Sooner or later, every parent gets pushed to the brink by their misbehaving child. Perhaps you even remember your parents taking a disciplinary approach when you started throwing tantrums.
Now one mother has gone viral on TikTok for how she calmed down her angry 5-year-old by having a genuine heart-to-heart, and the entire encounter was caught on a doorbell camera.
Temper Tantrums
No one changes moods quite like your young child, and sometimes the simplest thing can trigger a meltdown.
Parents don't enjoy seeing their children upset, and figuring out how to calm them down is something learned through trial and error. But, how exactly do you calm a child down when they're having a meltdown? If you're one mom on TikTok, she uses her words.
The TikTok
Destiny Bennett, also known as @thebennettgang on TikTok, is a wife and mother to three boys who loves to share "Healthy Marriage & Parenting Tips" on her social media. Destiny recently went viral with 5 million views for what she calls a "conscious parenting" moment that was caught by her doorbell camera.
She captions the post with, "Can't believe I caught this on camera."
A Mother's Love
The TikTok caption explains that Destiny's 5-year-old son struggles with "big feelings" and regulating his emotions, and on this particular day, he was angry. While outside the family home in Las Vegas, Destiny crouches down to meet him at eye level.
"I love you very much," Destiny says to her son. "Do you know how much I love you? You don't know how much? I love you, like, more than this much."
Gentle Parenting
Destiny then tells her son that she acknowledges how angry he is feeling and that she just wants him to feel better, saying, "I want you to love you enough to see how angry you are, and want to feel better."
She then tells him that it's natural for people to be happy when they get the things they want, and angry when things don't quite go their way.
When Things Don't Go Your Way
While anger is a natural human emotion, it's difficult for children to understand how to process and manage it in a healthy way, and this is a lesson Destiny wants her son to learn.
"We have to be able to let it go and understand that we're not going to get it, and we have to find another way to make our body feel better," she says. "I need you to love you."
Tiny Life Lessons
At the end of the TikTok, Destiny tells her son that he needs to learn how to love himself. She tells him how much she loves him, before enveloping him in a big hug and saying, "Let's have a good day today, okay?"
Destiny then kisses her son, and the two go about their day.
Future Generations
Destiny's TikTok quickly went viral with over 1 million likes and 19,000 comments. People loved seeing her gentle approach to "conscious parenting" and how she taught her son important life lessons just through her words and a calm demeanor.
"This generation is gonna raise some emotionally intelligent people and I love it so much," one user commented.
What We Wish Our Parents Would've Done
Other users shared that watching Destiny's video was an emotional experience as it brought back memories of their own childhood and how they wish their parents would have treated them when they were upset.
"My inner child is sobbing [right now]. I cannot explain how much this warms my heart. This is everything I wished my parents would have done," one user wrote.
