with your family · 6 min read

tantrums and meltdowns, through the nervous system

what helps in the moment, what helps after, and why lectures don’t land

written by saddy babu · 20 october 2026

somatic practitioner and breathwork facilitator

what a tantrum is, in the body

a tantrum is what happens when a feeling gets bigger than the body having it. the toast is cut the wrong way, or it’s time to leave the park, and a small nervous system mobilises: faster breath, braced muscles, a rising voice. in my language, a child protesting a no is mobilised, with self: loud, but still reachable. a tantrum starts past the edge of their window of tolerance, where they’re mobilised, with fear, and the energy starts running them. the kicking and stiff limbs look a lot like a small fight response.

two things make the toddler years the peak. the brakes are still being built: the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most involved in pausing and choosing, is one of the last areas to mature, and brain imaging suggests parts of it are still developing into the early twenties. researchers are careful about how neatly that maps onto behaviour, but self-control clearly grows through childhood. and toddlers often feel far more than they can say, so the body says it for them. tiredness, hunger, illness and too much going on all make a tantrum more likely.

it helps to know how ordinary this is. in a 2012 study of almost 1,500 three- to five-year-olds, 83.7% had tantrums at least sometimes and 8.6% had them daily. in michael potegal’s research, built from parents’ accounts of tantrums in 335 children aged 18 months to five years, three in four were over within five minutes, however long they felt on the supermarket floor.

what helps in the moment

start with yourself. young children settle by leaning on the steadiness of nearby adults, which researchers call co-regulation, or as the nervous system glossary puts it, one nervous system settling with the help of another. so steady your own body before you say a thing. that part you can practise in advance, and my free guided body scan is a ten-minute place to start.

then use fewer words, one short sentence said slowly: “I’m here, and I won’t let anyone get hurt.” get low, at or below their eye level, so you’re not one more big thing towering over them, and keep everyone safe, even if that means carrying your child somewhere with fewer people watching. then wait. potegal found that the anger and sadness in a tantrum run more or less together, with the anger peaking early while the crying and reaching for comfort build. the researchers’ advice was that the quickest way past the anger is to do nothing: stay close, and add no questions, deals or lectures. shaking a snow globe harder never helped the snow settle either.

the limit can stay where it was, too. connection before correction, as the old parenting line goes: the second ice cream is still a no, and you can stay warm about how hard that is.

why lectures don’t land

the lesson you want to teach mid-tantrum is usually a good one, arriving at the worst possible moment. pregnancy, birth and baby, the government-funded australian health service, puts it plainly: “there is no point trying to reason with your child as they are not in control.” james green, who recorded toddlers’ tantrums with potegal through a onesie with a wireless microphone sewn in, said that answering a parent’s question “may be just adding more information into the system than they can really cope with”.

there’s brain science here too, with a caveat. yale neuroscientist amy arnsten’s research in adults and animals shows that even fairly mild alarm you can’t control can quickly weaken the prefrontal abilities we reason with. nobody can scan a toddler mid-tantrum, since scanners need you lying still, so applying that to a two-year-old is an educated guess, though a fair one. the lesson can wait until they can take it in.

what helps afterwards

the end of a tantrum can come with a turn, when the crying changes and your child reaches for you. in one of potegal’s studies, about three in ten tantrums were followed by the child seeking out a parent, which the researchers suggested may be where making up after a conflict first appears. that reach is worth meeting, and three things help.

the first is repair: if you got loud too, own it in a sentence, and if you stayed steady, a hug and a plain “that was a big one” tells them you’re still on their side. coming back counts for more than a perfect record, as I’ve written in nervous system regulation for parents.

the second is naming the feeling together, once everyone’s calm. start with what their body did, then offer a word: “your whole body went stiff and your voice got really loud. I wonder if that was a big angry feeling, with some sad in it.” there’s more in how to help your child understand their emotions.

the third is a reset: a short shake together, then a longer stretch of stillness and slow breaths, because a body takes a while to come all the way down. on calmer days it’s worth practising the whole up-and-down, and in soma reset’s “with your family” collection, “move and breathe with your family” is ten minutes of winding the whole family up on purpose, then bringing everyone all the way back down.

tantrum or meltdown?

the two words often get used interchangeably, but many clinicians and autistic people draw a line between them. a tantrum usually has a want or a limit underneath it, and it often eases once that changes. a meltdown, in the words of the UK’s national autistic society, is “an intense response to an overwhelming situation”, a temporary loss of control when more is coming in than a person can process, like noise, light, crowds or a change in routine. the word comes up most often about autistic children, and a meltdown usually doesn’t stop when the child gets what they asked for, because the cause is overload.

so the response shifts towards less coming in: fewer words, less noise, softer light, fewer people watching and plenty of time, much as the national autistic society recommends. the line isn’t always crisp, and autistic children can have ordinary tantrums too, so let what helps guide you.

when to talk to your gp

most tantrums are an ordinary part of being small, and a few patterns are worth raising with your gp or child health nurse: tantrums or meltdowns many times a day or much longer than usual, a child who hurts themselves or others, breath-holding until they faint, or tantrums still going strong once school starts. a 2008 study of preschoolers flagged self-injury and tantrums averaging over 25 minutes as possible warning signs, though its authors said those cut-offs still needed testing. if you’re worried you might hurt your child, or your patience is stretched past its limits, reach out for your own sake too.

common questions about tantrums and meltdowns