3 step framework when supporting a meltdown

Ajouté : 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]Hey, my name's Hayden. I'm a certified synergetic play therapist and meltdowns are my jam. And when I'm supporting my own kids through a meltdown, here's a three-step framework that I try my best to follow. And I say try my best because as a human, I don't always get it right.

[00:00:11]But what I love about this is at any given point, even if I've already lost my cool, I can always go back and start over at step one. So, let's get into it.

[00:00:18]Well, step one is that I have to start off by not talking and instead focusing on regulating myself. I often jump right to trying to fix it or trying to rationalize it. And when we understand a little bit of neuroscience, Dr. Dan Siegel's flipping your lid model tells us that when we become dysregulated, we flip our lid. And our cortex, the logical, rational part of our brain, more or less goes offline. So, in the moment that I'm trying to be rational, I'm talking to the part of my kids' brain that isn't rational. The other piece of this though is I have to focus on regulating myself. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to keep my own lid from flipping so that I can be logical and rational and intentional in my next steps. So, step two then is co-regulation. And within this, I don't mean trying to get your kid to do something. We've all been there. Trying to get a dysregulated kid to do the thing that I want them to do doesn't typically go well. So, rather than that, I'm focusing on regulating myself um for a lot of different reasons, but overall, I'm trying to keep the situation from escalating and I'm trying to let my kid borrow my nervous system, right? So, I'm trying to model for them how to regulate through this big emotion and we're doing that together. Well, step three then is the three R's from Dr. Bruce Perry.

[00:01:16]We've already been doing regulating, which is the first one. The next are relate and reason. Well, relating is essentially validation. This feels really big. This feels [clears throat] really overwhelming. As I do that, I see how it lands. If it lands, great, we're moving up towards reasoning. If it doesn't, we move back into regulation.