It sounded like a harsh, draconian parenting practice. It was actually an act of love.

Tayler, 5, flips out at a restaurant because her little sister, Stella, is sitting next to mom. Tayler starts screeching and pushing Stella out of the chair. Her parents, Andrew and Lizzy, can’t get her back in control. The more they try to reason and problem-solve with her, or offer calming tools, the more escalated she becomes. (Dad calls this Tayler’s “street fighter” mode.)

In situations like this, Lizzy and Andrew often acquiesce to whatever demand Tayler is making to head off the inevitable explosion, especially in a public place. Stella also often gives Tayler what she wants, pacifying her sister to keep the peace.

Lizzy and Andrew are very concerned about this dynamic for several reasons:

• It’s enabling Tayler to think she can always get her way, and that ruling through intimidation and threats works.

• Tayler isn’t learning to accept and cope with limits.

• Tayler is sucking all the oxygen out of the family and they are having very negative feelings about her.

• Stella is learning to be a pleaser and to forgo her own needs to prevent Tayler’s tantrums.

Andrew, Lizzy and I have been working on an approach that enables them to stay calm and in control, while holding boundaries to help Tayler learn to be more flexible and accept limits.

This is what we come up with:

The next time they are going to a restaurant, they explain to Tayler that in public places, there are rules to keep everyone in that space safe and comfortable, just like the teachers do at school. In restaurants, this means sitting at the table, using inside voices and safe bodies. If she has a hard time doing this, mom/dad will be helpers and take her to a quiet space to give her a chance to calm so she can return to the table—the goal.

They have to enact the plan just a few weeks later. The trigger is Tayler’s insistence that Stella’s helping of ice cream is bigger. She demands Stella give her some of her portion. Lizzy tries to reason with her. Tayler—in red zone, processing nothing— storms over to Stella and starts aggressively digging her spoon into Stella’s bowl. No strategy is working to get her to stop.

Andrew steps in. He simply says, “I’ll be your helper” (the less language the better) as he guides Tayler away from the table and moves her to the car. He puts on her favorite music hoping this will calm her, but she starts attacking him—hitting and scratching. She is so dysregulated he can’t get buckled safely into her seat. Realizing he is a stimulus—his presence is harmful, not helpful—he tells Tayler he’ll wait right outside the car; when she’s calm, they can return to the table.

In less than five minutes—when Tayler sees that kicking and screaming at the window is not getting a reaction, and that dad is still calmly standing aside the car—she calms. Andrew refrains from any lesson-teaching. He just gives her a big hug. They return to the restaurant, Tayler eats her ice cream (Lizzy had asked the waiter to put it back in the freezer!). Tayler is a delight the remainder of the night.

Note that I hear stories like this frequently from parents: when they hold a limit calmly their children are noticeably more content and connected once the storm passes. As uncomfortable as it is for these parents to have to take such seemingly extreme measures, they had given their child exactly what they needed which enabled the child to move on in a positive way.

The take home: Don’t judge an intervention by it’s cover

It’s all in how it’s implemented. In this case, the parent didn’t shame, berate, reject or abandon his child. He was calm, connected, validating of her difficult feelings and showed that he could be her rock—do what it takes to prevent her from being destructive—and help her get back to a place where she could rejoin the family and feel good about herself.

What a gift.

If you’re still feeling uncomfortable about this approach, I encourage you to ask yourself the following question...

What are the alternatives, and the potential outcomes/lessons learned from those alternatives?

The whole family has to leave the restaurant. (The child controls the family; the sibling grows resentful of the big reactor.)

You give in to what the child is demanding, (reinforcing a very unhealthy dynamic and increasing your child’s inflexibility and sense of entitlement.)

You stay in whatever safe space you’ve taken your child to and let them beat up on you, fearing that if you separate yourself, you’re abandoning them (an unfortunate and ultimately harmful message from influencers skewing and sending false messages about “gentle parenting.”) What parent can stay calm—exactly what children need from their moms and dads when they are spiraling—when the parent is not able to get their child in control and is being physically attacked?

When I started in this field of practice, I never imagined I'd be advising parents to physically secure their child in a car and not stay in the car with them. Then I began working in the trenches with big reactors. Every day I was hearing stories and receiving recordings of parents and children completely out of control, with no clear boundary to keep either of them safe.

Most mental health specialists agree that what children need is a calm, connected, warm, loving, and sturdy parent— a mental and physical state that is impossible to sustain while feeling out of control and under attack by their own child.

I share these stories from the trenches, not as a panacea, or “the approach” for this kind of situation for all children. There is never a one-size-fits-all solution. Not to mention that sometimes (and often, with big reactors) what sounds good in theory fails in practice. (Most parents who come to see me have tried myriad strategies to get their kids to calm—taking deep breaths, offering a bear hug or other forms of comfort, using "if/then"—but find their kids are in red zone and are unable to engage in or accept any calming strategies.)

I share these stories to illustrate the importance of finding the right boundary together with the “just-right” support and scaffolding your child needs in that difficult moment to be safe and to regulate. Indeed, in this kind of situation, some families may decide to just never go a restaurant, and that may be the right decision based on their child's coping capacities. What we don't want is for parents to lower expectations when with the right boundary plus the right support, the child could work though and learn to manage in difficult situations.