The short answer: Tantrums are a normal, healthy part of toddler brain development. The reasoning part of your child’s brain is simply not built yet, and during a meltdown it goes fully offline. That’s why logic doesn’t work. What does: stay close, come down to her level, keep your own voice low and slow, name the feeling briefly, and save the lesson for later. Below is why this works, and how the Montessori approach can prevent many tantrums before they begin.
It’s six o’clock on a Tuesday evening. You’ve asked your two-year-old if she would like the blue cup or the green cup for her water. She chose the blue cup. You poured the water into the blue cup. And now she’s on the kitchen floor, face flushed, screaming that she wanted the blue cup, which is, of course, the cup in her hand, filled with the water she asked for.
If you’ve ever stood in this kitchen wondering how to handle a toddler tantrum like this, you’re not alone, about one in five two-year-olds has at least one tantrum a day. And if you’ve ever, in that moment, wondered quietly whether something is wrong with your child, or with you: nothing’s wrong. What’s happening is that your small person has a small brain that is doing exactly what small brains do.
This post is for the Tuesday evenings. For the supermarket checkout on Wednesday, the Kita pickup that dissolves before you’ve got her into the bike seat, the bedtime Fridays, the long dark Sunday afternoons of a Berlin winter. It’s for the moments when you’ve tried everything you can think of and your child’s still dissolving in the hallway. This isn’t a new technique. It’s a way of seeing, one I learned over my years
as a Montessori guide, and one I still return to every time a child melts down. It’s the same approach you’ll find at Montessori Mother here in Berlin.
New to Montessori? Start Here
If you’ve never encountered Montessori before, here is all you need for this article: it’s an approach to early childhood, developed by the physician Dr. Maria Montessori, built on careful observation of what children can actually do at each stage, and on deep respect for the child as a person. Rather than managing children’s behaviour, Montessori asks us to understand it, and to shape the environment so the child can succeed. You can read more on our What is Montessori? page. For tantrums, as you’ll see, this perspective changes everything.
The Upstairs Brain and the Downstairs Brain: How Your Toddler’s Brain Works
Dr. Dan Siegel, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, has spent decades studying how children’s brains develop. In his book The Whole-Brain Child, written with psychotherapist Tina Payne Bryson, he offers a picture that has changed the way I think about every meltdown I’ve ever witnessed.
Imagine your child’s brain as a house with two floors.
Downstairs lives the brainstem and the limbic system, the ancient, instinctive part of the brain that handles breathing, heart rate, big emotions, and survival. When the downstairs brain is running the show, a person is in fight, flight, or freeze. She’s not thinking. She’s feeling, and reacting.
Upstairs lives the prefrontal cortex. That’s the thoughtful, reasoning, empathetic part of the brain. This is the part that weighs options, remembers rules, sees another person’s perspective, and chooses to wait a moment before acting. It’s the part that can say, I am frustrated, but I will use my words.
Here is what every new parent needs to know: the upstairs part of your toddler’s brain is, literally, still a construction site. Research on toddler brain development, summarized well in the Harvard Center on the Developing Child’s reports on early childhood, tells us that the prefrontal cortex is one of the last regions of the brain to mature. It’s not fully wired until a person is in her mid-twenties. In a two- or three-year-old, it’s barely a frame. There are walls, but no roof.
So when your child is standing in the kitchen holding the blue cup and screaming for the blue cup, it’s not that she’s being difficult. Her downstairs brain has flooded, and the small, developing upstairs brain can’t yet get to the top of the stairs.
Why Logic Doesn’t Work During a Toddler Tantrum
Once you see the upstairs/downstairs picture, something clarifies: the reason that reasoning with a tantruming toddler feels like shouting into the wind is that there’s nobody upstairs to hear you.
The upstairs brain is slowly learning three core skills, what neuroscientist Adele Diamond calls executive functions: pausing before acting, holding an idea in mind, and shifting perspectives. All three are fragile in a toddler. All three go offline first when a child is tired, hungry, overstimulated, or overwhelmed.
This is why the bedtime tantrum is rarely about bedtime. The supermarket meltdown isn’t really about the cereal. Your child’s small upstairs brain has already been working hard all day, navigating new rules, big feelings, a body that isn’t fully under her command. By the time you reach for the toothbrush, there’s simply no capacity left.
When we try, in those moments, to explain, to reason, but sweetheart, you chose the blue cup, we’re knocking on a door that nobody can answer. She’s not refusing to come. She can’t get there.
What Maria Montessori Understood About Tantrums
Long before we had fMRI scanners, Dr. Maria Montessori was watching children very carefully and writing down what she saw. In The Absorbent Mind, published in 1949, she described what she called the “crisis of opposition,” a period, often around age two or three, when the child who was once agreeable seems suddenly unreachable. She refuses, insists and collapses.
Montessori’s interpretation was, for her time, compassionate. She didn’t see the opposition as defiance. She saw it as a sign of emerging will, of a small person who is discovering, for the very first time, that she is a self, separate from the adults around her, with her own wants and her own ideas about how the world should go. The tantrum, Montessori wrote, is often the sound of that discovery arriving faster than the child’s ability to manage it.
This, I think, is the quiet gift of the Montessori approach to tantrums, and one that parents drawn to gentle parenting will recognize. It doesn’t pathologize the hard years. It recognizes them as a developmental achievement, as evidence that your child is right where she should be.
Preventing Tantrums: The Montessori Prepared Environment at Home
A prepared environment, at school and at home, does three things that directly reduce the number of moments a downstairs brain will flood.
First, it offers meaningful freedom within clear limits. A child who can reach her own cup, pour her own water, and wipe her own spill doesn’t need to ask, or be refused, or be rushed. She’s the author of her own small day. Children who have more age-appropriate control over their environment tend to have fewer meltdowns, not because they are being given more, but because they are being given the right
things.
Second, it protects the rhythm of the day. Tantrums cluster around hunger, tiredness, transitions, and too much stimulation. An environment with predictable meals, protected sleep, uninterrupted work periods, and slow transitions is not a luxury. It is scaffolding for a nervous system that can’t yet scaffold itself.
Third, it limits choices to choices the child can actually handle. What do you want for lunch? is a question with a thousand answers, and a two-year-old has neither the working memory nor the cognitive flexibility to hold them all. Would you like the cheese or the eggs? is a question her upstairs brain can manage.
This is exactly what our Toddler Class in Prenzlauer Berg is built around. Children from 16 months use child-sized pitchers, real cups, and low shelves they can reach themselves, and parents attend alongside them, so you can watch what meaningful independence looks like at this age and carry it home. It’s one thing to read about a prepared environment; it’s another to see a twenty-month-old pour her own water, beam, and wipe up the spill.
Many of the meltdowns that look, to a tired parent, like personality or defiance are, in fact, environmental. And that’s a relief, because if the environment can cause a tantrum, the environment can also prevent one. (For more on this balance, see our post on freedom and limits from birth to 18.)
What to Do During a Toddler Tantrum
And then there are the moments when prevention has failed and you’re simply in it. Here is what the research, and years of watching children, both seem to suggest.
Come down to her level. Not over her. Not across the room. Close, but not looming. This isn’t a conversation yet. It’s a presence.
Lower your voice and slow your body. The nervous system of a small child regulates by borrowing regulation from the nervous system of a calm adult, what researchers call co-regulation. Long before words can reach a distressed child, the adult’s calm heart rate, slow breathing, and soft face are doing the work. You don’t talk a child out of a tantrum. You breathe her out of one.
Name the feeling, briefly. You are so upset. You wanted it to be different. Not as a technique. As a small anchor thrown into the water. Siegel calls this “name it to tame it.” Giving the storm a word begins, slowly, to connect the downstairs brain to the upstairs brain. But keep it short. This isn’t the moment for a paragraph.
Don’t try to teach. The lesson will come later, when the upstairs brain is back online. Teaching mid-tantrum is like trying to deliver a speech to someone who is underwater. Wait for her to come up.
Stay. You don’t need to fix the feeling. Just don’t leave. She learns that feelings are survivable by surviving them, once, twice, a hundred times, with you right there. Most tantrums are over within five minutes, though some stretch to fifteen. Although it can feel like a lot longer.
After the Tantrum: Repair and Connection.
When the tantrum passes, and it always passes, something lovely becomes possible.
This is the moment for the small conversation, not to scold, but to make sense. That was a hard one, wasn’t it? You wanted the cup. The cup felt wrong. Bodies get so big sometimes.
You are narrating her experience back to her, gently, so that she can begin to know it. You are also, quietly, doing neurological construction work. Every time a child is helped through a big feeling by a calm adult, she lays down a small neural path between her downstairs brain and her upstairs brain. This is what Siegel and Bryson call integration, the slow weaving of the two floors of the brain into one working house. You don’t build that staircase by lecturing. You build it by being there, again and again, while the feelings pass.
This is also the moment, sometimes much later, to repair if you didn’t respond the way you wish you had. None of us are calm every time. We snap, or walk out, or say the sharper thing. The repair isn’t a performance. It’s a simple, warm return. I was tired and I got cross. That was not your fault. I love you. A child doesn’t need a parent who never loses patience. She needs a parent who comes back.
When Are Toddler Tantrums Not Normal?
Most of what feels alarming is well within the range of normal. But if tantrums regularly last longer than twenty-five minutes, if your child frequently hurts herself or others, if they intensify significantly after age four, or if your child cannot calm down at all even with your support, it’s worth a conversation with your pediatrician.
The Longer View: Building Emotional Regulation Over Time
Your Tuesday-evening kitchen isn’t a failure. It’s a nursery for a brain that is, right now, learning how to be a human brain. Every tantrum weathered with a calm adult at the child’s side is a small, invisible deposit in a developing mind. Over years (and it is years, not weeks) those deposits become the capacity to pause before reacting, to name what they feel. They become the adult your child will one day be.
This is slow work. Slower than anyone tells you. But it’s real, and you’re doing it every day, even the days you’re sure you’re getting it wrong.
The blue cup, I promise you, is not the point. The child on the kitchen floor isn’t broken. And you, standing over her with a full cup in your hand and no idea what to do next, are doing something far more important than you know.
You are staying.
Come See It for Yourself
If you’d like company in this slow work, that’s what Montessori Mother, Germany’s first Montessori Early Learning Center, is here for. Our parent-attended classes run from 2 months to preschool age, in English, at our centers in Prenzlauer Berg, a calm, prepared space where children practice independence and parents get coffee, conversation, and a chance to see Montessori in action. You can join a class or our waiting list here, or get in touch, we’d love to meet you and your small person.
A Few Further Readings
- Siegel, D. J., & Bryson, T. P. (2011). The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary
Strategies to Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind. Bantam Books. - Harvard Center on the Developing Child. Brain Architecture and Serve and Re-
turn working papers. developingchild.harvard.edu - Diamond, A. (2013). Executive Functions. Annual Review of Psychology, 64,
135–168. - Montessori, M. (1949). The Absorbent Mind. Clio Press.
- Schore, A. N. (2003). Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self. W. W. Norton.
This article was written by Andrea Bognár (former Montessori Teacher at Montesssori Mother Berlin) and edited, formatted, and published by Kim Schruth, Montessori Teacher and Co‑owner of Montessori Mother Early Learning Center, Berlin.