8 Things Toddlers Do When They Feel Frustrated

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A toddler and a jigsaw puzzle. Or a toddler and a zipper. Or a toddler and the cup that was supposed to be the blue one. Or a toddler and the snack that broke in half, or the block tower that won’t stay up, or the television that turned off when the episode wasn’t finished, or the older sibling who is sitting in the exact spot that was going to be occupied.

These situations have something in common: a goal that cannot be reached. A want that cannot be met. A gap between what the toddler intended and what actually happened — and in that gap, something has to happen. Something always does.

Frustration is one of the most fundamental and most frequently experienced emotions in toddlerhood. It is the automatic, biologically encoded response to blocked goal attainment — the feeling that arrives when what you wanted and what is available are not the same thing. And toddlers, who are simultaneously developing strong desires, limited language, and a newly urgent drive toward independence that regularly outstrips their physical capability, encounter this gap more frequently and more intensely than almost any other developmental period.

What they do in response to it is specific, varied, and genuinely worth understanding. Not as a catalogue of problems to manage, but as a map of the developing regulatory system — the tools the toddler has available, the ones they’re building, and what it looks like when those tools run out.

What the Research Tells Us About Toddler Frustration

Before the eight things, one finding that frames all of them.

Anger is elicited in situations in which one’s goals are blocked, and it readies one to act to overcome obstacles and persist to achieve goals. Anger expressions are functionally related to the development of a sense of efficacy and autonomy. As infants gain experience with autonomous behavior, such as self-locomotion, they express more anger. This is the key developmental insight: frustration and its expressions are not failures of temperament. In appropriate intensities, they are the emotional fuel of goal-directed persistence — the feeling that pushes toward mastery rather than away from it. The toddler who is frustrated by the zipper is a toddler who wants to close the zipper. The frustration and the drive are the same thing, from different angles.

Observations of contingent sequences of emotion-strategy-emotion reveal that infant and toddler age strategic efforts reduce emotion intensity momentarily but are of limited effectiveness. If young children’s regulatory efforts improve as expected between the toddler and preschool years, then the duration of anger displays should decrease, and shorter anger duration should be associated with increases in the duration of distraction. The eight things below trace exactly this developmental arc — from the most basic, least regulated expressions of frustration through to the more sophisticated regulatory strategies that are just beginning to emerge in the third and fourth year of life.

The 8 Things

1. They Cry

This is the earliest, most universal, and most physiologically direct expression of frustration available to a toddler — and the one that is most consistently present across the full age range of toddlerhood, from 18 months through 36 months and beyond.

Crying in response to frustration is not a communication failure. It is a communication: the sound of a nervous system that is activated past its current regulatory capacity, broadcasting its state to whoever is available to receive it. In the first years of life, this broadcast is the primary mechanism for obtaining the co-regulatory support that the not-yet-developed internal regulatory system cannot yet provide on its own.

The goal of one major systematic review and meta-analysis was to review the literature on relationships between child distress expression behaviors such as crying and three clusters of child distress regulation behaviors — disengagement of attention, parent-focused behaviors, and self-soothing — in the first three years of life. What it found is directly relevant here: the crying that looks like the whole event is often the beginning of a regulatory process that includes reaching for a parent, attempting to distract, and gradually returning to baseline. The cry is the opening signal, not the summary.

What’s important for parents to understand about frustration-driven crying specifically is that it is not the same as pain crying or hunger crying — though all three can look similar at the surface. Frustration crying tends to arrive alongside the blocked goal: it begins when the tower falls, or when the no is given, or when the desired thing becomes unavailable. It is contextually anchored in a way that tells an observant parent something specific about what happened.

What this looks like:

The frustration cry is the first request for co-regulatory support. The parent who can read its context — who notices that the crying began when the block fell, or when the snack was refused, or when the activity ended — is a parent who can respond to both the cry and its cause simultaneously, rather than only to the sound.

2. They Hit, Bite, or Throw

This is the frustration behavior that most alarms parents and most reliably produces the kind of response that feels necessary to address immediately. The hitting, biting, and throwing that toddlers produce in moments of frustration are genuinely alarming from the outside — and from the inside of the toddler’s nervous system, they are the automatic motor expression of a state that has exceeded the capacity of whatever other regulatory resources were available.

The neurobiological mechanism is straightforward: frustration activates the threat-detection system, which triggers the fight-or-flight response. In adults, the prefrontal cortex modulates this response, accessing socially appropriate alternatives before the motor impulse completes itself. In toddlers — whose prefrontal cortex is in very early development and whose inhibitory control is limited to the earliest stages — the motor expression often completes before any modulation occurs. The hitting is not chosen. It is what happened.

Anger is elicited in situations in which one’s goals are blocked and it readies one to act to overcome obstacles. In infants, anger expressions are associated with persistence at getting a lever to work, whereas sadness expressions are not. As infants gain experience with autonomous behavior, they express more anger. The aggression that accompanies frustration in toddlerhood is the approach response — the body doing what bodies do when something wanted is not available and the system says act. It is the same energy that, channeled differently, produces persistence. The direction it takes depends on what alternatives the toddler has access to.

Throwing, in particular, is often a motor regulation strategy as much as an expression of aggression: the physical act of throwing an object provides proprioceptive and vestibular input that briefly regulates the activated nervous system, in much the same way that adults might slam a door or hit a pillow. The toddler who throws the block when frustrated is not only expressing frustration. They are, at some level, regulating it — imperfectly, through the only high-intensity motor release currently available.

What this looks like:

The hitting, biting, and throwing require a consistent behavioral response — a clear, calm limit — while simultaneously recognizing what’s happening underneath: a nervous system in a state of frustration-activation that doesn’t yet have the vocabulary or the motor alternatives to express itself differently. The limit addresses the behavior. The co-regulation addresses the state. Both are needed.

3. They Come to the Parent

This is one of the most developmentally significant — and most frequently underappreciated — things on the list. Not the dramatic expressions of frustration, but the simple act of seeking the parent in the moment of frustration. The toddler who brings the broken toy to the parent. Who tugs at the parent’s sleeve when the task isn’t working. Who moves toward the parent when the situation has exceeded available resources.

Experimental frustration procedures with 158 children ages 15–39 months found that children’s use of parent-focused coping strategies — moving toward the parent, seeking comfort — was one of the primary behavioral responses to frustration. This is the attachment system doing exactly what it evolved to do: in conditions of stress or blocked goal attainment, seek the proximity of the attachment figure. The parent is not being pestered. They are being recruited as the co-regulatory resource the toddler’s own system cannot yet reliably provide.

Bowlby’s foundational attachment theory described the caregiver as the “safe haven” — the figure to whom the child returns in moments of distress for the comfort and support that allows them to return to exploration. In the context of frustration specifically, the parent functions as the external regulatory system that the toddler’s internal system is still too immature to handle on its own. The toddler who comes to the parent when frustrated is behaving exactly as the attachment system was designed to produce: seeking the co-regulatory presence that brings the nervous system back to baseline.

What this looks like:

When a toddler brings their frustration to you — whether through crying, through tugging, through bringing the thing that doesn’t work — they are making the most developmentally appropriate regulatory move available to them. Responding with warmth and presence is not indulging dependency. It is providing the co-regulation that their developing system is looking for, and that, offered consistently, gradually builds the internal regulation that eventually allows them to manage frustration without the parent needing to be summoned.

4. They Try Again and Again

This is the frustration behavior that is easiest to miss because it doesn’t look like distress. It looks like persistence — the toddler who, after the tower falls, builds it again. Who, after the puzzle piece doesn’t fit, tries another angle. Who, after failing the first time, approaches the task again with the same or greater intensity.

Approach behavior, defined as differences in behavior to an incentive event and anger at its removal, was assessed in a longitudinal study. In toddlers, active resistance to parental demands reflects children’s motivation to control events. Early approach behavior predicted toddlers’ persistence, especially gross motor persistence. Goal-directed behavior in the first months of life is related to later behavioral persistence.

The persistence that looks like stubbornness is, in the research literature, one of the most positive temperamental and motivational characteristics available to a developing child. The toddler who keeps trying after failure is a toddler whose frustration is functioning as the research says frustration is supposed to function: as the fuel for continued approach behavior, the emotional signal that the goal matters enough to keep pursuing.

At 18 and 24 months of age, children were quick to react angrily and slower to shift attention away from the desired object than they were at later ages. Over time, children were quicker to distract themselves. The early persistence in the face of frustration — the tendency to stay with the blocked goal rather than shift away from it — is one of the developmental precursors to frustration tolerance. The child who keeps trying is building, across thousands of such moments, both the capability that eventually produces success and the regulatory experience of surviving the frustration that precedes it.

What this looks like:

The toddler who keeps trying after repeated failure is doing something worth recognizing — not with elaborate praise, but with genuine acknowledgment of the effort: “you keep trying. That’s what I want to see.” The effort — the staying with — is what matters most, before success arrives. The child who hears their persistence named is learning something about what the effort means.

5. They Give Up and Walk Away

This is the behavior that worries parents the most, and that the research describes as a genuine regulatory strategy in its own right. The toddler who, after multiple failures, simply stops. Who leaves the puzzle on the table. Who walks away from the block tower mid-construction. Who disengages from the task without ceremony and moves on to something else.

Three clusters of child distress regulation behaviors were identified across the first three years of life: disengagement of attention, parent-focused behaviors, and self-soothing. Disengagement of attention — turning away from the source of frustration — was one of the primary regulatory strategies available to infants and toddlers.

Disengagement is not failure. It is one of the earliest available forms of self-regulation: the capacity to recognize when a situation has exceeded available resources and to remove oneself from it rather than continuing to escalate. The toddler who walks away from the frustrating task is demonstrating a version of the emotional disengagement that adults use when they step away from a problem they’re too activated to solve — a deliberate (or in toddlers, semi-deliberate) shift of attention away from the source of dysregulation.

The developmental trajectory here is nuanced: excessive early disengagement — giving up too quickly, before any persistence has been attempted — is associated with less frustration tolerance development over time. But the capacity to disengage when the activation genuinely exceeds the resources is, in appropriate proportion, a regulatory skill. The toddler who walks away, comes back a few minutes later, and tries again has used disengagement effectively. The toddler who never stays and tries is the one worth watching.

What this looks like:

When a toddler walks away from a frustrating task, resist the impulse to immediately redirect them back to it. Give the disengagement its moment — the regulatory break is doing its work. And then, when the toddler has returned to baseline, offer the return: “that puzzle is still there if you want to try again.” The choice to return — made from a regulated state — is the most productive version of the second attempt.

6. They Distract Themselves

This is the most sophisticated regulatory behavior on the list — and the one that shows the clearest developmental trajectory across the toddler years. The toddler who, when frustrated by an unavailable toy, turns to a different toy. Who, when the snack they wanted isn’t available, becomes interested in something on the shelf. Who finds their own internal redirect and uses it.

Longitudinal analyses of waiting behavior from toddler to preschool age found evidence of age-related changes in the latency and duration of how children deployed their attention and expressed anger. In the third year of life, children appeared able to sustain self-initiated distractions for longer periods and to express anger for briefer periods, which can be interpreted as quicker recovery from anger. Age-related advances involve links forged between attention control and frustration tolerance.

This developmental finding is one of the most practically significant in the research. The capacity for self-initiated distraction — the ability to shift one’s own attention away from the source of frustration — doesn’t appear fully or reliably until the third year of life, and it improves measurably between 18 months and 48 months. It is, in part, a function of developing attentional control: the prefrontal systems that allow voluntary attention direction are the same ones that allow frustration regulation. As one grows, so does the other.

This means that the 18-month-old who cannot distract themselves from the unavailable object is not failing to use a tool they have. They are demonstrating the absence of a tool they are actively building. The 3-year-old who can find their own internal redirect in a frustrating situation is demonstrating neurological progress that has been assembling, from exactly these daily frustration encounters, for two years.

What this looks like:

The emergence of self-initiated distraction in the third year is a milestone worth noticing and supporting. When a toddler finds their own redirect in a frustrating situation — when they turn toward something else rather than escalating — naming it matters: “you found something else to do. That was a good idea.” The behavior that is noticed and named is more likely to be repeated.

7. They Say “No” to Everything

This is the one that is least obviously connected to frustration — and in the developmental literature, one of the most consistent behavioral expressions of the accumulated sense of thwarted autonomy that frustration in toddlerhood produces over time.

The “no” phase — the developmental period in which toddlers apply a reflexive, emphatic “no” to a remarkably wide range of propositions, including ones they would presumably otherwise enjoy — is partly the expression of emerging language (the discovery that “no” is a word with power), partly the practice of the autonomy drive (the experience of having agency over whether a thing happens), and partly the behavioral residue of accumulated frustration: the toddler who has spent a significant proportion of the day being told no, encountering blocked goals, experiencing the gap between wanting and having, begins to use “no” preemptively, to assert the agency that the environment keeps overriding.

Anger expressions are functionally related to the development of a sense of efficacy and autonomy. Most children experience rapid gains in autonomy, ability, and efficacy during the preschool years and become better able to use emotions such as anger to achieve goals in particular contexts. The “no” is the verbal expression of the same autonomy drive that anger is the emotional expression of. They are different channels of the same communication: I am a person with preferences and intentions, and I assert them.

The research on Self-Determination Theory makes the developmental necessity of this explicit: the need for autonomy is a universal, innate psychological need whose satisfaction in age-appropriate ways predicts healthy development. The toddler who says “no” — even to things they might want — is practicing the exercise of autonomous preference. The frustration that came before the “no” is the experience that made the “no” necessary.

What this looks like:

The toddler who says “no” to everything is not being contrary for sport. They are asserting the agency that the day kept denying them. Providing genuine, meaningful choices — not fake choices, but two options that are both acceptable and both real — gives the “no” somewhere to go that doesn’t require a battle. “Do you want the apple or the crackers?” is a context in which the toddler can practice the exercise of preference without the “no” needing to function as the only available form of self-assertion.

8. They Go Still and Shut Down

This is the least visible and most frequently missed of the eight things — partly because it doesn’t produce the sounds and movements that demand a response, and partly because it looks, from the outside, like compliance or calm. The toddler who goes very quiet. Who sits without engaging. Who seems to have stopped trying without any visible dramatic expression. Who has gone somewhere internally that is not distress in any obvious sense, but is not well-being either.

This is the freeze response — the third branch of the autonomic nervous system’s threat-response repertoire, alongside fight and flight. When the activated state becomes overwhelming — when fight produced no result and flight produced no result, or when the sense of helplessness about the blocked goal reaches a certain threshold — the nervous system’s next available option is a reduction in output: a withdrawal of engagement that reduces the cost of being in the situation by reducing participation in it.

The Gennis and colleagues systematic review of distress expression and regulation across the first three years of life identified the behavioral profile of shutdown — reduced vocalization, reduced movement, reduced social engagement — as one of the documented patterns of toddler distress response. It is sometimes called “masked distress” precisely because its outward presentation does not match the internal state that’s producing it. The toddler who has gone still is not fine. They have exceeded the threshold of available coping resources and defaulted to the physiological conservation mode.

Experimental frustration procedures with 158 children ages 15–39 months examined diverse characteristics of children’s frustration and the specific behaviors through which children coped. The range of frustration behaviors included not only active, outwardly visible responses but also withdrawal and disengagement, particularly in children with less secure attachment relationships with the participating parent.

What this looks like:

The toddler who has shut down is a toddler in distress who needs the same co-regulatory response as the toddler in full meltdown — just a quieter version of it. Physical proximity, a warm and attuned presence, a simple naming of what you see: “you seem really quiet. Are you okay?” The shutdown that is responded to with warmth and presence comes back to baseline. The shutdown that is met with nothing, or with the assumption that quiet means fine, is a frustration experience that received no co-regulatory response — which is the experience that, over time, teaches the child not to bring their distress to the relationship.

What All Eight Share

Each of these eight things is the toddler’s nervous system doing the best it can with the regulatory resources currently available. The crying, the hitting, the seeking, the persistence, the disengagement, the self-distraction, the “no”, the shutdown — these are not failures of character or parenting. They are the behavioral expression of a regulatory system that is developing, that is limited by neurological immaturity, and that is building, across exactly these daily frustration encounters, the capacity for the more sophisticated regulation that will arrive in the preschool years.

The parent who understands this is the parent who can read the behavior for what it is — not a problem to be eliminated but a developmental process to be supported. The hitting needs a limit. The seeking needs a response. The distraction needs to be named. The shutdown needs to be noticed. Each of the eight things is a request, in the language available to the toddler’s current regulatory system, for something specific from the parent.

The answer to most of them is the same: warmth, presence, a simple naming, and the consistent availability of the co-regulatory relationship that the toddler’s own system is using as its scaffold while it builds the capacity to stand on its own.

A Note on Individual Differences

Toddlers vary significantly in their frustration profiles. Some are highly persistent and tend toward the active, approach-oriented expressions — the hitting, the retrying, the determined “no.” Others are more likely to disengage, seek comfort, or shut down. These differences are partly temperamental — some children have a lower threshold for frustration activation, more intense emotional reactivity, or more difficulty shifting attention — and partly shaped by the co-regulatory environment they’ve developed within.

When a toddler’s frustration expressions are consistently extreme, very frequent, or include significant self-injury or prolonged shutdown, a conversation with the pediatrician is appropriate. Most frustration behaviors in typical toddlerhood are developmental. The subset that is more than that is identifiable — and early support is almost always more effective than waiting to see if the child grows out of it.

Which of these eight do you recognize most readily in your toddler? And which one have you found most challenging to respond to calmly and consistently? Share what you’ve noticed in the comments — the specific strategies that have actually worked in a real household are always the most useful thing another parent can read.

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