure out why it happened
Think about the incident and try to figure out why the tantrum occurred. Write down what happened before the tantrum. Write down what happened afterwards. Also keep note of the time of day, the environment, when did they last eat, is there a sensory component. Your strategy to prevent one next time will depend on this. For example, occasionally my son will have a tantrum that is completely unexpected. The exact same scenario on a different day would not lead to a tantrum. We started to realize that when he was hungry his threshold for having a tantrum was a lot lower. So, part of the solution was to keep him well fed.