10 Ways to De-escalate an Upset Child: Practical Strategies for Parents and Teachers

Discover practical de-escalation strategies for upset children from MD Sue Bagshaw & Michael Hempseed’s book, Calming Your Child.

When a child is overwhelmed by strong emotions, standard discipline methods often backfire. They leave both parent and child feeling exhausted and frustrated. In this excerpt from Calming Your Child, authors Dame Sue Bagshaw, MD, and Michael Hempseed share effective, research-backed techniques to manage emotional outbursts before they turn into full-blown meltdowns. By focusing on emotional regulation first, offering positive alternatives, and protecting a child’s sense of safety and dignity, caregivers can navigate challenging behavior with calm authority and help children regain control.

De-escalation Techniques for an Upset Child

“To hear the phrase ‘our only hope’ always makes one anxious, because it means that if the only hope doesn’t work, there is nothing left.”

—Lemony Snicket, The Blank Book

There are a number of techniques that can be really helpful when you are trying to de-escalate an upset child. It is important to know what you can and cannot de-escalate. If a child is moderately upset, you have time to use the techniques that we discuss in this and subsequent chapters. However, if they are in a state of rage, you cannot talk them out of it; they have temporarily lost the power of rational thought.

1. Giving a Positive Alternative

Have you ever asked a child to stop doing something and he just keeps doing it? Often when he keeps doing it, we think he is being defiant.

Our brain can imagine some amazing things, but it is not good at imagining the words don’t, stop, and no. If we say, “Don’t think of a pink elephant,” most people do. Your brain can’t imagine the word don’t, so all we hear is “think of a pink elephant.”

Every parent knows that if you ask a child not to cry, the child will immediately burst into tears. If you say to a child, “Stop drawing on the walls,” she will only hear “draw on the walls.” You need to give a positive alternative, such as, “Go play with your other toys.” If you give a positive alternative, she will follow what you say. This is why the American police say, “Stay in your vehicle,” rather than, “Don’t get out of the car.”

2. Regulate First

Psychiatrist Bruce Perry developed a theory called the Three Rs. The first step in solving behavioral problems is to help the upset person Regulate (in other words, make them feel calm), then Relate to them, and then Reason with them. All too often we get it backward: we try and reason with a child before the child is regulated. (It is helpful if you first regulate and calm yourself, and that will help your child.)

For example, we say, “If you don’t behave, you will get no TV for a week”—this is trying to reason with someone. When someone is distressed, they often don’t think about long-term consequences.

When we try to reason with someone who is upset, it just doesn’t work, and everyone gets more upset.

Let’s imagine you have a child and it is past their bedtime. If you say, “You will be tired tomorrow” (Reasoning), this does not motivate them to go to bed at all. Next, we try bargaining with the child: “If you don’t go to bed, you will not get ice cream for dessert tomorrow.” Statements like this often create more anger. Now you have an even bigger tantrum to deal with.

Children don’t have a good understanding of time; both of these suggestions—the consequences of being tired or having no dessert tomorrow—involve a distance of time that is too great for a child to comprehend.

Instead, you could ask, “Would you like me to read you a story?” Many children love hearing stories read to them, so this helps them relax (or Regulate them). Maybe you could start in the living room, read ten or fifteen pages, stop at an exciting point, and say, “Let’s continue in bed.”

To Relate to a child, you could say, “I know it can be hard to go to bed at the right time. Even I find it hard sometimes.”

Now you can start to Reason with the child. You could ask, “How come you don’t want to go to bed?” It often helps to give examples of the kinds of answers you want. “Do you find bed boring?” “Do you not like the dark or your bed?” “Do you hear scary noises?” Once the child is regulated, you can address each of these issues one by one.

3. Saying “You Are Not in Trouble”

Children often get really upset when they think they’re in trouble, even if they are not. For example, if an adult says, “This is your last warning,” the adult usually means, “I am trying to stop you from getting into trouble.” But children frequently think this means, “An adult is angry with me,” “I’ve failed again,” or “I’m no good at anything.” When children think they’re in trouble, their behavior tends to get worse, not better.

A really good statement to start with is, “You’re not in trouble.” When children hear this, they are more likely to understand that an adult is trying to help them, which reassures them.

4. Acknowledging Feelings

Next you need to acknowledge how they are feeling. If you say, “Calm down,” children don’t actually calm down; often they become more aggravated. An even worse thing to say is, “You’re getting upset over nothing.”

Instead, children often want you to acknowledge how they are feeling. If a child comes into a room and is obviously angry and frustrated, a really good thing to say can be, “You are not in trouble; it looks like things are not going well at all. Please tell me what’s been going on—I really want to know.”

This shows that we are listening to the state they are in, we are saying, “We are here for you; we want to help you.” When you say, “Please tell me what has been going on,” it often forces the child to stop and explain what has been going on. This often slows the child down and soothes them.

If you say this in a slow, calm voice, this can also be a good way to de-escalate someone. When it comes to de-escalation, the calmer you are, the calmer the other person will be as well. Even if on the inside you don’t feel calm and you’re feeling panicky yourself, try and deliberately say your words in a slow, calm voice. This in itself can be very calming and therapeutic.

It helps if you are at the same eye level—a child won’t feel acknowledged if the other person is towering over him; that can feel quite threatening. Sitting down together so that you are more on the same level is helpful.

5. Feeling Trapped

One factor that many people do not consider is how far a child is from an exit. If a child feels trapped, he is more likely to become upset and aggravated. Often just knowing that there is an exit that he can use makes a big difference. This doesn’t work in every circumstance. For example, if a child is likely to run out onto a busy road, then obviously this is not a good idea.

Many people don’t consider how important exits are. When people with high anxiety come into a room, one of the first things they do is look for an exit. If they end up in a part of a room that’s away from an exit, that may make them feel trapped. This raises their adrenaline and cortisol levels, which means if something does go wrong, they’re more likely to have an explosive tantrum. Consider if there is a way to manage this behavior by putting a child near an exit. It doesn’t have to be an exit out of a house onto a road; it could be merely an exit into another room.

6. Personal Space and Feeling Threatened

Often when children are anxious or have been traumatized, they need a much bigger personal space bubble than other people do. The technical name for this is peripersonal space. Most people feel comfortable with someone standing between one-and-a-half and six-and-a-half feet away from them. If it is someone you know really well, the bubble gets much smaller. Researchers have found that people with anxiety or people who have experienced trauma often have a much bigger personal space bubble than those who haven’t. Sometimes they prefer a distance of ten to thirteen feet.

When a child is calm, a good question to ask is, “Would you like me to come closer to you? Or would you like me to step further away?” You will be surprised that often the child will want you to be quite a few feet away. When the child says this, they are not making a joke; it is really how far away they want you to be. Consider that this is the child’s safety bubble. If this is a safety bubble, how often does it get violated because we put people too close to the child?

7. Understanding Shame

Time-outs are when children are sent to their rooms for bad behavior. The problems with these are:

Children often don’t know why they are in time-out.

Time-outs can damage the relationship between a child and parent because a child is being separated from their caregiver.

A new version of this is time-in, which is when a distressed child stays with a parent or caregiver. This can work well, but there are times when this may not be effective. If a child is crying her eyes out, she may feel embarrassed and filled with shame, and making her stay around an adult can add to the shame; in these situations, allowing her to be by herself can help. There is a difference between sending a child to her room for poor behavior and allowing her to be on her own to cry in private.

8. Avoid Humiliation

If you are a teacher and a child starts making a paper airplane, one of the tempting things to do is to go over, pick it up, scrunch it up, and yell at the child. However, if you do this, you will humiliate him in front of everyone else. When we are humiliated, we blush and our sympathetic nervous system activates as if we were being chased by a wild animal; people who are humiliated often go into fight mode.

One of the most important aspects of de-escalation, particularly with aggressive children, is not to humiliate them in front of others. If children feel even the slightest bit of humiliation, they may react explosively.

If a child is making a paper airplane, a good thing can be to go over to him and say, “That’s incredible. As a child, I was never able to make those. Would you be able to show me after class how you made it?” You’re affirming him. You’re saying that he has a good skill, but you’re also saying that now isn’t the right time. Often, if you can handle it in this way, you stop an explosive outburst.

It is also worth considering whether there are other things you are doing that may humiliate a child, such as asking them to write on the board. If a child doesn’t feel confident about spelling, or he’s worried about his handwriting, you can cause an explosive tantrum when you ask him to do this.

9. Challenging Times

Sometimes children test you. A few years ago, Michael was asked to give a talk at the youth prison. A week before he came in, one of the staff at the youth prison called him and said, “We just wanted you to know we had a presenter in today and she left in tears.” Michael thought, Great. Why did you tell me that now?

Michael doesn’t get intimidated easily, but this really unnerved him. He went in feeling very vulnerable. He started by saying, “Hi, my name is Mic . . .” Before he even finished his name, one of the young people interrupted and said, “Sorry, I’m not trying to be offensive, but do you know you sound like Elmo?” (from Sesame Street)

Often when children say, “I’m not trying to be offensive,” what they’re really saying is, “I’m trying to offend you as much as I possibly can.”

Michael paused for a minute and said, “Thank you. I’ll do impersonations later.” If he had said, “Shut up, you’re being really disrespectful,” then that would have become a competition. Or if he had humiliated that person, they’d have tried even harder to throw him off his game.

He doesn’t know why that first presenter left in tears, but he suspects that maybe she didn’t know quite how to respond to a remark that was actually trying to be offensive, and then the session escalated from there.

10. Pointing Out Embarrassing Things First

If there is something embarrassing that you worry children might exploit, the best thing is to point this out at the start. For example, Michael’s last name is Hempseed. The word hempseed is somewhat associated with marijuana. Almost all difficult young people know this. Whenever he introduces himself, he makes a joke out of it.

He says, “Hi, my name is Michael Hempseed. I always had this dream to own my own airline. I wanted to be a little bit like Richard Branson. I was going to call this airline Hempseed Airways. And the tagline was going to be, ‘Hempseed Airways, getting you higher than anyone else.’”

Most disruptive children love that joke. It also takes away their ammunition. So, if there is something embarrassing, if you make a joke out of it first, then that takes away any fuel they may have.

Key Takeaway

De-escalating an upset child isn’t about winning an argument or enforcing immediate compliance. It’s about helping them regain a sense of calm, safety, and respect. By giving positive alternatives, honoring their physical space, and focusing on regulation before reasoning, you can defuse high-stress situations before they turn into full-blown meltdowns.

Want to learn more science-backed strategies for supporting anxious, angry, or overwhelmed children?

^{Excerpt from Calming Your Child by Dame Sue Bagshaw, MD, and Michael Hempseed.}