Transcript: 3 Signs an Infant Tantrum Isn’t Bad Behavior But a Cry for Help

This is a text transcript from The First Time Mum’s Chat podcast. The episode is called 3 Signs an Infant Tantrum Isn’t Bad Behavior But a Cry for Help and you can click on the link to view the full episode page, listen to the episode and view the show notes.

Helen Thompson: Welcome to another episode of First Time Mum’s Chat. I’m Helen Thompson, a childcare educator and baby massage instructor, with over 30 years of experience working with families. This podcast is your go-to space for honest, supportive, and heart-centered conversations to help you feel more confident and connected on your parenting journey.

If you are a mom navigating those early months of motherhood, feeling overwhelmed by crying, confused by meltdowns, or unsure how to respond when your little one lashes out, then you are in the right place. We’re nearing the end of our special series on communication, and today’s episode is a game changer.

I’m joined by Joss Golden, a level two Aware Parenting instructor who’s spent over 30 years helping parents uncover what their children’s behaviors are really trying to say. Did you know a toddler’s tantrum is actually their way of healing? In this episode Joss shares how we can turn meltdowns, aggression, and those won’t listen moments into powerful opportunities for connection, using tools like attachment play and loving limits.

You’ll hear why behavior is communication, especially in babies and toddlers, how play can transform aggression into cooperation. The surprising reason you as a parent, need time-in just as much as your child.

Joss, I’m absolutely thrilled to welcome you to First Time Mum’s Chat. As someone who’s supported families for over 30 years and brings such a deeply compassionate lens to parenting, I know you are going to bring so much value to our listeners. You are such a strong voice for helping parents connect through understanding rather than control. Before we dive into tantrums, behavior and how we can respond with more calm and connection, can you share a bit about your journey and what led you to this powerful work?

Joss Goulden: Thank you Helen, for inviting me on your podcast. It’s a real pleasure to be here. So yeah, my name’s Joss. I am a level two Aware Parenting instructor and I have two grownup children who are now 21 and 19, and I live in Western Australia and I work to support parents to navigate some of the things that we all face in parenting that can make life really challenging for us and to develop really strong relationships with their children, to understand their children and their children’s behavior, and how we can support our children to thrive and to have really strong, safe, secure, closely attached relations with their parents to feel safe. To feel heard and understood, and to have their needs met in a way that yeah, supports their wellbeing because we really can see such a crisis in mental health in young people at the moment. So never has it been more important than now, really for parents to be getting the support that they need to be able to then in turn be supporting their children.

Helen Thompson: Absolutely. I come from a childcare background myself, so I know exactly what that’s like and sometimes I just feel that parents, I don’t wanna say put them down, but I sometimes feel they find it hard to navigate children that have got behavior issues. They find it really hard to know exactly what to do and how to communicate with them and that was one of the reasons why I wanted to get you on because I know you’ve got experience in that.

So, we all know that toddlers have meltdowns. That’s just one of those things. Toddlers have meltdowns for a reason. They’re trying to communicate with us, it’s not a behavior issue necessarily, it’s just they’re wanting to communicate. We’ll go to the older age group in a minute, but we’ll start from the toddler. In your experience, how would you support parents to get through that meltdown stage?

Joss Goulden: Yeah, well, as you say, Helen, tantrums are a really normal part of the toddler years and they are the way for our toddlers to communicate with us and let us know that they are needing something and with this beautiful understanding and framework that aware parenting gives us, we can see that, as you say, behavior is communication. So there always is a very legitimate reason why a child is behaving the way they are and we see really in aware parenting that toddler tantrums are really a way for toddlers to have therapy. It’s a way of them to release all the buildup of big feelings that they have. The frustration, the overwhelm, the fear, the uncertainty, all the painful feelings that they will experience at times in their childhood and tantrums are an amazing way of releasing all that agitation and tension and stress out of their bodies. So when children cry, when children make big movements with their bodies, when they’re sweating and getting really hot and falling apart, that is their innate biological healing mechanism to get stress and trauma out of the body.

So in our culture, we don’t understand tantrums generally. We see it as children misbehaving, but when we have this understanding, we can see that that is not a child misbehaving, that is a child trying to find their way back to balance, back to feeling calm, back to feeling connected, back to feeling safe.

So when we view it that way, it becomes so much easier to move in with compassion and care when our child is having a tantrum and so what we recommend is that you get down on the floor near where your child is, you connect with them with warmth and love, perhaps a, a lovely tone of voice. You might use endearments like or sweetheart or darling, you might touch them gently on the back or something like that and we just say, oh, sweetheart, I can see this is really hard for you right now. I’m here with you, I’m listening, I care. Then they just go for it. They rage, they might shout, they might cry, they might stamp their feet or move their arms and all of these things are a beautiful way of getting this tension and stress and trauma out of their bodies. If we sit and just be present and loving with our children in these moments, what we see at the end of the tantrum, is our children typically come in close to us, they want cuddles, they make beautiful eye contact. We can feel in their bodies that they’re relaxed, they’re restored, they’re back in balance, they’re feeling back in their normal, loving, cooperative self. So we can really observe in our children the power of just giving space and offering listening with our love to a child who is obviously struggling and in pain and then thereby seeing them come back to themselves, back to their joyful and connected self.

So it’s a really powerful way to support children without going into judgment or criticism and sometimes there’s a voice in our head when a child is having a tantrum that says, oh, they’re so naughty, or they’re being so manipulative or why are they making such a big deal over such a tiny thing? Really, that is often coming from our own younger parts that didn’t receive this kind of support in listening or this cultural misunderstanding that children need to be taught and controlled how to behave. So, often we need to be getting some listening and support ourselves as parents to release the pain that we hold from not having been supported in this way, not being able to express ourselves in our full range of emotions when we were children. There were probably some feelings that were allowed and some feelings that weren’t. Or maybe we were punished or maybe we were sent away to our room or maybe we were told to stop making such a big deal of it and to calm down. So there’s often layers there for us to explore and get a bit curious about in order to be able to come back and just offer love and trust and holding and presence to see that our children are doing exactly what they need to do in that moment to support themselves to heal.

Helen Thompson: Yeah, you’ve come up with a very important point there that listening to our children is the key because as you said, that’s their way of communicating. Even if they’re babies, it’s still their way of communicating. It’s by crying or having a temper tantrum and listening to that and getting down to their level and trying to let them know that it’s okay for them to have that release. I know that some parents find that incredibly hard to do. I’ve often seen parents in supermarkets when their kids are having those temper tantrums, and it’s really hard because other people are watching and I think they feel intimidated by that. It’s just allowing that child to know that you’re there and the listening is absolutely key to the communication and the behavior and not punishing. I was always brought up to have time out. When I was in childcare, we were always told to give the child time out to express that and let it out but to me, time out doesn’t work. You really need to spend the time and actually sit down, as you’ve mentioned with the child and communicate with them and as you say, give them a touch on the back and give them a cuddle and just say, look, I know you’re having a bad time right now, but I’ll let you just have it and let them just let it out, as you’ve mentioned.

Joss Goulden: Yeah, I mean, we always say that timeout is for parents, when we are feeling overwhelmed and going into big responses ourselves and what our children need in these times is time in, which means time where we are there, really understanding what’s going on for them, offering them acceptance of whatever they want to say and whatever they want to share and our loving connection and as you say, not going into punishing or shaming or being harsh to our children in those moments.

It’s really difficult to listen. Often we think we are listening, but often parents go into dismissing or trying to fix. Oh, sweetheart okay, you want the red cup? All right, darling, I’ll get you the red cup. Actually what that child needs in that moment is just to be allowed to fall apart and have the big feelings, and we can really see how when children are supported to release in these ways, they set up these beliefs about themselves, that they are lovable, however they’re behaving, and that they’re always worthy and that having feelings is normal and that when we have painful feelings, what we need is support and listening so that we can offload our painful feelings and come back to feeling good and that is true whether you are a baby, a toddler, a teen, or an adult and most parents need a lot more of that kind of support too.

Helen Thompson: Yeah, I agree and if you start doing that when they’re younger, encouraging them to express their big emotions when they do get to the middle school or even primary school, they’re much more likely to say, look, I’m having a moment right now, I need somebody to listen to me. They’re much more Open to doing that because they’ve had that support from when they were younger, and it’s easier for them to learn how to regulate and to sort out their own emotions because they’ve had that support from their parents from the very beginning. I think it’s hard for some parents to do that, but I do think it’s so valuable because it helps them regulate and it helps them to create a sense of safety and security for them to be able to get through that tough moment. Would you agree with that?

Joss Goulden: Absolutely, yes and the other thing is that when we understand that children are very, very sensitive and very often children experience things that are painful and stressful and difficult, and we might not understand that as adults in this culture, but right from the moment of conception, children are now, we understood to be, affected by the stress of their parents. We can see that often birth is a very stressful experience for a child and those early years where there are so many new experiences and so many new sort of overwhelm at times, and then everyday things that can be stressful and difficult for children. So we can really see how, when we listen to children, we allow them to cry with our loving support and our care and our presence, they’re able to release all of these little stressful things that happen in their lives, or many of them but when we don’t have this understanding, when instead we try to stop our child from crying or we might punish our child if they’re crying, these things all build up inside and this is not released. So we often get behaviors that we find most challenging in children being caused by an accumulation of stress and trauma. So the other benefit of listening in this way is that we have children who we see far less of that really challenging kind of behavior that’s so difficult for parents because they don’t have this ongoing accumulation of stress and trauma sitting in their bodies. They’re much more balanced. They’re much more likely to be calm, to be enjoyable to be with, to be playful, to be fun, to be kind to their sibling, to be gentle with the pets, all of those sorts of behaviors because they haven’t got this ongoing buildup of stress and tension that is sitting inside their bodies, pushing them into the kind of behaviors that we find so unenjoyable.

Helen Thompson: What are your thoughts on if a child is hitting and screaming and actually refusing to listen? If you’ve done all what you’ve suggested, but they’re still hitting you and screaming at you and really getting angry, not necessarily because they’re having a tantrum, just because it’s the way that child may be, and both of you are overwhelmed. You’ve both tried to listen to each other, but that child is just constantly hitting, constantly screaming, and constantly refusing to listen to you. What would your thoughts be on that?

Joss Goulden: Well, when a child is being aggressive in that kind of way, we can understand that what’s going on in their bodies is they’ve gone into that hyper arousal nervous system response of fight flight. So for whatever reason in that moment, their body is perceiving that they are in danger, that there is a threat to their wellbeing.

So they’ve got this automatic response inside their body that has pushed them into fight flight. So they are literally trying to fight because they believe that they’re in danger, whether or not there is an actual threat there, that is their perception. So it’s not that they’re being naughty or badly behaved, it’s not that they’re wanting to hurt us, it’s that they are believing that they’re in danger and they need to fight in order to survive. With that perspective and that understanding of what’s going on, it’s much easier for us to move in with compassion and connection and support. Now, a child in that state, we need to help to stop them from hurting, from hitting or from kicking or from being aggressive and so we offer them what we call in aware parenting a loving limit. A loving limit is a way of supporting them to release the feelings that are driving that behavior by, on the one hand, offering them a clear limit and a clear, strong, no, sweetheart, I’m not willing for you to hit me and that might be holding their hand, if they’re about to hit you, it might be putting a cushion between you and them so they can’t hit you, it might be moving slightly away, so they can’t do that. So stopping them from doing that behavior, ’cause they don’t want to hurt anybody. Giving them a little bit of information as to why.

So we might say, sweetheart, I’m not willing for you to hit me because I’m here to keep everybody safe and then we are also offering them this sense of loving presence and welcoming their feelings. So we might say, I’m right here with you, sweetheart, I’m gonna keep everyone safe, and I’m here to listen.

So we stop the behavior with a clear, strong, loving, no and then we offer them our warmth and presence, because often children are looking for a boundary, they’re looking for an edge to push up against. The other things that are really helpful around children who are aggressive is bringing in at other times, not in the moment of the actual aggression, but at other times lots of what we call attachment play, which are particular ways of playing with our children that support them to release and to heal and to feel safe, and to feel connected, and the most helpful types of attachment play when children are aggressive is to offer them what we call power reversal games. In these games, children get the experience of being powerful. So they get to play the part of the strong one, the fast one, the clever one, the strong one and we play the role of the silly one, the slow one, the weak one. So with a very young child, that might be pushing them on a swing, and as they come back towards us, we kind of pretend that they’ve kicked us and we sort of fall back and laugh and say, you mustn’t kick me. With a slightly older child, it might be having a pillow fight, for example, where we touch them gently with a pillow and they hit us with a pillow and we have this very exaggerated falling over.

It might be with an older child doing a arm wrestle, for example, with them and we put up some resistance, but they win. Or it might be grabbing a young child and saying, I’ve got you now, and you’re sitting on the couch and you hold them between your knees and you say, you’ll never get away, you’re in prison, you’ll never escape this time and they push their way out and they run away and then you try and chase after them and you can’t catch them. So these are all examples of giving our child the experience of being powerful and when our children feel empowered in this way, not only do they feel safe and connected, not only do they get to laugh and release stress and trauma through laughter, they also get to heal from experiences where they felt powerless. Often it’s powerlessness that drives aggressive behavior and it is so common for children to experience powerlessness. So many times they have to do things that they don’t want to do. So many times they are right from the beginning, we’re changing their nappy and they maybe, we’re not even telling them that that’s what we’re doing, we just lie them down and do it, or it might be, in the birth they might have really stressful experiences where they feel very powerless and in danger or it might be a teenager being told off at school and feeling really powerless and really not enjoying those experiences.

So anytime a child gets to feel powerful in a playful way, it heals those experiences and makes it much less likely that they’re going to be aggressive, hurting, hitting, hurting the pets, hurting their siblings, hitting us, throwing things, destroying things and generally those sorts of behaviors are so hard for us to manage.

So it’s a bit of how we support them in a moment, and also how we support them more generally to be less likely to behave in those ways.

Helen Thompson: I love your approach to the play because I’m a great believer in play to heal, and I think play is so powerful for kids, whether they’re grownups, whether they’re teenagers, whether they’re toddlers or babies. I think it’s really important, the play aspect, and I like what you said about the approach of how to do that when they’re hitting you to get a pillow in the way and all those powerful things.

You’ve given me a few tips there of how to deal with kids when I’m working in childcare like that, because I think that’s the real key and I think play is so, so valuable, whether it’s fun play or whether it’s aggressive play or whatever, it can be so valuable for the children to be able to release their emotions and it also helps them to regulate as well.

I think a lot of parents don’t understand that sometimes children need to regulate and work out what’s going on for them and doing what you suggested I think is really wonderful. I think it also gives the child time to be patient and to understand both angles. It gives the child time to understand the parent’s side, but also you are giving them the chance to understand their side as well through play. Those two work really well together.

Joss Goulden: Yeah and sometimes it’s really hard to offer this to our children. Often it’s really hard because as parents, we are in our nuclear families doing all the things that we’re trying to do without the village and the support that we need around us. So sometimes we don’t feel like playing with our children. Sometimes as children ourselves, we weren’t played with in these ways. Often parents say, oh, I play with my child all the time but there are very specific ways that we can play with our children, which are very healing and very effective at building safe and connected relationships with our children and that really support their behavior.

So it’s sort of tweaking the ways that we play and supporting parents when they have things that are getting in the way of them being playful. Often in order to be playful with our children, we also need to be having time somewhere in our lives as parents, where we are doing things that we enjoy too, where we are having playful, fun experiences because often parenting is very stressful and there’s a lot of pressure and it’s often hard work.

So finding small ways that we get to do things that we enjoy will also mean that we can come back to our children with more capacity to be playful and to have fun with them too. So we need that just as much as our children do.

Helen Thompson: How would you encourage parents to be more playful with their children? You’ve just mentioned, parents can get very stressed and very wrapped up in their own environment, and they may play with their kids like board games or card games or something, but how do you support parents to shift that play into more of the attachment play that you’ve just suggested?

Joss Goulden: Well, I think one of the things that’s really important and so highly valued in aware parenting is parents meeting their own needs and as I said before, their needs for connection and play and fun and enjoyment, but also finding other ways to meet their own needs. Most of us have chronically unmet needs as parents and I think often we might have a tendency when we want to raise our children differently to how we were raised, for example, to put our own needs last, and particularly as mothers, there is this sort of myth of the perfect mother who just devotes herself wholeheartedly to her child, but actually if we discount and dismiss our own needs, it is inevitable that we’re gonna end up at times feeling resentful, feeling overwhelmed, feeling stressed, and that is when we’re often harsh to our children in a way that we don’t want to be.

So really taking time to prioritize what our needs are at the moment, what our main unmet needs for our, and finding ways to meet that, really builds our capacity. Typically the biggest unmet needs for parents are for support, for rest, for community and so finding ways that we can meet those needs for ourselves is really important.

Sometimes if we haven’t been raised in this way where we haven’t had the experience as children where our needs really matter and where our needs were valued, it can be quite hard for us to learn to value our needs. So, sometimes we need a bit of support to identify what’s there, what’s getting in the way. Parents often say, oh, well I’ve got no time, I can’t possibly do that. That is true, we are very time limited, but there is always time for us to find small ways to take care of ourselves. It doesn’t have to be going away for two weeks of silent retreat. It might just be five minutes with a cup of tea in the sunshine, but just being really deliberate and mindful and taking care to meet our needs is very important.

Then when it comes to actual play, I mean it’s really helpful. Dr. Aletha Solter has written a fabulous book called Attachment Play. There’s an amazing book by Lawrence Cohen called Playful Parenting. Those two resources I really recommend for parents. I also have a free ebook on attachment play that’s available on my website if people want that.

Learning these specific ways of playing with our children is very helpful and I think two of the main ones that I’ve already mentioned, the power reversal games. Another one is where we give our children what we call non-directive, child-centered play or special time. This is time where we just devote a set period of time to play with our children several times a week. It doesn’t need to be hours and hours and parents often go, oh God, I can’t play with my child. ’cause it will never end, they’ll never be satisfied but with special time, we say to our children, it’s special time, we can do whatever you want and I’m here to play with you and they get this sense that we really wanna be with them and they get to choose what we play. It might just be 10 minutes. So we might say to our child, it’s special time, we’ve got 10 minutes, what do you wanna do, I’m here because we know it’s finite and it’s gonna end, we can be really enthusiastic in the play and our children get this experience of our undivided attention, which they don’t actually get that much of because we’re all so busy and so they love it. So in special time, we wouldn’t answer our phone, we’d just be present and connected with our child in whatever they wanna do. That way when we start doing this really, really regularly, maybe 10 minutes, three times a week is what we’re aiming for, we also see this huge change in our children’s behavior because their needs for connection have been met because they feel this sense of safety and love from us. Again, they’ve had this experience that they’re in charge of the play and we are following their lead. So there are very few parenting challenges that aren’t significantly helped when we offer that kind of special time to our children.

The other kind of play I’d like to just mention briefly is what we call symbolic play and this is when our children have had particular experiences that have been very challenging for them. We bring in these themes into play to support them to release and integrate and heal from those experiences.

So for example, if a child has had to go to the doctor and they’ve had a stressful experience at the doctors, we might bring in a doctor’s kit at home and they get to be the doctor and we get to be the patient. So they listen to our heart with the pretend stethoscope, and maybe they give us an injection and maybe we pretend to be a bit scared and silly and they get again, this experience of being powerful and to laugh and to release some of the stress from that, or maybe the child’s been out on the street and a dog has barked very loudly and they’ve been scared. We might bring in a dog toy and be playing with a dog toy and maybe the dog is weeing in the house and we’re saying, no, no, you mustn’t wee there.

Or we are pretending to be scared of the dog and the child gets to be, no, it’s okay, mommy, this is just the toy dog, it’s not scary. These are lovely, powerful ways to support integration and healing and the release of stress, which again means they’re less likely to be behaving in ways that we’re finding unenjoyable, because usually when children are behaving in ways that we’re finding hard, it’s because they’ve got big, painful feelings sitting inside that they’re trying to get rid of.

Helen Thompson: Yeah and they do roleplaying themselves. When children are learning to play and learning to do things, you often see them roleplaying what you’ve said. I’ve seen that so many times. They’re saying something, you’re thinking, hang on, where did that child pick that up from? They’re obviously role playing what you are doing, so it’s good to reverse that. I like that strategy, I think that’s very good one because you’re giving that child the time to express their fear and express what they’re afraid of.

Feeling it in a safe environment I think is great too. I think that security and that safety and we’re still communicating with our child, but yet we’re supporting them in their behavior as well and how we approach it.

Joss Goulden: Yeah, absolutely and children are geniuses at play, it’s their language, it’s the primary way that they learn and so often we might think, oh, they’ve had this experience, how might I bring in play around this to support them? Actually, when we just give them our presence, they will often automatically come up with exactly the game that they need to do in order to make sense of something that they’ve experienced that’s been difficult. So there’s a lot of trust that we can bring to that and if we’re just there and we’re willing to participate, then they will often do exactly what they need to do in order to heal.

Helen Thompson: You mentioned how important it is just to hold your child or to touch their back or whatever, if they’re going through a dramatic time. Touch is the first experience that babies feel when they’re born, and I think it’s important that we use touch in order to communicate in a positive way as well. I just wanted your thoughts on that because I think the touch part of communicating and developing the behavior with our children is so important.

Joss Goulden: Yeah, I, I love what you’re saying there, Helen, because yeah, touch is so important for our children and it conveys so much and it’s such an important aspect in building close attachments and connection and safety for children. So often if our children have got big feelings, for example, but maybe they’re feeling a little bit reluctant to express or to move into tears, but we can see they’re really sad, if we move in close and just gently touch their hand or touch their arm, that can be the perfect, beautiful icing on the cake that supports them to feel that we are there with them and we care how they feel and we can see that they’re struggling and we want to help them. It brings in so much beautiful connection and there’s lots of games. One of the attachment types of play that we recommend is games with physical touch.

So yeah, anything it might be with a young child that might be, you know, doing a clapping game where we are touching or it might be picking them up and swirling them round and, giving them hugs. With an older child, it might be, doing their hair or giving each other makeovers or something like that.

Games where we deliberately incorporate an element of touch is very therapeutic for our children to feel this sense of connection and safety. The other thing I think that’s really important around touch is to be really respectful to be meeting children’s needs for autonomy around touch too. So for example, if Auntie Sue has come over and wants to give your little child a hug, but your little child doesn’t actually want to hug Auntie Sue because little child doesn’t know Auntie Sue at all, then I think it’s really important for us to respect that child’s needs in that moment and maybe to say to Auntie Sue, oh, Johnny doesn’t feel like giving a hug now, but what he loves to do is to give high fives and maybe give a high five to each other, but really respecting our children’s needs around their body autonomy. That really means that their relationship with touch and their understanding of safety and their choice and their power in that is really embodied for them.

Helen Thompson: Yeah, I absolutely agree with that because that’s one of the things that I say to parents when they do baby massage, is to always ask their child permission before they touch a child. A lot of parents say to me, but how can my baby g ive me permission when they can’t communicate and they can’t talk.

Joss Goulden: Babies can give you so much, say yes or no by how they communicate with you, whether they’re gazing at you, smiling at you, or whether they’re turning their head away, or whether they’re kicking their legs or whether they’re crying you. You learn what the cues are, and as you say, it’s autonomy. If you start them from an early age, then they’ll understand that, as you mentioned.

Yeah, absolutely Helen and I loved what you were saying about communicating with young babies because absolutely young babies understand everything that we are saying to them and have very effective ways of letting us know what they’re trying to let us know as well. So yeah, I love that sense of saying, I wanna give you a massage now, is that okay, or I wanna change your nappy. It’s really important for children to have that way of communicating right from a very early age.

Helen Thompson: When they wake up, you talk to them like little adults and I think a lot of parents don’t do that. They just pick the kid up and plonk them down and change their nappy and do this. If you’re saying, I’m just gonna change your nappy now ‘ cause it’s wet or because you’ve got a poo in there, or whatever it is, it needs to be changed, that all builds up to what we’ve been talking about from the communication and the behavior. How we deal with children when they’re younger also helps to support them when they’re older as we’ve mentioned in this chat.

Joss Goulden: Absolutely and all children deserve to be treated with respect and thought and kindness, whatever age they are. When we treat children with respect and thought and kindness, they grow up to be adults who are respectful and thoughtful and kind.

Helen Thompson: This has been such a valuable conversation. Where can parents connect with you and learn more about your wonderful work?

Joss Goulden: Thank you Helen. So I have a website which is AwareParenting.com.au. I also share on social media at Aware Parenting with Joss. I offer, one-to-one consultations or sessions with both parents. I have courses, workshops, online circles. I have my podcast, which is called Aware Parenting Stories, and another podcast called the Aware Parenting and Natural Learning Podcast, which I run together with a colleague, Marian Rose.

I have lots of articles on my website. I have some videos and lots of free information. As I said, I’ve got a free ebook about play. If anybody wants that, they can message me and yeah, I’m really happy for people to connect with me any way that they want to.

Helen Thompson: Thank you so much Joss, for being on here. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you and I’ve actually learned a lot more about attachment play, which I think is the pillow fights and everything like that, which I think is a great relief for kids and for parents. So thank you very much for being here, I’ve really enjoyed having you on the podcast.

Joss Goulden: My pleasure.

Helen Thompson: Thank you for joining me on this insightful episode of First Time Mum’s Chat. I hope you found my conversation with Joss Goulden, as enlightening as I did, gaining valuable tools to foster deeper connection with your little ones. I know today’s conversation might have sparked some new ways of thinking about your child’s behavior, and I highly encourage you to check out the show notes.

You’ll find all the key takeaways from my conversation with Joss, links to her free resources, including her fantastic ebook on play, and how to connect with her and explore her work further. Remember, understanding your child’s behavior is a journey and you are not alone.

If today’s discussion resonated with you, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Your feedback helps us reach and support more moms like you. Stay tuned for our next episode, where I’ll be wrapping up our communication series with a very special guest, a child development professor, parenting coach and educator will delve into the science behind early childhood communication and provide practical strategies to enhance your parenting journey.

You won’t want to miss it! Until next time, take care and cherish your moments with your little one.