How to De-escalate Your Child’s Meltdown

Your child's meltdowns can be unsettling or even frightening. But using words like "violent" and "manipulative" can cause you to have a negative view of your child as willful and deliberate—maliciously in control of their actions. This in turn will affect how you handle these situations. Dr. Ross Greene reminds us that "kids do well if they can" even when they’re behaving in unfortunate ways.

These factors also influence how tolerant you might be in the face of them. In the book The Reflective Journey: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Low Arousal Approach, Dr. Andrew McDonnell suggests the neutral term "behaviors of concern," rather than a "tantrum" or a "fit."

"Distress behavior" is another way of conceptualizing these episodes—when someone is displaying a negative reaction to others, the environment, or to overstimulation, it’s usually because they are distressed.

If your child is neurodivergent, you may see meltdowns more often than you might in a neurotypical child. And yet neurotypical kids absolutely can have meltdowns! Managing the behavior of a child who is in the midst of a meltdown can be extremely distressing to you. Your child may be verbally or physically aggressive, self-injurious, or threatening when their nervous system is in survival mode. In these highly emotional and often scary situations, it helps to have some understanding of what happens when your child is highly distressed. You can also develop skills that can help you to de-escalate yourself and your child.

Your child may begin to show early signs of distress in subtle or easily visible ways that are unique to them. 

Phases of escalation

When your child becomes extremely overwhelmed they may become explosive, seemingly out of nowhere. However, there is a predictable pattern that happens before, during, and following your child’s distress episodes. Within this pattern, you only have a small window of opportunity to intervene and potentially prevent further escalation.

The first phase is the trigger. Your child’s nervous system detects danger. Triggers might include fear, anxiety, frustration, sensory overload, confusion, sudden changes in routine, lack of autonomy, too many demands, fatigue, or illness.

Their frontal lobe...

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