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Afterwards, everyone asks the same question: what set it off? The honest answer is usually that you cannot tell from one episode. You can tell from fifteen. Log each one with what was going on and what you tried, and this ranks the triggers — and, more usefully, works out which calming strategies actually worked and which ones you keep reaching for out of habit. Everything stays on this device: no account, no login, nothing sent anywhere.
Success rate is the number of times a strategy helped, out of the times you tried it. Anything you have tried fewer than three times is shown but should not be trusted yet.
Useful at a pediatrician or OT appointment, or attached to a request for a sensory assessment.
Trigger lists are easy and everyone keeps one. The problem is that they mostly confirm what you already suspected: noise, crowds, transitions. The list nobody keeps is the one that says which of your responses is actually working. Most families cycle through the same four or five strategies, and after a year they still could not tell you which one has the best record — because the successes and the failures never got written down side by side.
Once they are, the answers are often uncomfortable and useful in equal measure. Talking it through calmly may turn out to have a poor record mid-episode and a good one twenty minutes later. Leaving the shop immediately may work almost every time, which is an argument for planning shorter trips rather than a failure of anyone's parenting.
"Building up, caught in time" is worth an entry every single time it happens. Those are the episodes where you already did the right thing, and they are the closest thing you have to a controlled experiment. A log full only of the ones that got away teaches you very little about what prevents them.
There is no copy anywhere else. Here is what disappears:
Step 1 — take a copy first
Step 2 — type ERASE EVERYTHING
You will get about fifteen seconds to undo it before it is final.
A tantrum is goal-directed — it stops when the goal is met or clearly will not be. A meltdown is a nervous system that has run out of capacity; it does not stop because someone gives in, and the child is not choosing it. Shutdowns are the quiet version and get missed far more often, because a child who goes silent and still does not interrupt a classroom.
You record two separate lists for each episode: what you tried that helped, and what you tried that did not. Over a dozen or so episodes the difference between those two counts becomes a success rate per strategy. That is the number worth arguing with — not whether headphones should help, but whether they did, for this child, seven times out of eight.
No. It stays in this browser on this device — no account, no server, nothing uploaded. That is deliberate for something this personal, and it means you should export a PDF or a backup if you want to keep it.