Meltdowns and Tantrums – Understanding the Difference

Transcript: Meltdowns and Tantrums – Understanding the Difference

We use the term “sensory meltdowns” a lot right now, especially in my work. To ask the first question: Is there a difference, and does it matter?

If we think of a sensory meltdown versus a tantrum, we often think of a sensory meltdown as more “my body’s not coping,” and in that not-coping, it looks like a tantrum. A tantrum is often seen as a behavioural component: “I just don’t want to do this, so I’m gonna throw a tantrum.”

There are distinct differences because each is caused by different things, but they look the same.

A pure tantrum is often a child who doesn’t want to do something you’re asking them to do, which links to change. We speak about change a lot.

You want them to stop what they’re doing on their screens and come have dinner. That’s a change issue. A child who’s been diagnosed with something like ADHD will really struggle with that change because they’re doing something that’s reward-based, they need the dopamine and the motivation, and they now need to go to dinner, which is not reward-based. So they’re going to struggle to move into that.

Children on the autism spectrum struggle to move from one environment to another. They’re comfortable here, and it’s become, in their minds, the unknown, which can cause a tantrum or behaviour intended to get them what they want, not what you want from them.

And then there’s the sensory side of things, where the world is so uncomfortable, unknown, and unsafe in that moment that my system can’t handle it, and I can’t regulate.

Regulation and Dysregulation

The words “regulation” and “dysregulation” have been bandied about a lot recently. At its basic level, it’s my ability to soothe myself versus my inability to soothe myself.

Self-soothing is something we do a lot as adults. We’re driving, a taxi cuts us off, and we breathe. That’s self-soothing. We have a technique of breathing. We’ve got to — this is where practice also comes in, I’ve got to have the idea to self-soothe, then I’ve got to know what to do (I’m gonna do breathing), and then to do the breathing. That’s a skill we develop.

Neurotypical children who don’t have learning difficulties, who don’t have any diagnoses, they seem to, and I say seem to because I don’t know that it’s always the case, they seem to develop the skills as if by accident.

What I really think is going on is that they have the ability to pick it up without being expressly taught, and then they get the skill that way.

Reuven Feuerstein, the father of mediated learning, talks about explicit learning and implicit learning, I think these are the two types (I might be getting the terms wrong), but he says that often children do not pick up things automatically, and we as educators (which would be teachers as well as parents) need to intervene in order to teach them the skill.

So it’s not being automatically picked up, we need to develop it.

Self-Regulation Skills

When we look at self-soothing regulation skills, a typical child learns to regulate by watching others, trying it out for themselves, and practising, which works great. They’ve now got that skill in their toolbox.

A struggling child is not picking it up automatically, so the adult needs to intervene, and intervene with grace and understanding, not irritation, sarcasm, or eye-rolling. Recognise that they haven’t picked up the skill; now we need to develop it.

When to Teach These Skills

Now, if we’re talking about meltdowns, for whatever reason they are, in the meltdown is not the time to teach the skill.

I recently took up rock climbing, and when I’m on the rock in the Magaliesberg doing trail climbing and I fall, that’s not the time to teach me to fall. So we go to the gym to do fall training. Same thing.

If you ever go on an advanced driving course, or are just learning to drive in the beginning, not making the wheels lock is not a skill you teach in the middle of an accident. It gets taught prior to any accident.

So, if a child, and all children, tends to be overwhelmed, this is a mandatory skill you need to teach children from the beginning: how do you regulate yourself?

It starts with the adult being regulated first. A screaming mom is not regulated and cannot regulate somebody else. A shouting dad is not a regulated adult. They need to regulate themselves. So you need to breathe and calm down, this is not about you. How can I help this person?

What to Do During a Meltdown

Then the child is in a meltdown, how do I help them to feel safe? Because it’s an overload and they are now in fight, flight, freeze, fawn, whatever they’re in, their nervous system is not working. They’re not thinking.

So when we go into a fight-flight mode, our thinking brain slows down, if much, shuts down. So they’re not thinking. They’re not using their top-down brain, their approach. We are going to meet them with regulation and calm.

So we’re not gonna raise our voice. We’re certainly not gonna hit. We’re not going to grab, hold, and pull down. We’re not gonna do any of those things. We’re gonna breathe deliberately.

Many years ago, I used to ride horses a lot. If you wanted to slow the horse down, you slowed your breathing and your movement down, and the horse matched you. It’s the same sort of thing. You slow your breathing down, down-regulate yourself, and the child around you can feel that.

If they need a hug, give them one. Whatever they need to bring their system down — and it’s often a physical thing, they need contact and pressure (or they might not want pressure). Whatever they need, you give it to them physically and bring them out of that state.

Post-Meltdown: Engaging the Brain

Daniel J. Siegel discusses “flipping your lid.” He uses the hand model to explain flipping your lid. If you close your thumb inside your fist, and you close those fingers down, he’s saying the fingers are your thinking brain, and your thumb inside that fist is your automatic response.

When you have a meltdown, you flip your lid, your thinking brain is no longer online, you’re just responding. Your job as a regulated adult is to soothe that inner part of the brain and then bring the thinking brain back online.

When the thinking brain is back online, then you can connect and go through a three-step process:

1. See it

Language like:

“This looks hard.”
“I hear what you’re saying.”
“Repeating those words back to them.”
It’s a real connection, real understanding, making that child feel heard.

2. Say it with compassion

Use words like:

“Your anger looks real.”
“This must be tricky for you.”
“This looks tiring for you.”

Try to use their words, acknowledge the feeling, and let them sit in that.

3. Solve it

What can we do about this?

“Should we go to the bathroom?”
“Should we go and get a drink of water?”
“Would you like a hug?”

Just sort of move them out of the process.

Practising Regulation Over Time

A regulated adult can do that.
A dysregulated adult can’t.

And a regulated adult, the more they do it with the child, the more the child’s brain (again, going back to the plastic brain) experiences themselves regulating. So their nervous system learns what regulation, what moving from dysregulation into regulation, feels like.

Then that pathway gets followed and strengthened over and over, like walking through the veld: the pathways get walked on repeatedly. So, those pathways become easier to navigate.

So the more we co-regulate with a child, the more their nervous system learns to regulate.

Then, between the meltdowns, the meltdown is finished, the dysregulation is finished, it’s an hour later or the next day, and then you can start talking about:

“So when you feel like that, what can we do?”

Now you’re tapping into the cognitive side of the brain. We’re developing skills.

We might be:

Practising box breathing
Practising slowing down breath
Exploring movement that helps in that moment

You do those movements, so it gets added as another tool. The next time they have a meltdown, again, you self-regulate, but you might want to introduce some of the tools you’ve been using in that moment.

Now the kid is starting to pair tools they’ve learned outside of a meltdown state with their meltdown states.

A Long-Term Process

Understand that this is not going to be fixed in one week.

Something that I say often, and it is so true:

Children who are struggling tend to start, they can be picked up as early as four years old, but we tend to see them between seven and ten. These things start getting picked up, which means they’ve been struggling with this for seven to ten years.

The saying is:

“We didn’t get here in a week. We’re not getting out of here in a week.”

It takes time.

For me, our learning centre is an intervention school. It’s a two- to three-year minimum process of retraining the child’s brain and adding go-to strategies and skills to their toolbox so they have more to use.

If we go back to what I said about Reuven Feurstein’s work, if students are not learning it automatically, they need to learn it deliberately.

Then, it’s incumbent upon us, as the adults in that space, whether parents or teachers, to develop that skill and be patient with them over time because it’s going to take a while.