Tantrum of the Week

Bilingual Meltdown, Big Feelings

• Lynn McLean, LCSW-S, Registered Play Therapist-Supervisor ™ • Episode 5

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We unpack a real bilingual dinner blow-up and show how calm presence, simple scripts, and playful rituals can turn pressure into connection. We honor cultural pride while giving kids tools to switch languages without shame or meltdown.

• Co-regulation first: breathe, pause, ensure safety
• Reflect feelings instead of asking “why” questions
• Understand language switching as cognitive load
• Notice peer awareness and identity sensitivity at six
• Offer scripts: “Can I answer in English?” “What’s that word?”
• Shift from rules to rituals to lower pressure
• Use games, stories, and songs to embed Spanish warmly
• Repair briefly: acknowledge impact and plan a next step
• Normalize code-switching as flexible fluency
• Reassure parents: resistance signals bandwidth, not rejection

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Thanks for listening to *Tantrum of the Week* with Lynn McLean, LCSW-S, Registered Play Therapist–Supervisor™.

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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Tantrum of the Week podcast, where we talk about the latest tantrum erupting at your house and give you quick ideas about what's happening and how to help them go away. I'm Lynn McLean. I'm a child therapist and parent coach, and I've helped lots of parents manage lots of tantrums. We talk about real tantrums every podcast and give you pro tips about how to manage them. I'm so glad you're here. Hi, this week's tantrum of the week is from a family who has a strong Mexican-American cultural heritage. Parents grew up speaking Spanish and wanted the very same thing for their kids. And so they have created a bilingual household. Their little ones speak Spanish fluently and English fluently, and extended family come and go, and everybody is conversing and interacting in both Spanish and English a lot of the time. However, on one evening, grandma was over for dinner and six-year-old Sofia was talking with her. Grandma asked Sofia a question in Spanish, and all of a sudden, Sofia just exploded and yelled, I don't want to talk in Spanish right now, and ran out of the room crying. Everybody was stunned. Mom was embarrassed. Grandma was confused. And Sofia was obviously very upset and nobody really knew why. I think it's important for us to think about what to do in the moment, how come it might have happened, and what are some ideas for helping Sophia calm down afterwards and how to prevent another similar situation in the future. So in the moment, it's important for parents to really think about their own emotions. Mom was probably taken completely off guard because she's used to Sophia speaking Spanish all the time, and she's especially used to her loving, talking to her grandma in Spanish. So she was embarrassed probably, as well as caught off guard, and also maybe a little mad. I think all of those things are very understandable in the moment, and it can be easy to overreact. The first thing I always encourage parents to do is just take a minute and take a breath, think about how you're feeling, and calm down, honestly. Sophia has left the scene, she's no longer tantruming, she's no longer screaming and crying. So mom knows she's safe. And honestly, it's probably good for Sophia to have a little space and time to calm down as well while mom's calming down. After a beat, mom can go in, join Sophia. Honestly, just that way of being with kids in a calm way when they're upset and dysregulated, and we are regulated. It helps them calm down. It's co-regulation, it's powerful. And just being with them in that moment without saying anything is a really helpful use of your time. After everybody is a little calm, Sophia can listen. I think it's important for mom not to ask a lot of questions. Sophia may not know the answer to them anyway. I think we are curious about what happened. What happened? Why did you act that way? Grandma asked you a question that you knew the answer to in Spanish. You're not supposed to run away from the dinner table like that. Sophia probably can't answer questions about why she did any of that because honestly, she may not know in that moment. She may not be calm enough to even be able to articulate it if she can get there in the first place. So I think thinking about just joining her, that was really hard. You just want to reflect her feelings, validate them, be calm, and let her get back to her center. And she might be able to tell you, oh, I didn't know that word that she asked me, or I was tired, I didn't want to talk in Spanish, I wanted to talk in English. Who knows? But it really just gives her a chance to calm down. When we zoom out and think about the reasons why the tiantra may have happened, why she may have had this reaction. It is important for us, I think, to know that this is not uncommon at all. So families who have this strong cultural heritage and this rich identity can think that their kids can just seamlessly adapt and enjoy what they enjoyed as children. And sometimes that's just not the case. Sometimes there is a mismatch one day between what a parent was expecting or anticipating and what a child was feeling. So you're not alone. A lot of families have this and in lots of different areas. So that can help you, I think, have some comfort that there's nothing wrong with your kid. It's just something that happens sometimes. Another idea that we could have is that even though a lot of six-year-olds show up like a 15-year-old, it can be a little tricky sometimes cognitively and executive function-wise, for them to switch from one language to another. So, for example, if this dinner occurred on a school night, maybe Sophia was speaking in English all day long, thinking in English all day long, because she was at school. Then she comes home and family is speaking in Spanish, especially because grandma's there, and it can be a little hard, and maybe her brain just wasn't keeping up as quickly as it might at another time. So understanding developmentally where she is, I think, can help us give some context to her behavior, which can seem inappropriate and embarrassing at the time. Another thing that can happen with six-year-olds is they are aware of their peers and they are aware of differences between them and their peers. In this age, it's not uncommon for them to start to have some heightened awareness and maybe some not embarrassment about being different, but awareness. So thinking about Sophia's reaction, it might come from maybe a day at school where everybody's speaking English, and she may know that her best friend doesn't speak in Spanish at home. So she may have had this reaction like, I don't, I don't want that. That that's not me. All of these things can go into this feeling that she's having. It again doesn't mean that inappropriate behavior is okay. It just means we understand where it was coming from, and her feelings are not bad. I mean, she has them. So it helps us to understand them and to reflect them in a way that helps her. Because as I mentioned before, she may not be able to articulate why she felt this way. So we just hold up a mirror. I think you were really feeling hard or stressed out about speaking Spanish right then. It can help her, like, oh, actually, yeah, I was. So that way she can start to build on this awareness. And next time, maybe she has a little more space between feeling overwhelmed and overreacting. Maybe she can say, Hold on, let me think about that. Or what was that word? And then she can react in a different way and not just being overwhelmed and having a tantrum. So that's one benefit of us calming down, thinking about where she's coming from, and offering her some perspective about what just happened with her. I think another thing for us to think about is ways of integrating what we wish for our children in a fun and constructive and positive way for them versus an expectation. So we might have this idea that, well, grandma's here and we are gonna speak in Spanish at dinner when grandma's here. That's just the expectation. It's less of a rule and more of an idea and something that we're gonna follow. It might feel, though, like a rule and some difficulty to a six-year-old. So you might think about how to make things a little more fun and relaxed. Maybe there's a game that you're gonna play that everybody can play in Spanish. Or maybe you have grandma read a bedtime story in Spanish to the kids. There are ways to integrate this in a very warm and inviting and really familial way that mom probably remembers from her own background that can really help kids feel like, oh yeah, this is something that feels great to me. And it doesn't feel like pressure. So that's another way for us to put things together and think about ways to offset a tantrum in the future. Language is a really important part of our identity, and parents who are gifting their children with their cultural identity and a dual language experience, its richness and its identity, and it's such a sense of belonging. But understanding that sometimes that comes with a little bit more difficulty for our younger generation can really help parents know that it's not anything against them or their family personally. It's just where their little one is at that time. Thanks for tuning in for this episode of Tantrum of the Week, and I'd be interested to hear about cultural issues that might happen in your family. I'm so glad you were here for this episode of Tantrum of the Week. I'd love to know if any of this happens at your house and how you handle it. Comment, subscribe, and email us about your kids' tantrum of the week. We'd love to hear about your passionate kids. And even though I am a real play therapist, this episode is not therapy. There are lots of amazing professionals, and I recommend that you contact them if your family needs that kind of support. Be sure to grab your free copy of why the latest parenting trends aren't working for you and what you might try instead. At the link in the show notes. And be sure to send us your kids' tantrum of the week. We just might feature you on an upcoming episode. We'll see you next time at the Tantrum of the Week.