Medicine is in the dose. If you take enough ibuprofen it will kill you beside your pain. Lithium is a useful and powerful mood stabilizer, but take just a tiny bit more, and it's deadly poison
I'm here to offer a small story that happend a few years ago.
On one summer day I was working at a hotel reception desk. It was the weekend of the Hungarian F1 championship, the hotel was booked to the brim, we couldn't house an extra mouse, even if we wanted to.
The day before the event it was incredibly hectic, arrivals every minute, all the guests are tired and some are frustrated by the inconveniences of travel. Hard day for all involved.
In the afternoon a group of Greeks show up. We start checking them in, scanning passports, allocating rooms... wait a second, there's more people in front of the desk than on the ledger. Well, that's awkward. We find the guys not on the list and break the news. They swear they have a reservation, a friend of theirs said she's found rooms when even a traveling agency couldn't so they came. We believe them, but they are still not on the list. My partner expands the search on a hunch, and we find the reservation. So they made one. For the same day next year. Normally we'd just move the reservation and be done with it. But that day, we didn't have an empty dining chair, nevermind a room. Neither did any of our nearby sister hotels. The entire city was booked for that weekend.
In that absolute rollercoster we could give them one ray of hope: we had an unconfirmed reservation, that may or may not show. So my manager made the decision to give the room to the Greeks if the other group didn't show by 6pm. They didn't, and thus we could house everyone.
Moral for me was that even when all has gone off the rails, usually there's a solution. It may all seem fucked right now, but when you calm down, you might find ways to salvage the situation.
Keep your promises and be predictable. Predictability and clear rules and consequences create a sense of security and it will make it easier for them to comply.
Treat them with respect, they are small, not stupid.
Treat them kindly but firmly, what they want isn't always what they need.
You also might want to talk with the parents about this, they know their kids best and can give specific advice. What works with one kid, might not work with the other.
The system works like this:
After each session everyone makes a record of what happened from their character's point of view. These can be used in two ways:
-During sessions you can recall one of these events ("This is just like that time in Budapest") and get bonuses to that roll. This can be done once for each record in a session.
-Between sessions you can spend records to improve stats and add assets/powers whatever to your character. Spent records can't be used during sessions anymore. Each type of improvement has a required number of records to make. (think: improving skills is easier than getting better attributes)
If you as a GM rule, that only records with relevant experience can be spent to improve stats, it can be an incentive to do what you want to improve
Cortex Prime has systems that let you gradually improve the characters bit by bit instead of levels either through spending xp or using a system called session recalls
I know this has been said a lot for questions like this, but it's still true: the answer to your problem lies in seeing a psychologist. Probably no need for psychotherapy but some counseling could help you sort these things out
That's fair. But imo if it kills cancer cells, it's worth investigating