As a conscious parent and coach, I firmly believe that parents don’t have to solve their kids’ frustrations, that kids are allowed to feel how they feel, and that feelings aren’t wrong.
For some parents, however, this concept raises concerns. They believe that when you indulge in an emotional blow-up over a minor issue in a public setting, you’re saying, “No, sweetie, it’s totally fine to make your big feelings everybody else’s problem. You and your disproportionately large feelings can just go ahead and suck up all the oxygen in the room! No one else here matters at all!”
However, I don't agree that empathy is "indulging"; I don't agree that feelings are anybody's "problem"; and I don't agree that feelings are "disproportionately large".
It sounds like the thought of offering empathy to someone, even when you personally consider their problem to not be that big of a deal, feels really challenging and emotionally charges some parents. For me, whenever I encounter that resistance in myself, I can usually trace it back to grace that I was never extended as a child - it feels hard to be the first one to offer it.
Kids learn to manage small frustrations by experiencing a hundred thousand small frustrations and managing them, or having adults help them in that. I earnestly believe that they will learn to manage those frustrations better if they feel like their adults are on the same team as them while they're learning to manage them. I do not believe that policing another person's feelings leads to them feeling like they're on the same team as you.
All of the kids with "outsized" frustration reactions that I've ever worked with have had pretty good reason to expect their adults to be antagonistic towards them and their problems, and this is not helpful. Usually, that's because the adult was attacking the way in which they were expressing their problem.
I guess to say it another way - in one teaching method, the child eventually learns, "Oh, this problem is small because my adult stays regulated and solves it. They make me feel safe; I bet I could be like them; I bet I could solve it."
And in the other method, the child eventually learns, "If I express how I feel about this problem, everybody will focus on my expression and not on the problem. I better squash how I'm feeling if I want to get any help."
I don't find the latter method to be productive (in my own life and learning). So I'm not passing it on and I hope you won’t either.