How to calm your child down and teach them about emotional intelligence:
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It is normal for a toddler to have temper tantrums, but when your child is 5 years or older and still throws tantrums, you might consider teaching them how to control their emotions. When a child is overwhelmed, he/she needs to self-regulate these emotions and learn skills to help them calm down.
The top tips to help your child with emotional regulation are:
Get down to your child’s level.
Acknowledge his/her feelings. (“I can see that it makes you really sad when mommy says you cannot eat a chocolate”)
Sit with your child until he/she calms down.
Give your child something to stimulate them cognitively (like building blocks, sorting beads into different colours or shapes, build a puzzle, etc)
As soon as your child calms down, then you can reason with him/her. Explain to your child why you made a certain decision or why things went the way it did. (“Mommy said you cannot eat a chocolate now, because we are having lunch soon. As soon as you finished your lunch, you can have a chocolate.”)
We are all emotional human beings and even as adults we get upset sometimes. It is important to teach kids how to regulate themselves for when you are not close by to help them with this.
I made a free printable that you can use at home to develop your child’s emotional intelligence and teach them about “flipping their lid”.
Check out my visual explanation on Youtube as well as how I incorporate the free printable when teaching kids about “Flipping their lids”:
Flipping your lid
Flipping your lid
Dan Siegel has invented the hand model explaining how a child’s brain works. When a child gets unregulated Siegel calls it that the child just flipped his/her lid.
We have three main parts in our brain:
The brain stem: This part takes care of the survival parts of our body (like breathing, letting our heart beat).
The limbic region: This part is responsible for emotions and attachment to others. This part also works together with the brain stem to assess situations and determine if the situation is good or bad.
The cortex: The outer layer of the brain which controls rational thinking and reasoning.
How does the hand model work?
Our brain stem initiates “fight, flight or freeze” mode when we experience trauma or stress.
When a child experiences a big emotion, the stress hormone (called cortisol) is released and sometimes it goes in overdrive.
The cortex then disconnects with the rest of the brain and leaves the limbic region exposed. When this happens, we said that we flipped our lids and we can no longer reason or think rationally as our brains went into fight- flight or freeze mode.
Then you need to approach the child emotionally and not rationally to calm him/her down first before you can start reason with him/her.
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