Toddlers are mood swings given physical form.
One second, sweet as sugar. The next? Total war.
It is a struggle, really. Not because the noise is annoying—though it is—but because we worry. We worry about their nervous systems. About trauma. About doing it “right” without scarring them.
Faith Carter gets it. A mom from Syracuse, she documents the chaos on TikTok. But recently, she showed something different. Not just the tantrum. The exit strategy.
“I have a confession. I used to punch holes in walls.”
She was candid. Raw, even.
When her son was her daughter’s age, she lost control. Went from zero to panic instantly. The intensity was too much. So she exploded. Which, unsurprisingly, exploded the kid.
Now, five years on, her daughter hits that same developmental wall. Same triggers. Same internal scream. But Carter has tools she lacked then.
The video shows it plain. Toddler screaming. Crying. The whole meltdown suite. Carter? She doesn’t hug him. She doesn’t reason. She plays music. And she dances.
She moves. Shakes. Releases.
And eventually? The girl watches. Then joins.
Tears turn to smiles. The nervous system settles. It happens so fast it almost feels like a trick. But Carter explains the biology. A gazelle shakes off a lion chase. It doesn’t hold onto the terror. It lets the body process the stress physically. Then it grazes.
“Dancing, moving, shaking feels silly when you’ve been clenched all day. But regulating your own nervous system? It’s contagious.”
That word—contagious. We usually associate it with disease or bad moods. But calm can be infectious. Too.
Carter isn’t alone. Over 3,000 comments later, other parents are sharing their weird little rituals. One parent sniffs the air dramatically, forcing a toddler to mimic deep breaths. Another reports the two-year-old actually initiating it: “You wanna dance?”
They sway. He melts into her shoulder.
It works. Because the adult isn’t trying to fix the child’s emotions by talking. She’s changing the energy in the room. Leading by shaking it off first.
Which begs the question: Why do we expect toddlers to regulate if we are tight-clenched statues ourselves?
The answer might be simpler than we think. Move first. The rest might follow. Or it might not.
But the walls stay intact.
