Chaos to calm when dealing with a two year old.

Do you sometimes struggle with your child’s behaviour? Do you often hear “no!” or “I don’t want too!” from your young child? Do you feel there is no end to these behaviours? Or maybe they just don’t make sense to why they are occurring?

All children at around 2 and 3 years of age will present with some sort of challenging behaviours at some point, some more than others.

At the age of 2 years, your child will show some big emotions, however they don’t yet have the skills to regulate these emotions, or the communication to verbally express their frustrations.

As a parent we need to show, guide and support them in ways to regulate their emotions.

There is always a reason behind their behaviour. We may not directly see it, as it could be “small” to us but quite big to them. These are called the triggers. An example of a trigger could be when a child’s tower that they are building with their blocks falls down, or simply they are hungry or tired.

I always see this behaviour as like a volcano, especially for those bigger challenging behaviours.

Leading to the eruption are the triggers and when there are a number of triggers occurring, the child erupts.

When the eruption occurs, it is hard to settle the child at this stage. Some eruptions are short lasting, and easily “fixed”, others may last for a little longer.

When the eruptions occurs we can do the following:

• Hold the space with open arms. Allow the opportunity for them to come to you. Your child may not want to come into your space.
• Keep calm and wait it out.
• Validate those emotions, for example: “I can see you are feeling angry”
• Sometimes, you may need to give yourself some space to prepare in dealing with that emotion. If you need to go to another room to calm down then that’s ok but only for a short time (no longer than 2 minutes)

When your child calms down, this is the time to try to assist and support them. You may ask “I can see that building that tower was really hard, can we try again together?” or “I can see that building that tower made you really angry, let’s read a book and try again later.”

If you have worked out the frequent triggers that set a certain behaviour then these are the skills that become teachable moments.

Teachable moments involve learning new skills e.g. becoming more confident with building with blocks, modelling everyday language and learning about emotions through stories, songs and everyday conversations.

Want to find out more?

The Early Parenting Village can support you with strategies on how to support your child during meltdowns, provide some ideas to teach new skills and work with you on how to best managing those daily challenges.