How I stay calm and connected in the chaos.

The founders of the popular parenting platform Big little feelings -Mothers and real best friends Kristin Gallant, a parenting coach with a background in mother and child education, and Deena Margolin, a child therapist who specializes in interpersonal neurobiology back with more parenting wisdom in Yahoo’s new column called After bedtimea companion of their podcast, After bed with big little feelings. In the second episode of their show, Gallant and Margolin dive into toddler Drift showers – who are challenging (and let’s be honest, deadly) moments that can really test your patience and feel frustrated and assessed by everyone around you. Here Gallant shares five tips on how you can quietly navigate a tantrum.

It always seems to happen on the worst possible time.

You are at Target. Or in the park. Or on board an airplane. And just when you try to go out the door, view your shopping cart full of things or in line at the gate, you feel it coming. The whining and the shouting, followed by the full-body flop on the floor. Your toddler has official moment. And you officially die in.

For me that is the moment that the shame starts: You are doing it wrong. The child of no one else behaves like this. Look around – everyone stares. They assess you. Good mothers have no children who scream in public.

That voice? It is a liar.

This is what is true: your child’s tantrum is not a reflection of your failure. It is a reflection of their developing brain that does exactly what it is connected. Let’s split that, together with tips on how to deal with a toddler collapse.

The toddler brain is still ‘under construction’

Toddlers live in what is called the ’emotional brain’, or the limbic system. The rational, logical part of the brain that helps to regulate great feelings (the prefrontal cortex) is still developing. Like, year Away from being online. That means that toddlers cannot physically deal with overwhelming emotions in a calm, measured way, because the part of the brain that would help them to do so is not yet built.

So when your child loses it about a broken muesli bar or the wrong color cup, they are not ‘bad’. It is that their brains are immature and develop exactly on the right track.

But what about how deadly public tantrums can be?

You not only have to deal with a disrupted child, you also have to deal with every set of eyes in the supermarket or in the playground on you. The shame. The heat on your face. The desperate urge to stop it.

Let me say this as clearly as possible: you are not a bad parent because your child is having a hard time. You are not a failure because your child is struggling in public. It is actually the most human parenting moment there is.

So what can you do right now?

Here is a quick survival mode guide to get through it:

• Regulate yourself first: Your child’s brains are on fire. If yours also catches fire, they are just two brains in a fire. Take a deep breath instead. Literal. Ground yourself at the moment. You are not in danger, you are just in aisle 7.

• Forget the audience: Staring people? They have a) never a toddler or b) to have Had one and just forgot it. Your job is not to manage their discomfort, it is to support your child through the Hunne.

• Become low and stay calm: Kneel down at your child’s level. Speak softly. Your calmness is contagious, even if it takes time to spread.

• Save the lecture: This is not an educational moment; It is a survival. Let the storm pass. You can talk later when everyone is calmed down and back in his body.

• Have a sentence: Something like: “You have a hard time. I’m here with you.” It both bases in connection, and that is what helps to pass tantrums faster.

Bottom Line

Feeling public tantrums as the worst moment of parenthood. But they are actually one of the most important. Because when we stay present, are calm and connected, even in the chaos, we teach our children that large feelings are not dangerous and that they are not only at their most difficult moments. And that their emotions are safe with us. That is not a parenting error. That is parenthood at its best.