Little People, Big Feelings

Your child loses it over the wrong colour cup. Or because you cut the toast wrong. Or for no obvious reason. At. All. 

If you’re a parent of young children, big emotional outbursts are part of daily life, but that doesn’t make them any easier to handle.

In this engaging session, Dr Justin Coulson helps parents understand why little kids feel so much so intensely, and why our instinctive responses (calm down, stop it, you’ll be fine) so often make things worse. Drawing on the best child development science, Justin explains the four key reasons young children struggle to regulate their emotions — and what’s actually happening in their brains when things go sideways.

But this isn’t just about understanding. Parents leave with a practical, research-backed toolkit for staying calm under pressure and helping their children do the same. This session gives parents concrete strategies they can use from the very next bedtime, or dinnertime, or time-to-leave-the-park/beach/shops/friend time.

Because when we respond to our children’s big feelings with warmth instead of frustration, we don’t just restore calm in the moment. We build emotional intelligence that lasts a lifetime.