The Families of Character Show
We serve parents who want more for their family. Our show offers research-based parenting solutions to the most common family problems, real-life parenting stories, and authentic support. The host, Jordan Langdon, is a wife, mother, and Licensed Clinical Social Worker who validates what parents go through and offers practical actionable steps parents can implement today to transform their families in joy and unity. Guests are experts in their field of work and provide high-value material for parents and families.
The Families of Character Show
Ep. #177: Keeping the Peace During Holiday Meltdowns {Rebroadcast}
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Big feelings don’t check the calendar. Between crowded rooms, shifting schedules, and constant stimulation, kids can tip from excitement to overload in seconds. Parents are left juggling judgment, guilt, and a wailing child at the dinner table. In this episode, we share a practical way to turn holiday meltdowns into moments of connection by reframing tantrums as communication, validating feelings, and co-regulating with calm breath and touch.
We also discuss:
• applying consequences after calm and repair
• using HALT to spot hungry, angry, lonely or tired
• matching support to a child’s temperament
• choosing routine and sleep to prevent overload
If this episode resonates with you, please share with a friend who may also need peace during the holidays!
Need more resources? Visit our website to find our Huddle Up guide to help prepare for the oncoming holidays!
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Welcome back, parents. If you're listening to this episode and the holiday season has already passed, just stay tuned because you know the next holiday is just around the corner. They always are. So this is timeless information to help you manage meltdowns any time of the year, really. Listen, as a counselor and a fellow parent, I understand the challenges we face in ensuring our children's emotional well-being, especially during the hustle and bustle of the holiday season. And it's common for us adults to articulate our stress, but children often struggle to express their feelings. And then they resort to these frustration-induced tantrums at like the most inopportune times, right? Like dinner with all the relatives. So I'm going to encourage you in this episode to empower your kids with the skills that they need to manage and communicate their emotions effectively. This will foster a harmonious holiday experience. Okay. So hang with me. First, I'm going to suggest that you look at tantrums or meltdowns as more than just flat out defiance. Okay. If you can reframe these emotional meltdowns or emotional explosions, however you call them, and truly remind yourself that when your child is acting in this way, they need something in these moments. If you can do that and reframe that for yourself, you will be better prepared to respond to them in a way that helps diminish the outburst or meltdown more quickly. And your child will be able to learn ways to self-soothe down the road. Okay, so let's reframe tantrums as expressions of emotion rather than acts of defiance. This is a game changer. So, example, your child is yelling and screaming and balling up their fist. What do you do? You respond by verbalizing to them what you observe about their behavior. For example, you say, hey buddy, I can see you're really angry. You've got your fists balled up and your face is red. Then you're gonna give them a hug. You're going to connect with your child after you've let them know you've seen them. You connect with their frustration, right? By doing this. This diffuses the tantrum because they feel heard, just like you and I might experience. If we're really overwhelmed and frustrated and someone says, Man, I can tell you're really upset, and I can understand this is upsetting to you, and then gives you a hug, you immediately calm down, right? What also happens when you do this with your child is that you model the behavior they've associated with anger or jealousy or disappointment by putting the words to it. So you're saying, man, your your face is red and your fists are bald up, and and then they start thinking, oh, my fists are balled up and my face is red, and I'm feeling angry in this moment. This helps them to understand how they're expressing these different feelings and then how to manage it. So after you give them a hug, then you help them calm down by simply modeling what you want them to do for themselves. You, while you're hugging them, take a huge inhale as you're holding them and you say, Let's take a deep breath together. And you keep breathing deeply as you hold on to your child. Now, this might go on for three to five or even 10 minutes if this is a new intervention. But trust me, it is worth it. Plus, think about this. If you want your kids to come to you with the big things later in life, you have to lay the foundation early and often that you can help them with these small things like the tantrum because they had to put the iPad away or their brother hid their favorite toy. You have to set that foundation of safety where they are not afraid to come to you when they're upset or something's going wrong in their world. And you know what? If you're around relatives or friends over the holiday, I don't want you to worry about what they might think of you if you comfort your child during a tantrum because there's a lot of judgment, right? We can be so judgy in this parent world where we're going, oh my, they just hug them every time something goes wrong. And they, that person, that kid needs discipline. They need to, right? Well, we never know someone's full situation or the temperament of the child or what they've tried before. And so we just suspend judgment and also don't worry about what other people think of us. We need to just focus on what is working for our family, for our kids. Doing comforting your child in this way and validating their feelings and their frustrations isn't really common practice. So I wouldn't expect people to think that it's a great idea, okay? But it is because again, by providing the words and the physical comfort, you're helping them to be able to do this for themselves later on. So don't worry about what other people think when you start trying this method. And after the meltdown, you know, the child still might have to pay some consequences if they've done something to hurt another child or they've disrespected someone else. But the frequency and intensity of their meltdowns will diminish over time if this is your new way of responding to them. So be patient and stick to it when it comes to how you respond to your child when they are melting down. Here's some additional strategies to consider when you're on holiday or you're somewhere with your family where the schedule's a little different or the environment is different too. Number one, you gotta just get back to the basics, right? Maintaining a little bit of balance is key to reducing everybody's stress. Okay, so what I want you to do is just reflect on your family's individual needs during busy days. I love the acronym HALT, and I want you to remember it and teach it to your kids. HALT, H A L T is your checkpoint when you notice your kids or yourself getting a little overwhelmed or owly. Okay, so HALT. H hungry. Have I eaten in a while? Has my child had a healthy snack that will get his blood sugar back up to a normal range? Maybe we need to get some food. Hungry. A angry. If someone's angry, maybe they need to make an apology. Maybe they need to make an apology or or forgive someone, right? When we have uh situations or relationships that are unresolved and that are nagging at us, we become frustrated. We tend to be more emotionally expressive. So check yourself, ask your kids, hey, are you upset with someone or did someone hurt your feelings? And if they say yes, then facilitate a repair of that little rupture that happened, right? Let's go say we're sorry. You know, let's let's tell them that they hurt your feelings and see if we can repair this so that you can feel better. So that's angry. L, lonely. All of us act differently when we're feeling lonely, when we lack that connection, that human connection that we really truly need. So if you're feeling lonely yourself, you may just call a friend or you know, get yourself around someone that you are comfortable with and you enjoy and take the step to make the connection. If your child feels like, man, it's been three days, I don't have any cousins to hang out with, or you know, it seems like the adults are spending so much time together, take some extra time to spend with your child one-on-one so that they can get that connection and not feel that loneliness that's contributing to their emotional distress. And the T is tired. How often does a lack of sleep just throw us all into a tailspin? Often, guys, I remember having little kids and I would be overwhelmed and stressed and think, you know what, while I'm on vacation, I'm just gonna have a couple glasses of wine, kick back. The kids can do what they want. Like we'll repair all this later, but I need some time off. I'm gonna encourage you to avoid the temptation to just kick back, drink a few glasses of wine, and pay no attention to whether your kids have had a nap in three days or gone to bed before 11 p.m. It's worth it to just have one glass of wine, keep them on their schedule, and be able to enjoy the rest of your holiday because their needs are being met. And I get it. Some of you will do like I did, and you'll just decide to unplug completely over the holidays and let your routine go completely out the window because you're exhausted and you just want a break yourself. Okay. You just have to recognize that doing so is gonna cause you a lot more grief on the back end after the holidays are over. But if you understand that, you can decide whether that's worth it for you. I just recommend considering otherwise. So remember, halt. Halt is your checkpoint when you start seeing the emotions popping out or boiling over. Hungry, are you hungry? Angry, do you need to repair a relationship? Lonely, you need some company, you need some connection, and tired. Do we need to stop and just take a nap or take a rest? And anytime you're checking in with your kids about these particular areas that may need attention, you don't want to be rude about bringing it up. Are you hungry? Are you angry? Let's go through halt. You must be tired. No, we don't want to be condescending. We want to go on a hunt for the answer. We're kind of like uh an investigator. It's like, hmm, what's going on here? Let's figure this out because this isn't you. This is not your normal self. And so I want to help you, but I want to give you four words to check so that you can have those tools in your toolbox as well. So help them investigate and figure out where they can meet a need that might uh stave off a bigger meltdown or upset. And remember, meeting these basic needs is just super fundamental to preventing stress and frustration in both kids and us adults. Okay, so use the same thing for yourself. And then another piece of advice is just to consider your child's unique temperament. Every child has unique needs and temperaments, just like we adults do. You know, I'll sit around and talk with my friends and be like, I thought I was an extrovert, but I think I'm more of an introvert because when I'm out and about, I really find myself craving alone time to just kind of refresh and recharge. Well, kids have those same different temperaments and personality types as well. So pay attention to how your child copes with overwhelming situations. The holidays can be super over stimulating, right? For adults and kids alike. And we are not all the same. So if your child seeks like independent play, they would rather just be over in the corner playing with a toy and they've been around a bunch of cousins or uh, you know, family and and friends or neighbors. Make sure that you take a minute to just take them aside for 15 minutes or something and give them a little quiet space with a few toys to recharge because that's important for them. If they struggle to slow down, you know those kids are wired and they're going, going, going, going, and you're like, I'm I see the burnout coming, it's happening. Incorporate some intentional breaks for quiet moments, like looking at pictures together, right? That kind of calms their bodies down, but it gives them something to focus on. So maybe you go through your phone and you look at family pictures together to just kind of calm them down and calm their bodies down, or gaze out the window and tell them to tell you what they observe, right? What do they see out there? Tell them to name five things that they can see and four things that they can hear and three things that they can smell right now in the moment, right? You can do these mindful activities that still engage them, but they slow the body down in order for them to kind of catch their breath and relax. Understanding and catering to your child's temperament can significantly contribute to their emotional well-being. Again, this requires us to kind of step away from the crowd that we're socializing with, uh, from maybe some of the things we want to do, but again, it is worth it. Okay. Another piece of advice teach some frustration management, so to speak. Early introduction to these frustration management skills really equips kids to be able to bounce back from all life's ups and downs. So, one of the things that we have for you as a free resource is what we call feelings faces charts. So you can print these off. You can get them anywhere online, but we also have them at familiesofcharacter.com. These feeling charts just have little emoji faces that show expressions that correspond with different feelings: disappointed, jealous, angry, um, ecstatic, excited. When a child can identify their feeling through another person, through a character in a story or an emoji face, it helps them to detach from what's going on inside of their mind and their body, get it in front of them where they can see it, and then be able to manage that. So using those feelings, faces, charts are very, very helpful. Another thing you can do is you can give them a blank sheet of paper and give them some colors and tell them to express their feelings using different colors. And, you know, maybe red is for mad, and you know, black is for furious, and yellow is for, you know, calm or um excited, and do allow them to express themselves through some coloring or um writing or drawing. Kids really, really benefit from that, and child therapists use this a lot in play therapy with kids. Calming sensory activities, kids love these things. I I love kinetic sand. So if you buy some kinetic sand, you can pack it up in a little Tupperware container, put it in your purse, and if they need just some time to kind of play with this sand, it kinetic sand is awesome because it's moist and so it does not get all over the place and and kind of become a big mess. It's more like a clay, but it has that sand texture that's really satisfying for kids to play with. So you could bring it out at a restaurant, you could um bring it to you know a family gathering, and they could use that sand to just uh manipulate it in their fingers and their hands so that their body will calm down. Another activity we like to do if we have a little space for it and don't mind some cleanup is we'll put out a plastic um tablecloth. And then we get like two or three bottles of shaving cream from the Dollar Tree, spray it on the uh tablecloth, and let kids, you know, use their fingers to draw different pictures in it or make little uh snow, you know, a snowman or a tree or an animal. And they really, really love that. You gotta watch the little ones so they don't put it in their mouths or their eyes, but um, something simple like that just helps them to calm their bodies down and do something constructive with their hands. So those are some ways that you can help your child and just spend a few minutes calming down and managing emotions. Another thing is just pack along like all their favorite things, right? Not all of them, the whole room, and you gotta have limits, right? But long days and nights can be really challenging when you're away from home or you have a lot of company at your house. So it's important to be prepared with a you know little bag, you could call it like a coping kit in case frustration strikes. So it could be their favorite toy, their blanket, their pacifier, the um, you know, kinetic sand or play-doh, music, headphones so that they can, you know, listen to some calming music, maybe coloring books, right? A stress ball, bubbles so that they can practice their deep breathing, right? And just blowing bubbles helps them to calm their system down. So make sure you pack just a little little coping kit wherever you go for the holidays or whenever you're you're traveling, or have people over just to have that easily accessible. So I can't highlight this enough. Just consider when you're faced with a tantrum or meltdown with your kiddo. Remember this is not an act of defiance, it is them saying, in the only way they know how right now, that they need something. And your job as a parent is not to match their emotion and join them at the level of their frustration and react back. Your job is to be the adult in the room, to take a breath and then make sure that you validate what you see, right? You're so angry right now, buddy. Your your fists are bald, your face is red. I get it, you're really, really upset, you're really angry right now. Give them a hug, hold them, take deep breaths while you're holding them, and they will start mimicking what your body is doing because they feel themselves start to come down a little because you've comforted them, and then they will model your deep breathing, which helps their nervous system to settle down so that their brain can actually get back online from that disconnect it made and that emotional explosion, and they can start using skills to calm down and re-engage with their friend or their family in the way that they really truly want to behave. Okay, so reframe those tantrums as emotional expression trying to tell you something, okay? That is going to guide your child through moments of stress and frustration instead of inflame them to have another episode. And listen, if you want to hear more about diffusing tantrums and this same type of topic, please go back and listen to episode 57. It's titled Diffuse Tantrums and Record Time. And our featured guest there was Brooke Vincent. She's an awesome counselor in the Denver area, and she gives lots of examples of how to physically comfort and verbally validate during one of these tantrums or meltdowns with your kids. So be sure to check out episode 57 for more on this. Friends, we have got to think outside of the box when it comes to parenting. There's so many little hacks out there that we can try and so much junk on social media that people say is works and is good, and we'll put the fear of God into your child. And we've been so used to reacting when our kids throw a fit. Then we tend to go right into a consequence that doesn't even fit the behavior that it's it's just not working. Putting fear into our kids is not the way to condition the behavior that we want in them. Instead, helping them cope with big feelings by being able to put words to what's going on, and then behaviorally doing things like modeling deep breathing and soothing through calming movement is exactly what they need so that they can cope with whatever comes up for them in the future. Listen, parents, we have some really awesome news for you. We have kicked off our parent coaching courses, and they are packed with practical examples of this type of research-based parenting. It's been such a pleasure to be the coach of awesome parents like you who want better for their families, but just need a little bit of a guide over the course of a couple weeks to just get on track and practice some of these things and get in a routine with it. And then have the ability to ask some questions and get that professional guidance that is so often needed. I appreciate you tuning in and I really encourage you to share these episodes with a few people in your circle. That's how we get the word out and continue to build a movement of parents who want more for their families and are willing to consider tried and true processes and skills that will truly transform their family and propel the family forward. So just remember we're better together, right? As a parent, as a wife, as a coach, I am in your corner. Jordan Langdon signing off. Take care, you got this.
