Help Me Through It, Don't Do It: Building Frustration Tolerance in Young Children
Learning how to help your child handle frustration is an important part of healthy emotional development. While it's natural to want to rescue children when they're upset, moments of frustration are valuable opportunities to build emotional regulation, problem-solving skills, and long-term resilience.
We all know that phrase that starts in toddlerhood and continues on into preschool, I DO IT! Children naturally want to do things as independently as possible. What happens when they don’t or they run past their will to try? Generally speaking, absolute melt down. The brain goes into panic mode, objects of frustration get thrown, and little bodies collapse to the floor as emotions explode. What are loving parents supposed to do to help them? We often instinctually try to fix the source of the agony. This inadvertently fails them by halting two functions of a necessary developmental key known as frustration tolerance. What are those two functions and what can we do instead?
Teach Emotional Regulation Before Problem Solving
Regulation through frustration is a skill. Removing the issue teaches children that their problems must be solved prior to becoming emotionally regulated. This is contrary to what they will encounter the rest of their lives where emotional regulation will be needed to get through tough things. When time and safety allow, help your little one take a moment to practice age appropriate emotional regulation with them. This can look like acknowledging and articulating the emotions they are feeling, You’re so frustrated! It can look like mirroring deep breathing, tight hugs and so much more! Regulate, then problem solve together! When parents learn how to help their child handle frustration, they aren't simply calming big emotions in the moment; they're teaching a lifelong skill.
Build Critical Thinking Through Guided Problem Solving
Preschool children run into frustration intolerance so often because their amygdalas, the central function for emotion, are fully online while their prefrontal cortex, the center for thought, logic and reading, have decades left to go. In order to really help them, they need to have a problem solving demonstration for them to learn from and mirror. I once had a girl in my class who would yank her cubby box too far out in a way she couldn’t get the drawer back in. She would just stand and cry. After daily melt downs for a couple weeks around this, I knew my helping her regulate and telling her how to fix it wasn’t giving her what she needed to stop the repeated event. The next time it happened, I followed through with helping her regulate then walked her through problem solving. Was it something she could fix alone? How heavy was the drawer? Did she need to ask for help? Did taking the items out make it light enough to do it alone? Is there a different way she could pull the cubby out to prevent this from happening again? I told her how to do nothing. I asked critical thinking questions her brain was still learning to ask so she could master the process.
Resilience Grows Through Safe Struggles
At first it might seem cruel not to rescue children from their frustrations. Children thrive in environments where they are allowed to build frustration tolerance and struggle safely. Don’t save them from it, be with them through it. This will build their resilience for much bigger things.
Every challenge is an opportunity for growth when children have the right support. The People Grower equips parents with practical, research-informed strategies to nurture confident, resilient children while strengthening the relationships that matter most. Explore our services or connect with us to learn more.
