A Tantrum Isn't An Emergency

Why I gave up on "validating big feelings" and old school consequences--and what I did that actually worked.

Photo by zhenzhong liu on Unsplash

I realized it’s been a while since I wrote a parenting thing. So here’s one!

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For years, I struggled with gentle parenting my older child (now five) because not only is he very strong-willed, but I was led to believe that any whining or crying needed to be quelled as soon as possible. I believed that if he was upset, this was an emergency, or at least a high-level crisis, and it was my job to fix it as soon as possible.

“Fixing it,” in my case, usually defaulted to the absolute worst thing I could do, something that even the most permissive of gentle parenting influencers would advise against: attempt (and fail) to calm a toddler down with platitudes about big feelings, and ultimately give him whatever it is he wanted after enough whining. Sometimes, if the whining was completely nonsensical and endless, I might get mad, raise my voice, and then feel guilty.

I’m annoyed that it took me five years of parenting to figure this out, but as it turns out, whining isn’t an emergency. Nobody has ever died from whining, and despite my initial fears leading my irrational actions, a child has never been traumatized by not getting their way. There is something you can do instead of yelling, punishing, or giving in: do absolutely nothing.

Perhaps this is on me for being an idiot, but part of why I went down this bad path was that I was led to believe that whining was, in fact, an emergency.