Why Your Child Isn’t Giving You a Hard Time
I remember standing in the kitchen, twins on either side of me, both completely unravelling at the same time over things I cannot even recall now. One was on the floor. One was throwing something. And I was just standing there, a professional who had spent years working with young children, completely at a loss in my own home.
What struck me most was not the noise. It was my own internal response to it. I kept thinking, why are you both being so irrational? I knew better than to say it out loud. But I was thinking it, loudly, multiple times a day.
The thing is, I had spent years understanding child development. I had sat with dozens of families and explained exactly why young children fall apart the way they do. But somewhere in the relentlessness of parenting 24 hours a day, I had quietly forgotten to apply any of that to my own children.
When I realigned my thinking, parenting did not become easier. But my expectations shifted. My frustration eased. And that changed everything about how I showed up for them.
If you are in the middle of big feelings right now, this is for you.
The Brain Explanation That Changes Everything
The part of the brain responsible for managing emotions, making decisions, and controlling impulses is called the prefrontal cortex. It is not fully developed until the mid-twenties.
What this means practically is that young children are not choosing to fall apart. They are not being manipulative, attention seeking, or difficult for the sake of it. They are genuinely overwhelmed by feelings that their brain does not yet have the tools to manage on its own.
They cannot talk themselves down. They cannot take a breath and move on. They cannot do the things we do as adults to pull ourselves back from the edge, because the brain architecture that makes all of that possible is still being built.
This is not an excuse for behaviour. It is an explanation for it. And the shift from one to the other changes everything.
What Big Feelings Actually Look Like Across the Early Years
One of the things I find parents often miss is that big feelings look different depending on the age and stage of the child. It is not just toddlers. It is babies who cannot settle because they are overstimulated. It is three year olds melting down over transitions because they live entirely in the present moment and cannot yet hold the future in mind. It is five year olds unravelling after school because they held it together all day and you are their safe place.
The child who goes up
Some children dysregulate loudly. Screaming, hitting, throwing, bolting, refusing to move. This is the nervous system going into high alert, and the behaviour is the discharge of that overwhelm.
The child who goes down
Others go quiet. They shut down, zone out, cling, or regress to younger behaviour. This is just as much dysregulation as the explosive version, just less visible, and often more likely to be missed.
Both responses are the nervous system doing its job. Both need the same thing from you: a calm, steady person who stays close.
What They Actually Need in Those Moments
Here is where most of us, myself very much included, get tangled up.
When a child is in the middle of a big feeling, our instinct is often to fix it. To explain, to reason, to correct, to teach the lesson. And it makes complete sense that we try, because that is what we would want if we were upset.
But a dysregulated child cannot hear any of that. The thinking brain is offline. Asking them to use their words, calm down, or think about what they have done in the middle of a meltdown is like asking someone to read a book while a fire alarm is going off. The alarm has to stop first.
What actually helps is simpler than most parents expect.
Get close. Get low. Soften your voice rather than raising it. Reduce whatever is adding to the overwhelm. Offer your presence without demands. Your calm nervous system is the most powerful regulation tool your child has access to, because young children literally borrow regulation from the adults around them. This is called co-regulation, and it is not a technique. It is biology.
The teaching, the limit, the conversation, all of that comes after. Once the storm has passed and they are back with you. Not a moment before.
The Expectation Shift That Made the Biggest Difference for Me
When I finally stopped expecting my children to manage feelings that their brains were not built to manage yet, something quietly changed.
I stopped taking the big feelings personally. I stopped interpreting them as failures, mine or theirs. I started seeing a child who was struggling rather than a child who was being difficult. And that single shift in perspective meant I could show up differently.
Not perfectly. I still lost my cool. I still got it wrong sometimes, more than I would like to admit. But I was responding from a different place. From understanding rather than frustration. From curiosity rather than judgment.
And the repair, when I got it wrong, became part of the relationship too. Coming back after a hard moment and saying sorry, that is not weakness. That is modelling exactly what we want our children to learn.
You Are Not Getting It Wrong
If your child has big feelings, that is not a sign that something has gone wrong with them or with your parenting. It is a sign that everything is going exactly as it should developmentally. A child who feels safe enough to fall apart with you is a child who trusts you. That is worth holding onto on the hard days.
Understanding what is happening underneath the behaviour does not mean you have to accept all of it. Limits still matter. Connection and boundaries can absolutely coexist. But when you understand the why, the how becomes so much clearer.
Your child is not giving you a hard time. They are having a hard time. And you, showing up and trying to understand that, is already making a difference.
If this resonated and you want to go deeper, my ebook When Big Feelings Take Over walks you through all of this in detail, including how to respond in real scenarios, sensory tools that actually help, and the language that opens things up rather than shutting them down. You can find it in the shop at firstfiveyears.co.nz.
For daily support, tips, and the kind of content that makes you feel less alone in the hard moments, come and find me on Instagram at @first.five.years.
And if you would love some personalised support, tailored to your child and your family, I would love to work with you. You can book a free discovery call.