How to Stay Calmer When Your Kid Has a Meltdown (or You Do)

Friends, some authors make you want to soak up every single word. Fabian Grolimund is one of them. (If you don't have his book on learning successfully with ADHD and ADD yet, which is in German, please take a look. It's an eye-opener even if it doesn't affect your family.) Now he and Stefanie Rietzler have written a new book together, a kind of distilled essence of positive reinforcement for kids. Its German title translates to I Love You Just the Way You Are: Accepting, Understanding, and Lovingly Guiding Our Children's Feelings. We asked the two of them for an interview.

Dear Fabian, dear Stefanie, you write in your book, "As parents, we can learn to stay empathetic while also keeping our boundaries, saying no, and being authentic." Can you walk us through a really concrete situation where that works?

Many parents today want to respond to their kids' needs and treat them as equals, with real respect. But if we didn't get to experience that kind of treatment in our own childhood, it's hard to put into practice. We quickly mistake empathy for being nice all the time, and we hope our child will cooperate if we just explain everything well and stay calm no matter what.

Then the child has a tantrum anyway, or refuses to brush their teeth, or keeps putting off homework, and we react with frustration and helplessness. Suddenly we're loud and scolding, and afterward we feel terrible because we went against our own values. To our kids, we seem unpredictable: a second ago, Mom or Dad was cooing sweetly, asking if I could maybe hurry up a little, and now I'm suddenly being yelled at!

So how do we get out of that?

For us, being authentic means that as parents we learn to pay more attention to our own feelings and needs, and to notice early enough when it's getting to be too much. We're allowed to say so, and the best way is to stay with ourselves and speak about ourselves.

Can you give us an example?

For instance, we've recommended the following to many parents whose homework situation regularly blows up: Pay attention to your feelings while you're helping your child study. As soon as you start to get annoyed, say: "I notice I'm starting to get annoyed. I don't want us to fight about homework. I need a break now. When we've both calmed down, we'll keep going."

It's amazing how many families saw things calm down after that. The kids took more responsibility for their homework and, after a few minutes, said on their own, "Okay, we can keep going now." When we're open about our feelings, our children get a better sense of what their behavior sets off in other people, and they can respond to it.

In our work with families, we've often noticed that kids who are criticized a lot and scolded a lot eventually tune out. They simply block out the nagging, scolding parents and teachers. When we make clear how we feel and what we need, instead of just telling the child what to do or not do, we can reconnect with them, and we're also more likely to be taken seriously as parents.

You say "unconditional parental love" is often misunderstood as laissez-faire. How so?

Yes. Some parents wrongly take unconditional love to mean that you accept or approve of everything your child does, that there are no more limits and rules. But that can't and shouldn't be our goal. Instead, we try to accept our child even in difficult situations by staying warm and engaged with them. We stay connected with our child and want to find out together with them why, for example, they lied or stole.

Here's an example: A nine-year-old was caught stealing a superhero action figure at the grocery store. The parent could now scold the child and ground them to show them they must never do it again. This boy's mom reacted differently, though. She sat down on the bed with her son and said, "You know stealing is wrong and not allowed. I want to understand why you did it anyway."

Her son told her, in tears, that it was a dare among the boys, and he'd gone along with it because he finally wanted to have friends, too. His mom understood that very well, since her son had hardly had anyone to connect with so far and had suffered a lot because of it. The two of them could talk about how much it mattered to him to find friends, and about how other kids sometimes take advantage of that. Together, they thought about how he could make up for what he did and how he could respond next time when others pressure him.

So we should keep the conversation going?

If we only punish a child, we learn nothing about their motives. We just hope that fear of the punishment is enough to make the child act differently in the future. But maybe the peer pressure is stronger, and the child simply gets better at hiding this kind of thing? In any case, they won't feel they can come to us when they're in trouble.

To be perfectly clear: this isn't about taking away the child's guilt or brushing off what they did. It's important that we show them: Yes, you feel guilty because you did something wrong. But you can make it right, and I'm at your side to help you do it. And the next time you're caught in a tight spot like this, you can come to me and I'll listen.

Things blow up in families, and sometimes it gets really heated. How can we guide our kids well through their anger?

For kids to learn to handle anger constructively, they need caregivers who empathize with them, sit with that emotion alongside them, and find ways with them to calm down. For most parents, though, that's incredibly hard, and we won't always manage it. It's far too easy to get swept up in our kids' emotional storms, to get loud or snippy ourselves, or to simply feel overwhelmed because we can't "calm" the child down.

Part of the reason is that many parents' energy tanks are chronically empty these days because of the many demands of family, household, and work, and they often lack the strength to stay calm and engaged in heated moments.

On the other hand, very few people got to learn in their own childhood how to deal with anger in a healthy way! Many of today's parents were taught to swallow their anger: "That's enough! Stop this drama! Go to your room until you come to your senses! That's no reason to get angry! Are you still a little baby, acting like this?"

That conditioning makes it hard for us to tolerate our own kids' defiance, rage, and irritation. After all, we'd never have dared to show ourselves that way as kids! On top of that, most people lack good role models. Maybe you experienced your own father as hot-tempered and so you connect anger with threat. In that case, the old feelings of panic or powerlessness suddenly come flooding back when your own child freaks out.

Or maybe you had a mother who swallowed all her frustration and punished you by withdrawing her love instead of saying openly what bothered her. Then you learned that you have to soothe and please the people you love as fast as possible so you don't lose their affection. Your child's anger can set that pattern off all over again. But if we want kids to be able to tolerate their anger and, in the long run, handle it in ways that don't harm themselves or others, then we have to learn to tolerate this emotion ourselves, and to hold it.

Your book even has a love letter to anger…

Yes, because anger is wrongly seen as a frowned-upon, negative emotion. The problem with anger isn't the feeling itself, it's when it's expressed destructively, as aggression toward others or toward ourselves. But anger is an important signal from our psyche and essential to our well-being. It tells us when our needs are being overlooked and our boundaries violated, or when someone wants to hurt us or block us from an important goal. It activates us and drives us to change things!

People who had to learn to suppress this feeling get left behind. Eventually they don't know what they want or need anymore, they stay too long in toxic relationships or work environments, they don't dare to say no and stand up for themselves, they're more susceptible to many illnesses, and on average they even die earlier.

Kids who have been "trained out of" expressing their anger, for example through withdrawal of love, often seem very nice, compliant, and well-behaved on the outside. The price these children pay only becomes clear later. Many adults need psychotherapy just to get back in touch with their own feelings and to take themselves and their needs seriously.

How do we, as parents, manage not to get loud or snippy when we feel helpless and hurt? To put it provocatively: Isn't it actually authentic to be angry sometimes, too?

If we grant our kids their anger, we're allowed to grant it to ourselves, too. Then the same rule applies to everyone in the family: We all want to learn to express this feeling in a way that doesn't hurt anyone else. The kids can learn not to hit or bite. The parents can learn not to intimidate their children and to give up yelling and hitting.

What if my own parents didn't guide me well through angry phases? How can I break the pattern and learn to handle it better with my own kids?

In our book, we introduce different ways to regulate ourselves better. For one, we ask how we can take better care of ourselves and our needs in everyday life, so we're not constantly sliding into the red zone. Above all, though, we turn our attention to our own feelings and conditioning. For example, you can look back at a moment when you lost your temper and go over it closely: What exactly happened? What did I feel? What was going through my head?

You might notice that certain thoughts keep popping up: "My child has no respect for me and doesn't listen at all!" "You can't let him get away with this!" "My kids are so ungrateful…" "I sacrifice everything here and this is the thanks I get?!" "Is she doing this on purpose?!" We can really question those thoughts, and we often find they don't hold up. If we manage to build new beliefs and look at situations from a different angle, we can stay calmer.

How can we do that with a public tantrum, for example?

If a two-year-old throws himself on the floor at the mall because he desperately wants something, we get angry when we think: "He always does this! So embarrassing! Everyone's staring at us! Why can't he ever pull himself together? I can't let him win!" But we could also remind ourselves that it's completely normal for a child that age to want something badly. And that he can't yet put off his wishes by telling himself, "Maybe I'll get the candy next week, I can wait till then."

We could say to ourselves: "I'm allowed to say no, and my child is allowed to be angry. That's completely normal. Other parents go through this, too. And if someone has to give us a dirty look over it, then let them. My child matters more right now than some strangers." Then we can simply take the screaming child in our arms and comfort them, if they'll let us.

You want to reinforce kids positively, you argue for a constructive approach, and you give very concrete tips, for example when one child shoves another. Then we often say, "Hey, no pushing," when it would be so much more effective and productive to say, "Tell the kid next to you, 'Please give me some room,'" because it shows alternatives… What other tips do you have for us?

Most adults think it's important to show kids and teens the consequences of their behavior. Unfortunately, they often only have the negative in view. But kids learn much faster when we point them to positive examples and connections. We could say, for example:

• Did you notice how happy Lisa was when you shared with her?
• I saw earlier that you asked Benni if he wanted to play with you guys. He looked so relieved. I think he was too nervous to ask you.
• That (Nintendo) game comes out in five months? Why don't you figure out whether you can buy it if you save your allowance until then.
• Thanks for putting the play dough away. If you seal it back in the tubs after you play, it won't dry out.

Studies have shown, for example, that students were less motivated and saw learning as less meaningful when their teachers often pointed out negative consequences like: "If you don't try harder now, you won't pass this year!" or "With a report card that bad, you'll have a hard time finding an apprenticeship."

They were more motivated, on the other hand, when the same connections were framed positively: "I think if you prepare well for the last exams this semester, you could manage to get a passing average." or "Every half-grade you raise your average now will help you find an apprenticeship." On a purely factual level, both may mean the same thing. But the first feels like a threat, while with the second we get the sense that the other person is interested in us, believes in us, and wants to support us. We introduce many more options in the book.