On 5 March 2026, ACAMH will host a webinar Mastering Meltdowns: Managing Big Feelings in Kids.
We caught up with the presenter – Associate Professor Dr. Erin Gonzalez, a clinical psychologist at Seattle Children’s Hospital – about the topic itself, her career, and her hopes for the event.
Looking back at your career, what first got you interested in this topic of meltdowns and big feelings, and how did you then come to specialise in it?
I’m a third-generation psychologist – my grandfather, my mother, then me – so I grew up with a lot of family conversations around how people work. But I wasn’t really focused on child mental health until the later phases of my training, when I realised that working with children and adolescents is a great opportunity to get upstream of the difficulties we sometimes later see in adults. I later began specialising in ADHD, then that broadened into child self-regulation and helping kids get healthy socially, emotionally and physically.
Parent, guardians, carers, teachers and other people looking after children will know how tough it can be to react well to a meltdown. What are the things to keep in mind?
It’s important to start from a point of understanding that kids are always doing the best they’re capable of in that moment. However, their window on time is much narrower than ours, plus when a big emotion happens or something surprising and disappointing occurs, even if it’s something an adult might not think of as significant, it floods their whole system. Sometimes the most immediate, convenient, and sometimes effective reaction is something explosive – it’s attention-getting, it scares their parents, it helps them avoid whatever pressures are being put on them.
You’ll be talking about common triggers for meltdowns – are there some very predictable and reliable ones to look out for?
Some of them will be really specific to your family and your children. I have two daughters, six and eight, and unfortunately, I don’t always know when the mermaid cup – which is a special cup in our household – is in the dishwasher. It’s good to identify the specific things that might be a trigger for your children. More generally, a big trigger is the dopamine crash. When a child is excited and then they have to stop what they were doing, they’ll do anything to get it back.
Let’s say I let my child play video games right before bed, then want them to turn it off and do the most boring thing in the world, getting ready for bed – you can anticipate a dopamine crash and explosive behaviour. We want to avoid transitioning from high dopamine to super low dopamine activities – go from video game to something interactive or to dinner time, rather than straight to homework or bedtime.
It’s also about control. Kids feel safe when they know what to expect, but when we remove that control – which we have to do many times a day, whether that’s leaving the park or telling them it’s time to put the Lego away, but they hadn’t realised it was that time – that triggers resistance. We’re not going to anticipate all the triggers. But you can reasonably expect and plan around certain times of the day to be a potentially tough transition.
There’s a lot of noise and interest right now around ‘gentle parenting’ – what do you think of that, in relation to reacting to meltdowns?
Let me be clear that gentleness in parenting is great, and you can be both highly structured and be a gentle parent.
But it’s really important to remember that gentle parenting strategies are honed with children who respond well to it. If you’re parenting a real explosive child, you need more structure, more limit-setting, using your attention strategically.
The term ‘gentle’ can get taken to mean that you shouldn’t uphold boundaries or have consequences. Certain children thrive with that, but a high emotions child, a child who’s impulsive with explosive behaviour, is not going to thrive with that approach. You can be gentle while having limits and consequences – we can combine that with structure and evidence-based strategies.
When a meltdown is happening, how can you balance being calm and validating feelings with still upholding clear boundaries around unsafe or unacceptable behaviour?
Our boundaries are crucial – that’s how we help children learn, and boundaries make children feel safe. We may feel that compromising boundaries because of a meltdown will help, but it’s actually scary for kids when there aren’t clear boundaries. Imagine a school with no rules. As much as we try to be nice by moving boundaries, we’re creating unpredictability.
If I say we don’t throw anything in our house, I’m making a commitment to uphold that – your sister’s not throwing anything, you’re not throwing anything, even when you’re mad. It’s OK to have feelings and I will support you, but it’s never OK to throw something. The emotions should not override boundaries.
Now I sometimes do change my expectations. A few weeks back, a kid in the bathtub became really explosive and I decided on the spot we’re not washing hair tonight – we’re wrapping up and getting to bed because they’re clearly overtired. That’s moving my expectation, not my boundary. But if I have a rule of no splashing water at me and she’s doing that, I pull the plug immediately because I can’t allow that boundary to be broken.
What will be your key takeaways from this webinar?
If there’s one takeaway, it’s that while kids are always doing the best they can, but they are not developmentally ready to self-regulate on their own.
We have this dream we can just tell them to take a deep breath or count to 10. But that’s not how children self-regulate – they self-regulate alongside a caregiver. It’s on us to create an environment that supports self-regulation.
Children are highly emotionally driven – emotions matter more than facts. It doesn’t matter if it’s bedtime if they were excited about doing something right as you tell them it’s bedtime.
Who do you hope will attend this webinar?
This webinar will be relevant if you work with children in any context, or have your own children, and especially if those children have big emotions.
It’s always my mission to make scientifically driven concepts digestible. Even when I do clinician training, my hope is to equip clinicians with language that will click for families.
Interested in more from Erin? She’s one of a number of experts who has recorded content for ACAMH Learn, our completely free, online learning resource.
About the speaker
Erin Schoenfelder Gonzalez, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Department of Pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine. She is a clinical psychologist and co-Director of the Behavior and Attention Management Specialty Program at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Her specialization and research interests include parent-focused behavioral treatments for ADHD and the association of ADHD with health risk behaviors, especially physical activity and screen use. She also co-directs the First Approach Skills Training (FAST) program at Seattle Children’s, where she develops and disseminates brief behavioral treatments for integrated care settings.
Following her superb webinar last year on ADHD we welcome back Associate Professor Erin Schoenfelder Gonzalez, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Department of Pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
