Tantrums are not bad behaviour — they are a developmental milestone

I remember the supermarket. My son was three. I said no to something — I cannot even remember what — and he collapsed. Full collapse, on the floor, between the yoghurt and the cereal, screaming in a way that made other shoppers genuinely stop and stare.

I remember the heat in my face. The certainty that everyone was judging what kind of parent I was. And underneath the heat, something worse: the quiet voice asking whether I had somehow caused this. Whether I was failing.

I know now what I didn’t know then. What I want to share with every parent who has stood in that aisle.

What the tantrum actually is

Daniel Siegel, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA and author of The Whole-Brain Child, uses a metaphor that changed how I think about my children’s most difficult moments. He describes the brain as a house with two floors. Upstairs is the prefrontal cortex: the reflective, reasoning, socially attuned brain — responsible for emotional regulation, impulse control, and empathy. Downstairs is the limbic system and brainstem: the reactive, survival-oriented brain that responds to threat and emotion before the upstairs can intervene.

In young children, the upstairs brain is not yet built. The prefrontal cortex does not fully develop until approximately age 25. In a three-year-old it is barely online — under construction, not yet capable of the regulatory work we instinctively expect from it.

When a young child is overwhelmed by a big feeling, they do not choose to fall apart. They cannot choose otherwise. Their downstairs brain has flooded the system. The tantrum is not defiance. It is a nervous system doing exactly what an underdeveloped nervous system does when it encounters a feeling larger than its current capacity to manage.

Why talking doesn’t work in the middle of it

When a child is in the middle of a tantrum, their prefrontal cortex is offline. Siegel calls this “flipping the lid.” This is not a metaphor. It is a description of an actual neurological state in which the upstairs brain has lost connection with the downstairs and cannot be reached through language or logic.

Trying to reason with a dysregulated child is the parenting equivalent of trying to have a philosophical discussion with someone in the middle of a panic attack. The words cannot be received. No amount of clarity, patience, or repetition changes this — because the issue is not comprehension. It is neurological state.

“The child cannot regulate their own nervous system yet. They need to borrow yours. Your calm is not just helpful in those moments — it is the actual mechanism.”

The Still Face experiment and what it shows

In the 1970s, developmental psychologist Ed Tronick at the University of Massachusetts conducted a series of experiments that became some of the most cited in all of child development research. In the Still Face paradigm, a parent playing warmly and responsively with their infant is asked to suddenly go blank — to hold a still, expressionless face and stop responding to the child’s signals.

Within seconds, infants begin to protest. They smile, point, vocalise — trying every tool they have to re-engage the parent. When the parent remains unresponsive, children escalate to distress, then withdrawal. The experiment shows with extraordinary clarity how profoundly dependent young children are on an adult’s co-regulating presence.

The inverse is equally true: a calm, attuned, responsive presence stabilises the child’s emotional system in real time. Regulate first — stay calm, get close, breathe slowly. Connect second — make contact before making meaning. Story third — later, when the nervous system is open and safe.

What the story can do — and when

Stories come in only at the right moment. Not during the tantrum. Not even immediately after. The story belongs in the calm — at bedtime that evening, or the following day — when the nervous system is open and learning is actually possible.

For a three-year-old, that story must be architecturally different from a story for a six-year-old. Short sentences. Repetition. Basic emotion vocabulary. One feeling, one solution, immediate validation. Nothing that feels like a lesson. Everything that feels like being understood.

That is what the child in the supermarket needed. Not an explanation of why they couldn’t have the thing. Just: I see you. I’m right here.

I know this now. And it has changed everything about how I parent in those hard moments — and about why I built Nuri Tales.