Why your three-year-old needs more than one way to calm down

"Take a deep breath" is good advice. It is also, for a lot of three year olds, the only tool they have been handed. A study published in Child Development on 3 July 2026 suggests that one tool is not enough, and that the children who cope best with frustration are the ones who have several ways to do it and move between them.

What the study did

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin put 57 children aged two to six through a frustration task in the lab, the kind of setup where a toy is just out of reach or a promised prize does not arrive. Then they watched how each child tried to manage the feeling. Distraction. Talking to themselves. Asking for help. Looking away. Fiddling with something else.

They measured three things: how many strategies a child used, how often they switched between them, and whether they spread their effort across strategies rather than leaning on one. The researchers call this polyregulation. The rest of us can call it having a toolkit.

What they found

• Younger preschoolers used a toolkit more than older ones, and for the younger children it worked: more variety and more switching meant less distress.
• Across all ages, children who used more strategies had fewer behavior problems, as rated by their parents.
• For the oldest children in the sample, switching a lot was linked to more distress, not less. By five or six, a child who has found the strategy that works for them does better sticking with it.

So the advice changes with age. At three, breadth wins. Try things, switch things. By six, depth starts to win.

How to build the toolkit

Children do not invent these strategies alone. They copy them from the grown-up who is calm nearby. A few that showed up in the study, and how to hand them over:

• Distraction. "Let's see what is out the window." Not a bribe, a redirect.
• Self-talk. Give them a line. "I can wait." "It is okay to be mad." Say it out loud yourself first so they hear what it sounds like.
• Asking for help. Praise the ask, not just the calm. "You told me you were stuck. That was a good idea."
• A body move. Breathing, yes, but also squeezing a fist and letting go, or stamping once on purpose.

Then, when the next frustration comes, name the choice: "You are mad. Do you want to breathe, or get a hug, or look at something else?" Three options is a toolkit. One is a rule.

A calmer takeaway

A tantrum is not a child failing to use the one tool. Often it is a child with no second tool to reach for. Every Beem Bunnies story shows Pip trying more than one way through a big feeling, because that is what the research says a three year old actually needs. In Pip's First Day of School, his toolkit is naming the feeling, the goodbye ritual, and a tiny toy from home.