How to Deal with Toddler Tantrums
Temper tantrums are one of the most common and most challenging experiences for parents and caregivers. These outbursts of big feelings can be surprising and downright exhausting, for you, your little one, and everyone else in the family.
Today, we’re answering one of the most common questions we hear: how to deal with toddler tantrums.
In the past, we’ve shared posts about what a temper tantrum is, how tantrums relate to your child’s mental health, and even whether you should ignore a toddler temper tantrum.
Now, it’s time to provide some tips for responding to temper tantrums and keeping your cool, so that you have more space for love and joy in your relationship with your child.
These 15 guidelines are a blend of mindset shifts and practical recommendations; our hope is that you can leave this article with a new perspective on temper tantrums, and some actionable tips for navigating them in the future.
One more thing: we expect children to have temper tantrums. However, if you’re worried that your child’s tantrums are beyond the norm, Little Otter offers a free, 3-question temper tantrum assessment for children 2-6. You’ll learn if your child’s tantrums may indicate a deeper mental health concern, and if so, where to get support.
Let’s get started:
1. Don’t fear the tantrum.
The first step of dealing with tantrums is simply acknowledging that they are common, expected, and important. (Check out our complete guide to temper tantrums here.) You can’t prevent or avoid them - and trying to may backfire.
Many parents will do everything they can to avoid the tantrum and keep their child happy. However, this can easily spiral into a situation where a toddler is holding the family captive with endless demands for control — over EVERYTHING.
The trouble with this approach just leads to more tantrums, and to missed opportunities to help children learn to adapt to life’s limits and to cope with the inevitable frustrations and disappointments we all confront as we make our way through this world. That’s why limits are loving, and why avoiding them is not. More on that next.
2. Change your mindset to see limits as loving.
Parents who feel they are being “mean” when their child is upset that they won’t read an 8th book at bedtime (“just one more and then I’ll go to sleep!”) or prepare a third meal after their child has rejected the first two options (that they’d requested) naturally have a hard time following through with a limit.
Their child’s protests trigger strong emotions that flood their brains, making it hard to think through what their child really needs at that moment. As a result, the child is calling the shots. This leaves parents feeling out-of-control, manipulated and angry. Many times parents don’t even recognize this loss of control when it is happening.
Unfortunately, and ironically, this usually results in parents actually getting mean; at this point, they may start yelling, shaming and punishing. This leaves everyone feeling miserable and the child having learned little about better coping skills.
Keep reminding yourself that limits are loving, because they lead to flexibility and the development of effective coping strategies, like finding another toy to play with when the one they want is off-limits.
This ability to adapt is what ultimately makes children happy and helps them be successful in the outside world, now and in the future.
3. Remind yourself that kids aren’t misbehaving on purpose.
Children are not misbehaving on purpose. They may have learned that certain unacceptable behaviors help them get their way or gain control, but they aren’t purposely trying to drive you mad. Young children are strategic, not manipulative.
4. Practice empathy for your child and yourself.
At this age, young children are still developing the life skills they need to manage strong desires and impulses. It’s difficult! A little empathy can go a long way. Likewise, it’s important to be kind to yourself. Parenting is difficult; giving yourself room to be human can help you respond more calmly to your child’s tantrums.
It’s really important to avoid shaming and blaming at this stage. Toddlers are very sensitive to shame; this can create a vicious cycle where the tantrum starts for a certain reason, and then gets complicated by shame. Toddlers are also very sensitive to reinforcement, so if tantrums can divert plans, they are easily reinforced.
To avoid shame, think about whether your child responds best to distraction, redirection, or de-dramatization. You can also help by giving voice to their feelings with a book that helps normalize fears and validate feelings.
5. Validate their feelings.
Along those lines, try to acknowledge your little one’s big feelings during a tantrum. This isn’t about telling them they’re “right.” Instead, it’s about letting them know you love and understand them.
For example, you might say something like, “I can see that you’re upset,” or “This doesn’t feel good at all.”
Again, books can be a helpful way to validate emotions and help provide pathways to talk about them.
6. Do your best to keep your cool.
Stay in control when your child is spiraling out of control. Managing your emotions and reactions is one of the most important parenting tools at your disposal.
When parents get reactive and emotional, it tends to escalate the child’s upset and intensify power struggles. When your child is losing it, they need you to be their rock, and stay sane and rational.
And when you are clear about expectations while remaining loving, and avoid a lot of anger and shaming, your child doesn’t get overwhelmed and upset about the “break” in the relationship with you at that moment. They’re able to be calm and adapt more quickly, too.
Again, knowing that your child isn’t misbehaving on purpose, and practicing empathy for them and yourself, can help you keep your cool.
7. Don’t try to “talk it out.”
Tantrums aren’t the time to talk it out. Just like with adults, it’s easier to talk about feelings when your child is calm and their feelings are manageable. We sometimes think of tantrums as emotional storms. When your child is having a tantrum, it might be tempting to try to reason with or ask them to “use their words.” But during this emotional storm, they simply can’t!
8. Establish and enforce limits that you know are good for your child.
Define limits based on your child’s wellbeing, not based on your child’s response.
If you think setting limits on screen time or how many kisses you give at bedtime are good for your child (kids who get 2 or 3 are no less well-adjusted than kids who get 20) — go for it. But don’t expect your child to be happy about it, or thank you for ensuring that they get ample time to play pretend or do a puzzle versus interacting with a beloved screen. I have yet to hear a 3-year-old say, “Thanks, Dad, for not letting me have those M&M’s before dinner. I know how important it is to eat my growing foods.”
Don’t fall into the trap of believing that if your child is unhappy at times, that they’re an unhappy child and you are not a good parent. Quite the opposite.
Just because a child doesn’t like a limit, and is unhappy in the moment, doesn’t mean it’s not good for them.
The next time you find yourself in that moment when you’re about to give in on a rule you know to be a good one, remind yourself that we live in a world that doesn’t adapt to us; we have to do the adapting. Giving your child the gift of loving limits will help them be more flexible and adaptable — key ingredients for success in all aspects of their life.
9. Create limits you can implement.
Effective limits aren’t dependent on your child’s compliance. A limit is really only as effective as your ability to implement it.
Let’s take the example of picking up toys: you can’t actually make a child clean up their toys. You can repeatedly demand that they put toys away, but as long as you are in the position of trying to convince your child to do something, they’re in control, and they know it.
Instead, you can clearly explain that your child has two great choices:
If they put all the toys away, they can have them all to play with again tomorrow.
If they choose not to clean them all up, the ones that don’t get put away will be put in a special box, or on a shelf high up. They won’t be able to play with those toys for a day or two.
This is a consequence you have control over, and sets up a clear structure that helps your child make good decisions as she experiences the outcome of her choices.
Another common example is sitting somewhere for “time-out”. This is rarely effective, as the child can keep getting up and you have to keep coaxing them to sit back down. (Remember, any time you are trying to convince your child to do something, they’re in control.) You can’t make a child stay on the chair or step; attempts to do so typically lead to an increase in both the child’s and parent’s distress, raising the volume and intensity, making it less likely the child will calm down and be able to learn any lesson from the experience.
It is usually much more effective to establish a place in your home that is safe and has boundaries where your child goes to cool off (that is not punishment!) when his whole mind and body is out of control.
10. Identify common stressors.
Kids are more likely to have tantrums when they’re tired, hungry, overstimulated, or facing a new situation. Some situations are more likely than others to spark a tantrum; for example, lots of kids have bedtime tantrums or tv tantrums.
While it’s not possible to prevent every tantrum, understanding your child’s triggers and creating a plan ahead of time will help you navigate them.
For example, if your child tends to tantrum around bedtime, create a soothing bedtime routine that is not punitive when you’re both calm. Remember, your little one is only a toddler; they’ll adapt if you reassure them verbally and behaviorally.
11. Have a plan for dealing with tantrums and power struggles.
Without a plan, reactivity rules.
Let’s look at a common example: a daughter provoking a situation by procrastinating eating breakfast. She takes one bite every 5 minutes to delay the inevitable—brushing teeth, putting on shoes and a coat, and heading to child care. Dad starts to feel out of control since his child is calling the shots, and he feels his blood pressure rise. How can he make her get a move on? He tries coaxing and bribing her to eat faster, which naturally results in her slowing her pace. (Power is oh so pleasurable to the young child!) Then the reactive, right brain completely takes over and Dad crosses to the even darker side: he yanks her out of the high chair. Now, his daughter is screaming “you’re hurting me,” which amplifies his annoyance and adds some guilt, says all sorts of awful things, straps her angrily into the car seat, and everyone starts their day miserable. Sound familiar?
So, anticipate these kinds of events and have a plan that includes clear choices with consequences you can implement (more about choices in the next section). It may go something like this: “Layla—we have 20 minutes for breakfast. We’ll put our friend the timer on to help you keep track. When the timer beeps, whatever you haven’t eaten can go in your special take-away container to bring in the car in case you get hungry.”
Having a clear plan for how to deal with situations that cause tantrums provides lots of benefits:
It enables you to remain loving, present and supportive.
It keeps you, the parent, in the driver’s seat, where you belong.
Your child learns to make good choices. This doesn’t mean your child isn’t going to have a total meltdown when you actually follow through with the plan. But remember, that doesn’t mean your approach was wrong.
Again, just because your child doesn’t like a limit, doesn’t mean it’s not good for them.
12. Offer choices with intention.
It’s hard to hear “no” all day long! One valuable tactic for dealing with tantrums and reducing power struggles is providing your child a sense of agency and control where possible.
In some cases, the clear, age-appropriate choices might be things like “Do you want to wear your blue socks or your red socks?” or “Do you want grapes or a banana?” In others, it might sound more like “You have two great choices! You can throw the balls into the basket, which means you can keep playing with the balls. If you choose to throw them at people, the balls will go away. You decide.”
Make the choices clear and concrete, and offer them with all the positivity you can muster! Children pick up on their parents’ tone, which can be contagious. That’s why the “two great choices!” language is effective. Approaching these encounters with tension and threat in your voice can put them in a negative and oppositional frame of mind.
Keep in mind that you’re not responsible for your child’s choices. You’re in charge of offering clear and appropriate choices, and implementing the consequences of your child’s decisions.
13. In some cases, you can “ignore” a tantrum.
This is such a big topic, with so much nuance, that we wrote an entire blog all about if and when you should ignore a tantrum. Safety always comes first. But when the safety of your child, you, other people, and objects isn’t in question, “ignoring” a tantrum can be valuable.
Child mental health experts do make a distinction between actually ignoring and just not intervening in a tantrum; to be clear, we don’t recommend actually completely ignoring a tantrum, but it can be helpful to not engage directly with your child at these moments so that you don’t feed into the overwhelm.
“When ‘ignoring’ is intentional, specific, and directed, it is an intervention,” said Dr. David Hong, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University Medical Center and Little Otter Advisor.
You can (and should) keep an eye on your child when emotions are running high so that you can monitor their behavior and ensure their safety. But you can do so without engaging with them directly. Make sure you’re ignoring in a gentle way, not a “let me know when you are done” exasperated way, which is humiliating, or an overly distressed way, which is also reinforcing.
This approach of “ignoring” a temper tantrum can take many forms:
Averting your eyes
Turning your back
Moving away from the situation (but staying close)
Redirecting with a specific request (without getting too engaged)
Redirecting can be especially powerful for younger kids, because it helps the parent take the focus away from the inappropriate behavior and turn everyone's attention to something else. It also keeps you from falling into the trap of trying to reason with your child when they’re not in an emotional state to be able to understand or respond constructively.
14. Become a tantrum detective.
It can be helpful to try to understand why your child is having tantrums. Here are ten questions about your child’s tantrums that will help us understand them:
How often do the tantrums occur?
What happens during the tantrum?
When do they happen?
Where do they happen?
Who do they happen with?
What are the triggers?
How long do they last?
What is happening in your child’s life and your family’s life?
How do you and other adults respond to your child's tantrums?
How are you doing?
To help you and your child, we need to learn together.
15. Pay attention to see if your child’s tantrums are a signal for a deeper mental health concern.
Tantrums are likely to be considered “developmentally typical” by health professionals if they’re brief, don’t occur every day, aren’t unsafe, are clearly triggered by frustrating events, and tend to be worse when the child is tired or hungry.
On the other hand, frequent, aggressive tantrums in preschoolers may indicate that your child is experiencing an emotional or behavior challenge. Dr. Egger, co-founder of Little Otter, calls these types of tantrums a “mental health fever.”
They’re a sign that we need to look more closely at the child’s feelings, actions, and functioning, as well as their experiences and context, to see if more support may be in order.
So how do you tell the difference between an intense but “typical” tantrum and something more serious? While there are no “one size fits all” answers, doctors recommend taking note of tantrums that:
Are prolonged, i.e. lasting 20 minutes or more.
Involve breaking things, particularly intentionally.
Hurt the child or others.
Continue to occur in later childhood.
As a parent or caregiver, you know your family best. So as you consider your child’s tantrums, think about the effect they have on your family.
Even if your child’s tantrums don’t fall into the “atypical” category based on the bulleted factors above, they may still impair or otherwise negatively impact your child or family’s functioning. If that’s the case, it may be time to explore outside help from a mental health professional.
Remember, tantrums are challenging!
You’re not a bad mom, dad, grandparent or caregiver if tantrums sometimes get the best of you, too. The most important thing for your child’s mental health and development is simply your love, support, and care.
If you’re worried about your child’s tantrums, consider taking a few moments to complete the free, online Little Otter Tantrum Assessment.
While it’s not a replacement for a professional evaluation, this tool can help you better understand your child’s behavior and provide some guidance as to whether it might be time to seek additional support.
When more support is needed, Little Otter is here to help. We’re currently available to families in select states, and expanding rapidly. Learn more and join.
Meet the Writer: Claire Lerner, MSW
CLAIRE LERNER, MSW, is a licensed clinical social worker and child development specialist. She served as the Director of Parenting Resources at ZERO TO THREE for more than twenty years. Claire has also been a practicing clinician for 35 years, partnering with parents to decode their children’s behavior and solve their most vexing childrearing challenges.
Claire also provides training to local preschools and pediatric residents. Claire is the author of hundreds of parenting resources, including books, blogs, podcasts, and videos. She writes a column for PBS Kids, and her work has been published by several parenting publications. She has also served as a content expert for numerous national daily newspapers.
Claire is the mother of two very spirited children of her own, Sam (30) and Jess (28), and mom to two stepchildren, Justin (30) and Sammy (27). She lives in Washington, DC with her husband and two, also spirited, pups.
Learn more about Claire’s latest book:
Why Is My Child in Charge?: A Roadmap to End Power Struggles, Increase Cooperation, and Find Joy in Parenting Young Children (Rowman & Littlefield. Hardcover) ISBN: 978-1-5381-4900-3.
Through stories from my practice, I show how making critical mindshifts—seeing their children’s behaviors through a new lens —empowers parents to solve their most vexing childrearing challenges. Unlike many parenting books that offer a one-size-fits-all approach that often leave parents feeling frustrated and defeated when those prescriptions don't work, the real-life stories in my book provide a roadmap for how parents can tune into the root causes of their children’s behavior and how to create and implement strategies that are tailored to the unique needs of their child and family. Read more about and order the book: