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Big Feelings: Teaching Emotional Regulation to Preschoolers
A practical, stage-by-stage guide to helping your 2-to-5-year-old name, ride out, and recover from big feelings—without losing your own cool.
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: Why Your Preschooler's Brain Is a Wild, Wonderful Mess (and What That Means for You)
Let’s start with a scene you probably know by heart. It’s 5:47 on a Tuesday evening. You’ve just walked in the door from work or maybe you’ve been home all day and the walls are starting to close in. You’re trying to get dinner on the table. The macaroni is boiling, the chicken is sizzling, and your three-year-old is standing in the middle of the kitchen, screaming because you cut her toast into triangles instead of squares. Or maybe it’s not toast. Maybe it’s the blue cup when she asked for the “other blue cup.” Maybe it’s that you buckled her car seat before she was “ready.” Maybe it’s absolutely nothing you can identify, and she is just melting, right there on the floor, like a popsicle dropped on hot pavement.
And in that moment, a voice in your head—maybe quiet, maybe loud—whispers something ugly. What is wrong with her? What is wrong with me? Why can’t I fix this? Why is she so difficult?
I need you to hear me clearly on this, because it’s the foundation of everything we’re going to do together in this book: Nothing is wrong with her. Nothing is wrong with you. This is not a sign of bad parenting, and it is not a sign of a “difficult” child. You are standing in the middle of a completely normal, completely predictable, completely necessary stage of