How to Handle Tantrums Without Making Them Worse

By Avianna Shull, BCBA · July 14, 2026 · 8 min read

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Almost every parent has had the experience of doing something reasonable during a tantrum and watching it get louder. The frustrating part is that the response usually was reasonable — it just happened to be the one thing that made this particular tantrum bigger.

Why tantrums escalate

A tantrum is not a character flaw and it is not manipulation in the way adults usually mean that word. It is a behavior that has, at some point, worked. It got something started, got something stopped, or got someone’s attention. That history is what keeps it going.

The escalation part has a specific mechanism behind it. If a child screams for two minutes and nothing changes, then screams louder and something does change, they have just learned exactly how loud they need to get. Behavior analysts call this an extinction burst, and it is the single most common reason a well-intentioned plan backfires.

The uncomfortable implication: holding firm for four minutes and then giving in is worse than giving in immediately. It teaches persistence rather than teaching that the answer is no.

What to do in the moment

During a full tantrum, your child is not in a state to learn anything new. The goal in the moment is narrow: keep everyone safe, stay steady, and avoid teaching a lesson you did not intend to teach. Actual skill-building happens later.

Say less. Reasoning, negotiating and lecturing during a tantrum rarely helps and often functions as attention. One short, calm sentence is plenty.
Keep your voice flat and low. Not cold — just level. Matching their intensity raises the ceiling.
Stay nearby if it is safe. Presence without engagement is usually the right balance.
Follow through on whatever you already said. If you said “we are leaving the park after this slide,” leave after that slide.
Wait for calm before anything else. Instructions, apologies and conversations all land better once the storm has passed.

Four things that accidentally make it worse

1. Giving in late

Covered above, and worth repeating because it is so common. Decide before you speak whether you can hold the line. If you cannot — you are exhausted, you are in public, the flight boards in ten minutes — it is better not to set the limit than to set it and fold.

2. Piling on new demands mid-tantrum

“Stop crying, look at me, use your words, say sorry.” Each additional instruction is another thing to refuse. Demands during escalation typically extend it.

3. Big reactions

For a child whose tantrums are maintained by attention, an animated adult response is a reward regardless of whether it is a happy one. Frustration and worry are both attention.

4. Relitigating afterwards

Long post-mortems once a child is calm tend to re-trigger the whole thing. Keep the debrief short and forward-looking: what to do next time, not what went wrong this time.

Preventing the next one

Prevention does far more work than any in-the-moment technique. Most tantrums are reasonably predictable once you look for the pattern — the same transition, the same time of day, the same request.

Signal transitions in advance. A warning, a visual timer, or a “two more turns” count gives a child time to adjust.
Give choices within the limit. Not “do you want to leave?” but “do you want to walk to the car or be carried?”
Front-load the hard moments. Grocery trips go better before the nap gap than after it.
Reinforce the version you want. Notice out loud when a transition goes smoothly. Specific beats generic: “you turned off the tablet the first time I asked” beats “good job.”
Make expectations concrete before you arrive. A quick review in the car costs nothing and prevents a lot.

What to teach instead

A tantrum is doing a job. If you remove it without teaching something that does the same job more effectively, it will come back or be replaced by something less convenient.

So the real question is: what is this tantrum accomplishing, and what could my child do instead that would work as well or better?

If it gets a break from a demand → teach asking for a break.
If it gets a preferred item → teach requesting, and teach waiting.
If it gets attention → teach asking for attention, and give it generously at other times.
If it escapes something hard → teach asking for help, and make the task easier to start.

Teach these skills when your child is calm, not in the middle of a meltdown. A new skill has to be well practised in easy conditions before it is available in hard ones. This is the part parents most often skip, and it is the part that produces durable change.

Working out which job a behavior is doing is what behavior analysts call identifying the function. If that idea is new, it is worth reading what the function of behavior actually means — it is the concept that makes everything else on this page make sense.

When to get help

You do not need a crisis, a diagnosis or a referral to ask for support. It is reasonable to reach out when tantrums are frequent enough to shape your family’s day, when they involve aggression or unsafe behavior, when they are not improving despite consistent effort, or simply when you would like a second opinion from someone who does this professionally.

Getting help early usually means smaller adjustments are enough.

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