This episode is brought to you by Boston Children's Hospital.

They treat more children with rare diseases and complex conditions than any hospital in the world.

Hi and welcome to our Schimm Special Series Kid Q&A, where we're digging into your biggest

questions about parenting and your kids' health. I'm Jana, a senior manager here at the Schimm.

I'm also a mom. My son, Lou, will be two years old next week.

Now, I may be biased, but I think Lou is pretty great. That said, I've definitely noticed an

uptick in tantrums in the last few months, and I don't always know how to handle them.

I know I'm not alone in struggling with this, so we called up Dr. Eric Ali, a tending psychologist

in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Boston Children's Hospital,

to ask for some help. Let's get into it.

Hi, Dr. Ali. Thank you so much for joining us. We got a lot of questions about what is normal

behavior for toddlers, and I'm putting normal very much in quotes. Kind of how many tantrums and

emotional outbursts is normal. What's a normal amount of time for a tandem to last? And how to know

and behavior crosses the line from being normal to needing an evaluation for something like autism

or ADHD. So can you give parents any guidelines or words of wisdom they can refer to?

All kids have times when their feelings just feel too big, and they don't know how to cope,

and that can then lead them to tantrum. And I wouldn't say that there's a quote-unquote

normal number of tantrums, but at this stage of development, little ones are still very much

learning what happens when they act in different ways. So they push the boundaries to see where the

limits are, and then the feedback that they get teaches them about how the world works. So if you're

worried about the intensity or the frequency of your child's tantrums for a week or two, keep a

log where you jot down what was happening right before, during, and then after your child's tantrum,

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