After 200 episodes, Lisa is still talking about meltdowns—because nervous system dysregulation sits at the very center of autism parenting. In this milestone episode of The Autism Mom Coach, she names the single biggest mistake parents make: pouring all their energy into preventing meltdowns. Using a story about a client’s son and a missing jar of peanut butter, Lisa shows why no amount of timers, schedules, and warnings can account for every variable, and why an all-prevention focus leaves you frustrated, self-blaming, and on the back foot. The shift she teaches instead—from prevention to preparation—changes everything about how you weather the hard moments.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why meltdowns are nervous system dysregulation, not “bad behavior,” and why that distinction matters even though the behaviors themselves can look identical to a tantrum.
- Why a prevention-first mindset backfires, leaving you judging yourself and your child when “doing all the things” doesn’t stop a meltdown that countless invisible variables set off.
- How shifting from prevention to preparation—and adopting the motto “I can handle it even if I don’t want to”—gives you more capacity to respond effectively, recover faster, and even lower the intensity of meltdowns when they happen.
Related episodes:
- The Autism Behavior Barometer: A Better Way to Understand Meltdowns (Ep #130)
- The Power of Co-Regulation for Autism Moms (Ep #185)
- Being Unbothered: How to Stay Regulated When Your Autistic Child Pushes Your Buttons (Ep #197)
Resources mentioned:
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TRANSCRIPT
You are listening to Episode 200 of The Autism Mom Coach: The Number One Meltdown Mistake You’re Making and How to Stop It.
Hi, I’m Lisa Candera, mother to an 18-year-old son with autism and founder of The Autism Mom Coach.
After my son’s diagnosis at age two, I poured all of my time, energy, and resources into helping him while completely ignoring the intense anxiety I was constantly feeling. White-knuckling it got me through the first several years, but it completely fell apart when my son hit puberty and aggression and self-harm became part of our daily lives.
I needed to figure out how to stay calm while he was constantly dysregulated. But how? No one had the answer. So answering that question became my mission.
I have spent years learning what actually works—not from textbooks or therapists who have never lived this life, but from trial and error in my own home.
From all of that, I have created tools and strategies that have helped me stop escalating meltdowns, make impossible decisions, and parent for the long game. I’ve now coached over a hundred moms through these same struggles.
On this podcast, I share everything I’ve learned—and what I’m still learning—with you.
Let’s get started.
Hello everyone, and welcome to this week’s episode of the podcast.
Two hundred episodes.
If you had told me during my first episode, over four years ago, that I would still be talking about meltdowns in Episode 200, I would not have been surprised at all.
Meltdowns—and really, at their core, nervous system dysregulation experienced by people with autism—are a huge part of this life.
They affect how our kids move through the day, how they handle demands and transitions, how we parent them, how we advocate for them, and how we teach them to advocate for themselves.
On top of all of that, meltdowns are deeply misunderstood.
And I’m not just talking about your in-laws, your neighbors, or the teacher at school who doesn’t get it. I’m talking about us, too. Autism parents.
And there’s a good reason for that.
Meltdowns are confusing. They can break your brain a little bit.
They look, sound, and feel like bad behavior. They look like all the things we’ve been taught to recognize as behavior problems—things children aren’t supposed to do.
And yes, many of the things our kids do during a meltdown are behaviors we don’t want them engaging in. But they’re not the same as behaviors driven by the reasons we typically associate with misbehavior.
For example, a tantrum is a behavior aimed at getting something. A child can often turn it on and off depending on whether it’s working.
That’s not what’s happening during a meltdown.
And here’s why.
Meltdowns are part of autism.
When I say “meltdowns,” I’m talking about the nervous system dysregulation that leads to the behaviors we see when our children are overwhelmed by frustration, stress, sensory overload, or emotional exhaustion.
Because of their autism—and whatever else they may have going on—our children are more vulnerable to nervous system dysregulation.
Autism is often associated with inflexibility, sensory processing challenges, communication difficulties, low frustration tolerance, impulsivity, and executive functioning challenges.
All of that affects how our children experience and manage stress.
All of that affects how they perceive the world.
And when they become overloaded, flooded, or simply can’t take in one more thing, we see meltdowns.
That means meltdowns can happen even when the exact same activity didn’t lead to a meltdown for the previous five days.
They happen no matter how prepared you are, no matter how many warnings you give, and no matter how many snacks you provide.
Meltdowns are complex and dynamic.
There is a lot we can do to prevent them, slow them down, and support our children.
But meltdowns are not like a peanut allergy or gluten sensitivity where, if you avoid the trigger, you dramatically reduce the likelihood of a reaction.
It’s not that straightforward.
Let me give you an example from one of my clients.
Her son was in fourth grade. Every day after school and a long bus ride home, he would have a protein shake.
The shake contained some combination of milk or yogurt, banana, blueberries, and peanut butter.
The peanut butter was his favorite part.
There were also two other boys in the house, so despite her best efforts, they didn’t always have peanut butter on hand. Sometimes she would substitute peanut butter powder or grind actual peanuts into the shake.
And most of the time, it was fine.
No problem.
Except for one day.
Her son came home looking forward to that protein shake, and there was no peanut butter.
He wasn’t having it.
He melted down.
He cried. He became inconsolable.
And she couldn’t figure out why.
They had made this substitution before. It had worked before.
But not today.
Because today his teacher wasn’t there, and he had a substitute.
Today his seat on the bus got changed because of a conflict between other students.
By the time he got home, he was done with substitutions and changes.
He wanted peanut butter in his protein shake.
And that final disappointment pushed him over the edge.
The point is this:
You can do all the planning and anticipation in the world, but you are never going to be able to account for everything that could potentially push your child past their limit.
There are simply too many variables.
We cannot anticipate all of them.
We cannot plan for all of them.
And we certainly cannot prevent all of them.
When all of your focus is on prevention, you’re on the back foot when a meltdown happens.
And more than that, you’re frustrated.
All the effort. All the schedules. All the timers. All the planning.
When it doesn’t “work,” you’re frustrated with yourself.
You’re frustrated with your child.
You’re judging yourself.
You’re judging your child.
Because somewhere in your mind you’re thinking:
This shouldn’t be happening.
The way I think about meltdowns now is very different from how I thought about them years ago.
For years, I approached meltdowns as something I should be able to prevent.
I had the schedules, the strategies, the visual supports, and all the systems.
And when a meltdown happened anyway, I felt frustrated with myself.
Frustrated with my son.
I took his behavior personally.
I no longer do that.
I no longer look at his emotional dysregulation, nervous system distress, and resulting behaviors as something I can completely prevent.
Instead of focusing on prevention, I focus on preparation.
And this is exactly how I teach my clients.
Now, I want to be clear.
Letting go of prevention as the goal does not mean you’re giving up on helpful strategies.
It doesn’t mean you’re going to have more meltdowns because you’re no longer doing the things that help.
You’re still going to do those things.
You’re just not going to put all of your eggs in that basket.
When you do that, you let go of an enormous amount of pressure and expectation.
And that shift alone can reduce stress for everyone involved.
It can actually prevent some meltdowns and, at the very least, reduce the intensity of others.
When you change your expectations about meltdowns and stop arguing with the reality that they happen, you create much more mental and emotional capacity to manage them effectively.
You recover faster afterward.
You’re not stuck replaying the story that the meltdown should never have happened.
Instead, your mindset becomes:
Meltdowns happen.
And I know what to do when they happen.
One of the mottos I teach my clients is:
I can handle it, even if I don’t want to.
Because none of us wants to deal with meltdowns.
They’re exhausting.
They’re disruptive.
They’re painful.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t handle them.
The shift is not resignation.
The shift is letting go of the impossible expectation that you should be able to prevent every meltdown.
The shift is supporting your child as effectively as possible, whether they remain regulated or tip into dysregulation.
And believe me, that becomes much easier when you stop treating the meltdown itself as evidence that you or your child failed.
All right, everyone. I hope this was helpful.
To celebrate the 200th episode, I created a brand-new free training all about how to reduce meltdowns by 50% in one week.
And guess what?
Part of that plan involves letting go of the idea that meltdowns should never happen in the first place.
That shift alone can change everything.
If that sounds helpful, head to the show notes and grab it.
You can find the link there, or visit TheAutismMomCoach.com and access it directly from the website.
All right, everyone. I’ll talk to you next week.
