The Impact of Overstimulation on Kids at Theme Parks

I watched a toddler melt down at a major theme park yesterday.

Not a tantrum. A collapse. The kind where the body just gives out because there’s nowhere left to go. Her mother was dragging her by the arm toward the next ride while the kid’s legs buckled under her. The mom looked exhausted. Frustrated. Embarrassed, maybe. Doing what we all do, pushing through, making memories, getting their money’s worth.

And all I could see was my daughter.

She was four the first time, at a theme park in Australia. She hated it. All of it. The noise, the crowds, the rides, the manufactured chaos everyone kept calling fun. She’d cry. Shut down. Refuse. Three years later, we’d moved to the States, took her to Busch Gardens. Same thing. At seven, her body still knew what it knew at four.

And I’d feel that familiar frustration rising, why can’t you just enjoy this? We came all this way. Everyone else is having fun.

I didn’t have the language then. I didn’t know what I was looking at.

Her nervous system was doing exactly what it was designed to do: protect her. It was saying this is too much. I don’t feel safe. Something is wrong here.And instead of listening, I tried to override it. We all did. Because that’s what the culture told us good parents do, push through, don’t let them be difficult, don’t let them ruin the vacation.

What We’re Really Teaching

Theme parks are sensory overload packaged as joy. Engineered dysregulation sold as family bonding. Think about what you’re actually doing: standing in lines for hours in the heat, probably dehydrated, definitely overstimulated, then strapping into something designed to trigger your fight-or-flight response at maximum capacity. Drops. Spins. Darkness. Startle responses on repeat.

And we call this vacation.

Adults can sometimes enjoy this, we’ve had decades to develop the capacity to regulate through intense experiences (or to dissociate through them, which we often confuse for resilience). But kids? Their systems aren’t built for this. When a child melts down at a theme park, their nervous system isn’t broken. It’s working perfectly. It’s saying I cannot process any more input.

The problem is what happens next.

When a child’s “no” gets dismissed. When their body’s protective signals are labeled as difficult, dramatic, no fun. When they learn that their felt sense of “this is too much” doesn’t matter because the adults paid good money and everyone else seems fine.

That’s not a single moment. That’s training. That’s conditioning. That’s a child learning, in their bones, that their internal compass is wrong.

Where It Leads

My daughter is 20 now. She’s in a relationship that doesn’t honor her limits. Her partner overrides her no. Situations where she tolerates things she shouldn’t because somewhere along the way, she learned that her discomfort is inconvenient. That going along to get along is love.

I’m not saying all theme parks caused this. I’m saying the theme park was one of a thousand moments where the message got reinforced: your body is wrong. Your feelings are too much. Push through.

And now I watch her, at 20, still pushing through things that hurt her. Still overriding the same signals that were trying to protect her when she was four, crying in line for a ride she never wanted to take.

What I Wish I’d Known

Her resistance wasn’t the problem. It was information.

A child who says “I don’t want to” or “I don’t like this” or who just shuts down and refuses, that child is in communication with their own nervous system. That’s a skill. That’s the thing we spend thousands of dollars in therapy trying to recover as adults.

What if, instead of overriding it, we had honored it?

What if “she’s being difficult” had become “she knows something we don’t”?

I can’t go back. I can’t undo two decades of messaging that taught my daughter to abandon herself to keep the peace. But I can see it now, clearly, standing in a theme park watching other parents do exactly what I did.

And maybe that’s worth something. Maybe naming it helps someone else catch it earlier.

Your child’s no is not a problem to solve. It’s a boundary to respect.

Even at the happiest place on earth.

I’m Sarah. I help women reconnect with the nervous system signals they were taught to ignore. If this landed, you might want to start with my free Nervous System Foundations course..