Does anyone have any tips or coping strategies they give their child about ‘big emotions’

[AluckyEllie]

Hi, I’ve an almost 4 year old girl and recently she has started having tantrums/talking back/shouting. She gets so wound up she hits herself (she did hit us/brother a few times but we stopped that.) I’ve told her to hit a cushion or bite it when she feels she needs to let it go. Does anyone else have any advice on what they do? It’s like she gets so wound up and just needs to let it out. Once or twice she’s just shouted/ growled.
I really struggle with it too but have learnt to bottle it up which I’m aware isn’t the healthiest and she needs better.

What helps my son (now 6) is going to a calm place. At school he knows it’s a particular corner (with books) and at home it’s his bedroom.

He can quite suddenly get overwhelmed, but going to a calm place (often without being told to, these days) and reading a book calms him down very quickly. It’s over as soon as it’s begin

He used to scream really loudly but we had to stop him doing that as it became clear he was starting to deploy it knowingly (not as a reflex) in order to hurt our/others’ ears. Obviously if he screams in pain (like after tripping up, stubbing toe etc) that’s ok, but if he makes eye contact with us then still screams at top volume because he’s upset about something, he does a time-out (in which he’s allowed to look at books). He hardly ever deploys the scream these days.

A Mighty Girl has an interesting blog post with book recommendations @AluckyElliewhich might be helpful?

Thank you both, I’ve made
a quiet place downstairs (it’s all open plan so
ive made somewhere a bit hidden and I’ll look at the blog post too. I want to have some phrases/tricks up my sleeve so I don’t start shouting/ adding to the chaos. Thank you!

I’m not sure about stock phrases but the good old “monkey see, monkey do” is always at play with DC do jist try and keep modelling calm behaviour.

Was the blog post of any use?

It’s a good reminder of some things I’ve read before like ‘it’s okay to feel angry, it’s not okay to hit’ which is a good go to line for me in the moment.

I did really like the bit about sometimes anger is justified and they need to see you work through it - like someone being rude and how you deal with it. Rather than just teaching them to bottle it up or to be walked over, how to stand up for yourself reasonably.

A silent lion roar is surprisingly satisfying, and adding 'claws' seems to help as well. Pushing the wall sometimes also helps – in some moods DD will also tell the wall off, which can be quite funny – and she's recently added hitting a balloon against a wall. That one is good because you can hit a balloon as hard as you like, and it's not going to cause any damage to a blank wall. The added focus of having to react to how it bounces back seems to help calm her down more than just hitting a pillow.