I have to admit, meltdowns are a pain. As much as I love my child, it can be hard to embrace meltdowns. In my previous post, I shared 3 facts to understanding meltdowns. In this post, I will be sharing strategies and techniques I use with my daughter to help her regulate her emotions and navigate her way back to being in calm mode.

You will realise as I describe the strategies, I use a lot of “I” messages in my communication with her. “I” messages helps me to communicate my feelings and reason across without my daughter shutting down to my messages.

The very first response to my child’s crying is to identify the emotion. This is a technique called “Name it to Tame it”  by Dr Daniel Siegel. .

The idea is to rationalise what we are feeling.  I do this by telling her explicitly how I feel and what she is feeling.

In instances where there is uncontrollable crying or she is throwing a tantrum, I describe her actions.

“I see that your eyebrows are together. It tells me you are annoyed.”

“I see that you are taking the toy and wanting to throw it on the floor. It tells me you are angry.”

“I see that you are crying and you are wailing so loudly. It tells me you are feeling sad.”

The more descriptive it is, the better. Sometimes I describe how I start to raise my voice when I am angry or clench my fist. This is to recognise my own bodily manifestations of the emotion and rationalise them out.

In that moment when I describe the actions, it creates an awareness for her and a holding space for myself to calm down.

Being able to recognise my own emotions is just as essential when I can get wrapped up in the negative environment. This is where I will use Name It to Tame It on myself.

“I can hear myself screaming and raising my voice. I feel upset when I saw you drawing on the floor.”

“I feel that there is a fire in my tummy. I am angry that I have to clean up this mess.”

There is a lot of use on the “I” language which I will elaborate more in another post.

At this juncture, there is no point to reason with her because the emotions take control of the brain and lots of crying happens. She is at the zone of reason control loss.  If I were to ask her to stop crying or to ask any questions, it wouldn’t work and the crying just gets louder (who else is with me on this? Haha.)

So now that we have connected to the emotional brain, the next step would be to validate or acknowledge the emotion. Here are 3 techniques I usually use to acknowledge emotions.

• Acknowledge using words.

At this juncture, my tone matters. Instead of raising my voice, I will calmly tell her a simple sentence like,

“Yes, I hear you.”

“I am totally feeling your anger”

“You are having a hard time”

The idea is to be in the moment with her and to be real.

• Or acknowledge using non-verbal gestures

Other times, I validate using non-verbal gestures like a nod or hug can validate and assure her of her feelings.

If the crying or melt down is uncontrollable, I would just stay by her side and let her cry it out without saying anything.

“If crying it out makes you feel better, you can cry out and I will just sit here and wait for you until you feel better”

On good days, the moment I recite this sentence, she stops immediately because she knows she is being heard and her emotions are being validated. On other days, the crying continues uncontrollably and whist my ears hurt and I almost immediately want to tell her to stop crying, I will sit there and just watch her.

• Acknowledge feelings using drawing

In moments when there’s too much emotions, I take a piece of paper and colour pencils and get my child to draw or doodle to express what she is feeling. She will draw a face with tears streaming down the cheeks or draw strong straight lines and crumple the paper.

To be honest, it takes a lot of self-control to sit there and ask her to stop crying. I have to tell myself that she needs her space and to shift my mindset from “get-over-your-meltdown” to “let’s get through this meltdown together”.

When I am sitting there watching here, I sit there with no judgement and just be present. My child can choose to cry out at the balcony or in the living room and my job is to make sure she is safe. I do not label these areas as “Cool down” corner or “Punishment corner” because the idea is for them to release the negative emotion, bring the emotional state to their rational state. The “Time-out” is not deemed as a feeling of punishment. Remember the emotional roller coaster we talked about earlier? Now is the time when the emotions gets released in a healthy way.

Once I have seen Andrea starting to calm down, I start asking her questions.

“Can you tell me why were you so angry?”

I hear her responses and accept what she says before I correct her. In my mind, I start to decode her needs and probe her to find out more. The first time I tried this, it took a very long time. But trust me, as you continue doing this, it gets better and better.

Some strategies I use to regulate the emotion:

• “I wish”

One of my favourite phrases to use is, “I wish…”

“I hear why you are angry. I wish I didn’t have to go to work too.”

“I wish we can stay in the playground longer.”

• Replace “but” with “even though”

“I think you were doing good in telling me how you feel. Even though you know it is getting late to stay out, you sure would want to spend more time playing.”

I put her needs first before I address mine.

• Writing it out

“I hear what you want. Shall we write it out? I have a paper here. You can take a pen and draw it out with me.”

Now that the situation is more clam and controlled, I can communicate and reason why I think what she did was wrong or what I needed her to do.

This is my turn to reason with her. This is the time where I set boundaries.

“Now it is Mama’s turn to tell you why I think what you did was wrong. You were running along the road and it is very dangerous. Cars can come anytime and the cars cannot see you. When they can’t see you, an accident happens. I need you to hold my hand when walking with me.”

Or I would do problem solving with her.

“Can you tell me how we can do this better the next time?”

By now, she is more cooperative to listen to what I have to say and the melt-down has subsided. We’ll come up with a plan, talk about it and I would tell her that we will try the plan out the next time it happens. And, we HAVE to execute that plan.

When a meltdown is about to start, breathe. Calm yourself down. Or even after the meltdown, breathe. Your body just went through a tense situation and now you need to reset yourself to equilibrium mode too.

By you reading all the way to the end, you recognise that the current parenting methods did not work for your child and there must be strategies out there to help your child. I congratulate and applaud you for your courage to want to make that change.

To be very honest, when I first started out these strategies, all of it didn’t work. There was the urge to go back to screaming or shouting at her, which were unhelpful behaviours. But I want to encourage you that parenting is no walk in the park. With each melt down, I fine-tuned my sentences, actions, language used to acknowledge her emotions and now it is much better. Melt downs from 45minutes to an hour are now no more than 10 minutes.

Keep trying and with each time, take notice of what can be done better. You can start off in the home environment first to hone your skills and when you get better, when melt downs happen in public, you can be in better control of the situation.

You’ve got this, parents. The more we share with one another, the more we learn and get better.

If you like this article, Like and Share so more friends can get the help they need.

Till next time,

Marilynn

Disclaimer: Some of these techniques are from the book, How To Talk so Little Kids will Listen by Joanna Faber and Julie King.