Handling Meltdowns & Teen Pushback: Your Parenting Q&A | CP211

Jun 6, 2025

Discover effective strategies for managing childhood tantrums and emotional outbursts, particularly during stressful situations like shopping trips. Learn how to foster emotional regulation in your kids while maintaining calm leadership. Shift focus to teenage resistance, exploring why teens might push back against family plans. Uncover the delicate balance of empathy and boundaries to strengthen family connections despite conflicts. Equip yourself with practical scripts and mindset shifts to navigate these challenging parenting moments with ease.

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INSIGHT

Brain Development and Tantrums

An eight-year-old's frontal lobe is not fully developed, so they can't evaluate consequences well.\n- Kids remember if a meltdown once worked, reinforcing future tantrums with intermittent reinforcement.

ADVICE

Managing Store Meltdowns

Plan store visits with no purchases and frontload your child about this rule.\n- Use calm, confident mirroring and allow a controlled tantrum without giving in.

ADVICE

Handling Teen Refusal to Attend

Firmly set the boundary that the teen will attend family weekends despite their protests.\n- Use empathy and mirroring but remain steady, calm, and unflappable as a parent.

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In this episode of the Connected Parenting Podcast, we're diving into two real-life listener questions as part of our Q&A series.

First, we explore how to support an eight-year-old who has emotional outbursts in stores when they’re told “no.” Why do these meltdowns happen, and how can we respond in ways that actually build emotional regulation instead of making things worse?

Then we shift gears to talk about teens, specifically, what to do when your teenager refuses to go on family weekends or trips. We unpack the reasons behind this resistance, and how to balance empathy with boundaries while still keeping the family connection strong.

These two scenarios may seem different, but at their core, both are about emotional regulation, autonomy, and how we show up as calm, connected leaders for our kids, even when things get heated or hard.

Tune in to hear strategies, mindset shifts, and scripts you can start using right away to manage these tough parenting moments with more confidence and less stress.

Jennifer's Takeaways:

Addressing Tantrums in Young Children (15:35)
Strategies for Managing Tantrums (15:47)
Handling Teenage Refusals to Go Away with the Family (16:00)
Maintaining Consistency and Confidence (16:12)

Meet Jennifer Kolari

Jennifer Kolari is the host of the “Connected Parenting” weekly podcast and the co-host of “The Mental Health Comedy” podcast. Kolari is a frequent guest on Nationwide morning shows and podcasts in th US and Canada. Her advice can also be found in many Canadian and US magazines such as; Today’s Parent, Parents Magazine and Canadian Family.

Kolari’s powerful parenting model is based on the neurobiology of love, teaching parents how to use compassion and empathy as powerful medicine to transform challenging behavior and build children’s emotional resilience and emotional shock absorbers.

Jennifer’s wisdom, quick wit and down to earth style help parents navigate modern-day parenting problems, offering real-life examples as well as practical and effective tools and strategies.

Her highly entertaining, inspiring workshops are shared with warmth and humour, making her a crowd-pleasing speaker with schools, medical professionals, corporations and agencies throughout North America, Europe and Asia.

One of the nation’s leading parenting experts, Jennifer Kolari, is a highly sought- after international speaker and the founder of Connected Parenting. A child and family therapist with a busy practice based in San Diego and Toronto, Kolari is also the author of Connected Parenting: How to Raise A Great Kid (Penguin Group USA and Penguin Canada, 2009) and You’re Ruining My Life! (But Not Really): Surviving the Teenage Years with Connected Parenting (Penguin Canada, 2011).