Picture the supermarket. The trolley is half full, the queue is long, and your three-year-old has just gone rigid in the trolley seat, howling, because you said no to the chocolate buttons. People are looking. Your face is hot. Somewhere in your head, a small voice is saying do something.
Almost every parenting question in that moment narrows down to one: how do I make this stop?
It is the wrong question. Not morally wrong. Entirely understandable. Just wrong in the sense that it will not get you where you want to go. Because behind every behaviour, even the loud and inconvenient ones, sits a child trying to tell you something. And until you know what they are saying, anything you do to make it stop is only ever a lid on a pan that is still boiling.
What behaviour actually is
Young children do not have the language or the neurology to tell us what is happening inside them. The pre-frontal cortex (the part of the brain that handles reasoning, impulse control, and putting feelings into words) is not fully formed until the mid-twenties. In a three-year-old, it is barely under construction.
When a small child loses it, they are not making a rational choice you could talk them out of. They are flooded. The thinking part of the brain has gone offline, and the older, deeper, faster part (the part that handles fear, threat and overwhelm) has taken the wheel. Asking them in that moment to use their words is a little like asking someone in a burning building to fill in a feedback form.
So, the tantrum, the defiance, the going-floppy, the sudden clinginess, the hitting, the hiding under the table: these are not a child failing to behave. They are a child communicating, in the only currency they have, that something is too much, too fast, too hungry, too tired, too unfair, too frightening, or too far away from the adult they trust.
All behaviour makes sense from the inside.
A different question
The American psychologist Ross Greene puts it in a single, quietly revolutionary sentence: children do well when they can. If they are not doing well, something is getting in the way. Not their character. Not their respect for you. Something specific: a missing skill, an unmet need, a stretched-too-thin nervous system.
That sentence is worth sitting with for a moment, because it shifts the whole landscape. If you believe a child is being difficult on purpose, your job is to make the difficulty more costly than the cooperation. If you believe a child is doing the best they can with the resources they have right now, your job is completely different. Your job is to find out what is getting in the way and help.
The first question (how do I make this stop?) leads to bigger consequences, louder voices, and a child who eventually learns to hide their feelings rather than show them.
The second question (what is my child trying to tell me?) leads somewhere else entirely. It leads to a conversation, even a wordless one. It leads to a child who learns that their inner world is something an adult is willing to be curious about. And, in time, it leads to better behaviour, because behaviour improves when the underlying need is met, not when it is shouted down.
Connection before correction
There is a sequence that comes from the work of Bruce Perry, and once you have seen it you cannot unsee it. He calls it Regulate, Relate, Reason, and the order matters more than anything else.
Regulate first. A flooded child cannot learn anything. Before any teaching, any reasoning, any consequence, the child needs to come back into their body. That might look like being held, or being given space, or having an adult simply sit nearby and breathe slowly. Whatever it looks like, it is not a stage to skip past on the way to the lesson. It is the lesson: the lesson that big feelings can be survived.
Then relate. Once the storm has passed, the child needs to feel met. That was a hard moment, wasn’t it. Not approval of the behaviour. Recognition of the human inside it. This is the bit that adults often want to leave out, because it can feel like rewarding bad behaviour. It is not. It shows the child that they are still loved on the other side of their worst moment, which, in the end, is the only foundation strong enough to build self-control on top of.
Only then, reason. And often you will find there is much less reasoning needed than you thought, because the child, once regulated and related to, frequently arrives at the insight themselves. I was sad. I wanted the buttons. A short conversation about what we might do differently next time will land in soil that is now ready to receive it.
Connection before correction is not permissiveness. It is sequencing. It is the recognition that the child you are trying to teach has to be available to be taught.
A different lens
I am not offering a method here. There are plenty of methods, and most of them work some of the time, and none of them works all of the time, because children are not machines, and neither are we.
What I am offering is a lens. The next time your child does the thing that makes your jaw tighten (the whining, the hitting, the refusing, the meltdown over the wrong colour cup), you might try, before anything else, asking yourself: what might she be telling me right now that she cannot say in words?
Sometimes the answer will be obvious. She is hungry. She is tired. She is overstimulated. She has had three transitions in an hour, and her small system has run out of road.
Sometimes the answer will surprise you. She is missing me, even though I am right here. She is missing her grandmother, who used to come on Tuesdays. She does not yet know how to ask for help with the puzzle.
Sometimes you will not find the answer at all, and that is fine too. The act of looking changes things. A parent who is wondering what this is is already, in their body language and their tone, a different parent from one who is thinking how dare you.
Children feel the difference. They always do.
The trolley is still half full. The queue is still long. Your three-year-old is still on the floor. But the question in your head has changed, and with it, almost everything else.
Susanne Rice
Registered Childminder · MEd, MRes · EdD Researcher
Founder, Grounded Parenting & Growing Curious Children