You Don't Have to Love Playing the Same Way Your Child Does

Your child is upset because you said it's time to turn off the video game. They argue, raise their voice, and tell you it's unfair. You know they're disappointed. You understand that transitions can be hard. You even know that anger is a normal human emotion. And yet, something about the way they're expressing that anger is getting under your skin. You feel yourself getting irritated. You want to shut the conversation down. Or you start explaining why the limit is reasonable, hoping they'll understand and stop being so upset. Maybe you feel overwhelmed and give up on the conversation altogether. So why might your child's anger bring out such a strong reaction in you, even when you understand exactly why they're upset? Part of the answer can be found in the relationship we've developed with anger itself. What Did You Learn About Anger Growing Up? Before we became parents, we were children watching the adults around us experience anger. We learned what happened when someone got upset. We learned whether anger could be expressed openly, whether it led to arguments or punishment, whether people withdrew from each other, and whether there was room to talk about what happened afterward. Some of us grew up in homes where anger was loud and intimidating. Others grew up in homes where anger wasn't discussed at all. Everyone was expected to move on, stay pleasant, or pretend things were fine. And some of us learned that expressing dissatisfaction wasn't worth the trouble. It felt easier to keep the peace, accommodate everyone else, and deal with our own feelings privately. Those experiences can influence what anger feels like to us now. We can understand intellectually that anger is a normal emotion while still having a strong emotional or physical reaction when someone around us becomes angry. This becomes particularly important in parenting because our children are going to get angry with us. They're going to disagree with our decisions, protest limits, express frustration, and sometimes say things that are difficult to hear. Their anger can activate patterns we developed long before they were born. Three Ways We Can Relate to Anger In my parent coaching work, I explore three common relationships with anger: flight, fight, and shrink . These aren't diagnoses or permanent personality types. They're patterns that can help us recognize what we tend to do when anger becomes uncomfortable. Flight: Getting Away From Anger Someone with a flight relationship tends to avoid anger, dismiss it, or move away from situations where it might be expressed. They may say, "I'm fine. It's not a big deal," even when something is bothering them. They may struggle to recognize or express their own needs because they're accustomed to prioritizing everyone else's. In parenting, flight can show up when our child becomes angry and we immediately try to distract them, cheer them up, explain away their frustration, or get the whole situation over with. Imagine your child becomes furious because it's time to leave the playground. You understand they're disappointed, but their anger makes you so uncomfortable that you immediately offer a snack, promise another outing, or start explaining all the reasons they shouldn't be upset. There's nothing inherently wrong with offering comfort, providing information, or helping a child transition. The question is what we're trying to accomplish. Are we supporting our child through an uncomfortable emotion, or are we trying to make the emotion disappear because we don't know what to do with it? Some parents with this pattern also withdraw when conflict becomes intense. They go quiet, disengage, or stop communicating because being around anger feels unsafe or exhausting. Fight: Trying to Control Anger A fight relationship often involves experiencing anger as intense, physically uncomfortable, or difficult to contain. This can show up as chronic irritability, feeling constantly on edge, snapping when challenged, or becoming especially reactive when someone doesn't cooperate. For parents, a child's anger can feel like a challenge to their leadership. You tell your child it's time to start school, and they yell, "NO! YOU CAN'T MAKE ME!" Suddenly, your own anger rises. Your body becomes tense, your voice gets louder, and you feel an urgent need to make sure your child understands that you're in charge. You may find yourself arguing, threatening consequences, or trying to regain control of the interaction. The expectation that school needs to happen can be completely reasonable. We still have to consider what is happening inside us when our child pushes back. If their anger makes us feel threatened, disrespected, or out of control, we can begin responding to those experiences rather than thoughtfully deciding what the situation requires. Shrink: Becoming Small Around Anger A shrink relationship can develop when anger is associated with helplessness, fear, or powerlessness. Someone with this pattern may become silent or passive when another person is angry. They may struggle to express dissatisfaction, worry about disappointing people, or feel that their needs and opinions don't matter. In parenting, this can look like becoming overwhelmed when a child yells, makes demands, or expresses intense anger. A parent may find themselves backing away from a boundary because the child's reaction feels too difficult to tolerate. They may go quiet and struggle to find their words. They may hold in their own frustration for days or weeks until they eventually reach a breaking point. And afterward, they may wonder why they couldn't respond the way they intended. Understanding this pattern gives us an opportunity to explore what anger has come to mean to us, particularly when another person's anger makes us feel powerless. Your Child's Anger Can Bring Up Your Own Relationship With Anger Here's where I want us to spend some time. Your child isn't responsible for the relationship you developed with anger before becoming their parent. And you aren't expected to magically undo years of learning just because you now understand the pattern. But recognizing it gives you more information about what's happening during difficult interactions. If you tend toward flight, you can begin noticing the urge to make your child's anger go away. If you tend toward fight, you can begin recognizing when your own anger rises alongside theirs and you feel the need to regain control. If you tend toward shrink, you can begin noticing when another person's anger leaves you feeling small, silent, or unable to express your own needs. And it's possible to recognize yourself in more than one pattern. You might avoid conflict with one person and become reactive with another. Your response can also change depending on your stress, exhaustion, or the circumstances. The purpose of recognizing these patterns is to understand what happens inside you so that your reactions don't automatically determine how you parent. What Are We Teaching Our Children About Anger? Our children are developing their own relationships with anger, too. They're learning from how we respond when they're upset, how we express our own frustration, how conflict is handled in our family, and what happens when someone disagrees. If anger consistently leads to punishment, withdrawal, intimidation, or dismissal, children can begin developing their own ways of protecting themselves from those experiences. They may learn to hide anger, express it more intensely, or become quiet and compliant when someone else is upset. Of course, children's emotional responses are also influenced by temperament, development, nervous-system capacity, and many other factors. We can't reduce a child's relationship with anger to a single parenting experience. But the emotional environment we create matters. And I want to be clear that allowing anger doesn't mean allowing every behavior that comes with it. Your child can be furious that screen time is over, and screen time can still be over. They can be angry with their sibling, and you can still intervene when someone is being hurt. They can disagree with a homeschool expectation, and you can still lead them through what needs to happen. Anger can exist inside a relationship without becoming something we have to fear, suppress, or control. Learning a Different Relationship With Anger Think about the last time your child became really angry with you. What happened inside you? Did you feel an urgent need to make the anger stop? Did you become angry yourself? Did you go quiet or feel overwhelmed? What did you believe would happen if your child stayed angry? Those questions can reveal a lot about your relationship with anger and what you may have learned about it growing up. And when we begin recognizing our own patterns, we can practice responding with more awareness instead of automatically repeating what feels familiar. Our children will experience anger throughout their lives. They'll be disappointed, frustrated, treated unfairly, challenged, and told no. We have an opportunity to help them develop a relationship with anger in which they can recognize it, express it safely, understand what it's communicating, and remain connected to themselves and others while they experience it. That work begins with examining the relationship we have with anger ourselves. Wondering What's Driving Your Child's Big Behaviors? Understanding your own relationship with anger is an important part of parenting a child with big emotions. But you may still be wondering why your child becomes so angry over certain situations, why their reactions are so intense, or why the strategies you've tried haven't made much difference. That's where my Behavior Blueprint comes in. I take a personalized look at one of your child's challenging behaviors and explore the patterns, developmental factors, needs, and skills that could be contributing to it. You'll receive a highly personalized, written breakdown with recommendations specific to your child, a follow-up call, and seven days of chat support with me as you begin putting things into practice.

Want the resource that goes with this blog? Grab my Curiosity Flashcards for free to help you move from assumptions about your child’s behavior to questions that help you understand what’s actually going on.

You sit down with your child after a difficult morning and say, “Can we talk about what happened?” You have good intentions. You don’t want to yell. You don’t want to punish them. You want to talk it through. So you explain what happened. You tell them why their behavior was a problem. When they disagree with your version of events, you clarify. When they tell you why they were upset, you point out the part they’re missing. When they insist something wasn’t fair, you explain why you made the decision you did. Twenty minutes later, you’ve technically had a conversation. Your child is irritated or shut down, you’re frustrated that they still don’t seem to understand, and absolutely nothing feels resolved. Sometimes we go into a conversation believing we’re trying to communicate when what we’re really trying to do is get our child to see the situation the way we see it. And that changes the entire conversation. What are you trying to accomplish? Last week, we talked about understanding our own feelings and needs instead of making someone else responsible for them . That same awareness matters when we enter a conversation, because what we bring into it affects what happens once it begins. If I enter a conversation needing my child to admit they were wrong, my listening is going to be limited. If I need them to understand why I made the decision I made, I’m going to keep explaining until I feel understood. If I need an apology, I’m going to hear their perspective through the lens of whether they’re taking enough responsibility. And if I’m afraid that changing my mind will undermine my authority, I’m going to have a hard time taking in anything that challenges my original position. I may be using calm words. I may be asking questions. I may genuinely believe I’m trying to work through the problem together. I’m also entering with an outcome already in mind. An empowered conversation starts with knowing your intention without becoming so attached to your agenda that there is no room for the other person. You can intend to understand what happened, repair after you yelled, address an ongoing problem in your homeschool day, or communicate a concern clearly. Your child may still see the situation differently. That doesn’t mean the conversation failed. Sometimes “talking it through” is really lobbying There are plenty of ways we try to convince our children without recognizing that we’re doing it. We repeat ourselves with slightly different wording because surely they’ll understand if we explain it one more time. We bring up three other examples to prove that this is a pattern. We tell them what we think their motives were. We point out what they should have done. We defend our own behavior. We use always and never because the current conflict has pulled every similar conflict into the room with us. We can also minimize their experience: “It wasn’t that big of a deal.” Or we try to prove our interpretation: “You were already angry before I even said anything.” At that point, we’re not very curious about what our child has to say. We’re building a case. This happens easily in parenting because we do have more experience than our children. We often have information they don’t have. We are responsible for making decisions they aren’t ready to make. That responsibility doesn’t mean we’re always right about our child’s motives, feelings, intentions, or experience. Your child can misunderstand part of the situation and still have something important to tell you. You can disagree with their conclusion and still want to understand how they reached it. You can maintain a boundary while listening to why it was difficult for them. If I’m only listening for the opening that lets me prove my point, my child can feel the difference. Taking responsibility for your part Taking responsibility for your own contribution can change the direction of a difficult conversation. “I was getting frustrated, and I started talking over you.” “I kept repeating myself after you told me you understood.” “I raised my voice.” “I made an assumption about why you weren’t starting your work instead of asking what was going on.” Parents can get nervous about this. If I acknowledge my part, will my child use that to avoid responsibility for theirs? Am I making it sound like the whole situation was my fault? Will apologizing weaken my authority? You’re responsible for your behavior, and your child is responsible for theirs. Both can be addressed in the same relationship. Taking responsibility gives your child an experience of what accountability actually looks like. You aren’t asking them to carry your mistake, and you aren’t requiring yourself to carry theirs. This becomes especially important when we want our children to learn repair. Repair isn’t one person accepting all the blame so everyone can move on. We can each look honestly at what happened and what belonged to us. Your feelings and needs belong in the conversation too Understanding your own feelings and needs also changes the way you communicate about them. There’s a difference between saying, “I need you to stop disrespecting me,” and recognizing that you’re feeling hurt and frustrated and that dignity, consideration, or being heard matters deeply to you. There’s a difference between saying, “You make me so angry when you refuse to do your work,” and recognizing that you’re feeling overwhelmed and discouraged and longing for support, effectiveness, or some ease in your homeschool day. When we understand our own experience more clearly, we can talk about it without requiring our child to fix it for us. That also gives us more room to hear what is happening for them. Your child could be overwhelmed by the assignment you thought was reasonable. They could interpret your repeated reminders as pressure. They could be embarrassed that they don’t know how to do something. They could be angry about a limit you set. Hearing their experience doesn’t require you to agree with every part of their interpretation. You’re trying to understand what the experience was like from where they were standing. Not every conversation needs to happen right now Timing matters tremendously when you’re raising a child with big behaviors and emotions. Sometimes we want to process a conflict while our child is still completely overwhelmed by it. We want to know why they did it. We want them to understand what happened. We want an apology. We want to make sure they know what to do next time. And they’re barely capable of participating in the conversation. A child who is highly dysregulated has less access to the language, perspective-taking, flexible thinking, problem-solving, and impulse control that a productive conversation requires. If your child is still screaming, sobbing, hiding, trying to get away, or completely shut down, you probably aren’t going to get their most thoughtful reflection on what went wrong. Waiting isn’t ignoring the problem. The conversation can still happen. The boundary can still be addressed. Repair can still be expected. You’re choosing a time when your child has enough capacity to actually participate. This is also where consent needs some nuance in a parent-child relationship. Your child does not have veto power over every conversation you need to have as their parent. There are safety concerns, family expectations, boundaries, and decisions that you are responsible for addressing. At the same time, forcing a child into a reflective conversation while they’re overwhelmed, shutting down, or unable to engage doesn’t create meaningful communication simply because you got them to sit there. Before starting the conversation, it’s worth considering whether it needs to happen right now and whether both of you are in a place where you can actually participate in it. Know whether you’re making a request or communicating an expectation Eventually, many difficult conversations move toward what happens next, and this is where it helps to be clear about what you’re actually asking of your child. Sometimes you’re making a genuine request. Your child has room to answer, offer another idea, or participate with you in finding a solution. Other times, you’re communicating an expectation or boundary. School still needs to happen. The tablet still needs to be turned off. Your child still cannot hit their sibling. Those decisions don’t become optional simply because you want to communicate respectfully. Confusion happens when we present an expectation as though it’s a request. We ask, “Would you be willing to turn the tablet off?” when turning it off isn’t actually optional. Or we ask our child what they think should happen next when we’ve already decided what we’re willing to accept. Being clear about the difference makes communication more honest. If something isn’t optional, we can say so respectfully. If we’re genuinely inviting our child into the decision or asking them for something, then we need to leave room for their response. There are also plenty of problems where our child can participate in finding the solution. A morning routine keeps falling apart. Schoolwork repeatedly turns into conflict. Siblings are struggling to share a space. Everyone hates the way a particular transition is going. We can come into those conversations with ideas without having to arrive with the entire solution already decided. Your child may tell you something you hadn’t considered. You may realize part of the plan isn’t working. Some pieces may still be yours to decide as the parent. There is room for parental leadership and genuine dialogue in the same conversation. The words aren’t the whole conversation It’s tempting to look for the right script when communication with your child keeps going badly. What should I say? How should I phrase the boundary? What words will make them listen? Words matter. Communication skills matter. There are ways of speaking that invite more connection and ways that create more defensiveness. The most carefully worded script can still carry an agenda. Your child can hear when you’re waiting for them to admit you’re right. They can feel when the question you asked has only one acceptable answer. They can tell when you’re listening so you can respond rather than listening to understand them. An empowered conversation asks us to know what we’re bringing into the conversation, take responsibility for our part, communicate our own experience without blaming, stay curious about theirs, and leave enough space for another human being to have a perspective that doesn’t perfectly match our own. Sometimes you will still make the final decision. Sometimes your child will still be unhappy. Sometimes you’ll finish the conversation without a perfect resolution. Your child is getting experience with communication every time you work through one of these moments together. They’re learning what it feels like to speak honestly, listen to another perspective, disagree, take responsibility, repair, and participate in solving problems with another person. Those are skills they’ll need in relationships for the rest of their lives.

Your child is angry because you said no. They’re crying because something didn’t go the way they expected. They’re anxious about something that seems completely manageable to you. They’re frustrated with their schoolwork and insisting they can’t do it. They’re disappointed about a change in plans and having a much bigger reaction than you expected. And before you’ve had much time to think about it, you’re already doing something with their feelings. You’re reassuring them. Explaining. Problem-solving. Reminding them why the boundary exists. Pointing out the bright side. Trying to help them calm down. Maybe you’re getting frustrated yourself because you’ve been talking about this for twenty minutes and nothing you say seems to be helping. We spend a lot of time talking about teaching children emotional regulation, but many of us entered parenthood without having much experience just being with an emotion ourselves. We learned to stop crying. To suppress big emotions deemed “too much.” To “get over it.” Told to just be grateful for what we had. Made to think logically about the situation. Told to go somewhere else until we could behave appropriately again. We may have even had loving parents who genuinely wanted to help us feel better (or rather, help us “get past” the emotion.) They simply didn’t have many emotional tools themselves. So now we’re raising children with big feelings while learning some of this alongside them. What does it actually mean to feel something? Marc Brackett, author of Permission to Feel , makes a distinction between intellectualizing our feelings and actually experiencing them. And most of us are really good at the intellectual part. We can explain EXACTLY why we’re upset. I’m frustrated because we’re already behind today, and I told him three times to get his math book, and now he’s arguing about the first problem. We can analyze what happened. We can tell the story. We can identify who did what and why we think they did it. Meanwhile, our jaw is clenched. Our chest feels tight. Our shoulders have crept toward our ears. Our stomach feels unsettled. We have an intense urge to make this interaction end. The feeling is actually happening in our body before we’ve built the story in our head. That physical experience IS part of feeling, and we have gotten really good at ignoring those feelings for the sake of logic. This is where the first part of the F-E-E-L process begins: Focus on the physical sensation of the feeling. Not doing something about it, not intellectualizing it. Just noticing what is happening inside of you; noticing the signals your body is sending you. This connects to what we talked about recently with the nervous system thermometer. Your body is constantly giving you information. The tight jaw, racing heart, heat in your face, heaviness in your chest, or the urge to get away are part of your experience of the moment. Before we can become curious about what an emotion is communicating, we have to be able to notice that we’re having it. Feelings can be uncomfortable without becoming emergencies This is where parenting can get particularly challenging. Our child’s feelings create feelings in us. Your child is devastated, and you feel an immediate pull to make them feel better. Your child is anxious, and suddenly you’re attempting to settle their anxiety by focusing on the positive. Your child is angry with you, and your own body begins preparing for conflict. Your child says, “I hate you!” and now you’re thinking about whether you’re doing enough, whether homeschooling is working, whether they’re learning what they need to learn, and whether you’ve made the wrong decision. Their emotional experience has now become yours too. When we’re uncomfortable with what we’re feeling, we can become very motivated to change what our child is feeling. We reassure. We explain. We tell them why it isn’t as bad as they think. We solve the problem. We defend our decision. We try to convince them that everything is okay. And of course, there are times when children need reassurance, information, help solving a problem, or our perspective. The question is whether we’re offering those things because that’s what our child needs or because their emotion has become difficult for us to sit with. The second part of FEEL is Embrace this moment as a temporary teacher, here to communicate. An emotion can be uncomfortable and still be allowed to exist. Your child can be disappointed that the answer is no. They can be angry about having to stop playing and start school. They can feel embarrassed about getting an answer wrong. They can be frustrated that something is harder than they expected. You can feel irritated, worried, overwhelmed, disappointed, or angry too. We don’t have to make every feeling disappear before we can decide what happens next. Putting words to what’s happening Once we’ve noticed the physical experience and allowed ourselves to stay with it, we can begin putting language to it. The next part of FEEL is Expand into the left brain: invite three feeling words. Maybe what initially felt like “I’m so mad” becomes frustrated, overwhelmed, and discouraged. Maybe what looked like irritation has some anxiety underneath it. Maybe you’re angry, embarrassed, and worried. Having more precise language can help us understand the experience we’re actually having instead of immediately acting from the first emotion that gets our attention. This matters with our kids too. A child who says, “This is STUPID!” during math may be frustrated. They may also be embarrassed that they don’t understand it, worried that they won’t be able to do it, or disappointed because something they expected to be easy feels hard. A child screaming about having to leave the park may be angry. They can also be disappointed, sad, tired, or overwhelmed by the transition. We don’t need to interrogate children until we uncover the perfect feeling word. We’re helping them develop a richer understanding of their emotional world over time, and that begins with adults who are willing to be curious about emotions rather than immediately trying to make them stop. What is this feeling communicating? The final part of FEEL is Label the underlying need or needs. Feelings carry information. Anger can tell us something feels unfair, blocked, threatening, or out of our control. Frustration can tell us we’re struggling with something that matters to us. Anxiety can point toward uncertainty, safety, predictability, or a need for more information or support. Sadness can show us that something mattered and we’re experiencing a loss. The need underneath a feeling doesn’t automatically determine what happens next. Your child can need autonomy and still not get to decide whether school happens today. They can want connection while you also need ten minutes without someone touching you. They can desperately want another hour of video games while the boundary remains that gaming is finished for the day. Understanding the feeling and need gives us information about what’s happening inside the person experiencing it. And when we understand that, we have more options than simply reacting to the emotion itself. If I realize that underneath my frustration with my child’s schoolwork is anxiety that they’re falling behind, I can recognize how easily that fear could make me push harder than the situation calls for. If I realize that I’m feeling angry because my child’s refusal is bringing up a need for cooperation and support, I can acknowledge that need without turning their behavior into evidence that they don’t respect me. If I recognize that I’m overwhelmed and need a few minutes of quiet, I can take my own need seriously instead of expecting my child to stop having feelings so that I can feel better. Your child is learning from how feelings are treated in your home Our children are learning what emotions mean long before they have sophisticated language for any of this. They’re learning whether anger makes people pull away. Whether sadness needs to be fixed quickly. Whether anxiety is something to be ashamed of. Whether disappointment means a boundary will change. Whether another person can stay connected to them while they’re having a feeling that is loud, messy, inconvenient, or uncomfortable. And they’re watching what we do with our own feelings too. They don’t need to see a parent who is calm all the time. They need experience with emotions as a normal part of being human: emotions that can be felt, understood, expressed responsibly, and moved through. That includes the emotions we would rather not have. We can feel anger without yelling. We can feel overwhelmed and recognize that we need support. We can feel anxious without allowing the anxiety to make every decision for us. Our children can be furious about a boundary while we remain confident in holding it. The feeling gets to exist. We still decide what we do with it. For many of us, that is something we’re learning in adulthood because no one taught it to us when we were children. So the next time your child’s emotion creates that immediate urge to fix, explain, reassure, correct, or make it stop, pay attention to what is happening in you too. Your body may notice it before you have words for it. And perhaps there is something there worth listening to.

One of the most frustrating things about parenting a child with big behaviors and emotions is seeing them do something successfully one day and then watching them seem completely incapable of doing the exact same thing the next. They remembered the entire morning routine yesterday without you saying a word. Today, they’ve walked past their shoes three times while you keep reminding them to put them on. They sat down and finished their math independently on Monday. On Wednesday, getting started on the first problem turns into an argument. Their plans changed unexpectedly yesterday, and they rolled with it. But today, a small change to the afternoon schedule sends them into a meltdown. Once you’ve seen your child do something, it’s easy to think, Okay. So I know you CAN do this. And they can. The part that gets confusing is why they can do it successfully one day and struggle so much with it the next. Understanding a little bit about your child’s developing brain can help explain that inconsistency. Your Child’s Brain Is Doing a Lot More Than You Realize When we think about brain development, it’s easy to picture a child simply learning more information as they grow. They learn to read. They learn multiplication. They learn how to tie their shoes and remember their address and tell time. A huge amount of development throughout childhood also involves your child’s growing ability to manage themselves, their emotions, their attention, and all of the information and demands coming at them throughout the day. The brain is made up of different areas that contribute to different functions. The temporal lobes are involved in things like language, hearing, memory, and emotion. The parietal lobes help process and integrate sensory information about the body and environment. The occipital lobes are heavily involved in visual processing, and the cerebellum plays important roles in movement, coordination, and balance. The frontal lobes, including the prefrontal cortex, are especially relevant when we look at many of the behaviors parents are navigating every day. The prefrontal cortex is heavily involved in planning, organizing, problem-solving, attention, working memory, impulse control, flexible thinking, considering consequences, regulating emotions, delaying gratification, and shifting from what we want to do toward what a situation requires from us. Think about how many times you expect your child to use some combination of those skills before lunch. They have to stop playing and begin school. Remember what they need for the lesson. Follow several directions. Ignore the sibling making noise beside them. Keep working when something becomes difficult. Tolerate making a mistake. Remember what you taught them yesterday. Wait while you help someone else. Change plans when something unexpected happens. Think before saying the angry thing that just popped into their head. That is an enormous amount of executive functioning, and these abilities are developing throughout childhood and adolescence. “But I Know They Can Do It” A developing skill isn’t an absent skill. Your 8-year-old can demonstrate impulse control. Your 10-year-old can plan ahead. Your 6-year-old can solve a problem. Your 9-year-old can regulate their emotions. Your child can remember a three-step direction, organize their school supplies, think about how their actions affected someone else, tolerate disappointment, and stop themselves before doing something impulsive. And then there will be times when they don’t. We tend to respond differently once we’ve seen evidence that our child is capable of something. If we genuinely believe a child cannot do something yet, we’re usually pretty willing to support them. Once we’ve watched them do it successfully, their inconsistency can start to look intentional. You’re not trying. You’re being lazy. You weren’t listening. You know better. You’re perfectly capable of doing this yourself. When we interpret that inconsistency as a choice, we can easily respond to a child as though they’re refusing to use a skill that may still require support. A child being able to demonstrate a skill under one set of conditions doesn’t tell us that they’ve mastered it across every environment, emotional state, level of difficulty, or amount of support. Think about how different it is to organize something you’re excited about versus something you find boring or difficult. A child might spend an hour planning exactly how they’re going to build something in Minecraft and then seem completely incapable of figuring out what they need to bring to the table for science. That gives us useful information about the skill. There are conditions under which your child can use it more easily and conditions that place much greater demands on their developing brain. Motivation, stress, distractions, fatigue, familiarity, cognitive load, and the amount of support available can all affect what your child is able to manage in that particular moment. Instead of stopping at I know you can do this, we can start getting curious about when, where, and under what conditions they can do it. What Should We Expect From a Developing Brain? Learning about brain development can bring up a very reasonable question for parents: So what am I actually supposed to expect from my child? If impulse control is still developing, you still need to teach your child what to do with an impulse. If executive functioning is developing, your child still needs opportunities to plan, organize, remember, and take responsibility. If emotional regulation is developing, your child still needs to learn what to do with anger, disappointment, frustration, and overwhelm. We can expect children to practice planning, organization, problem-solving, emotional regulation, and impulse control while also recognizing that developing skills will still require support, reminders, modeling, and repeated practice. If your child is developing the ability to organize their work, they need opportunities to organize things. If they’re developing problem-solving skills, they need opportunities to solve problems. If they’re learning to tolerate frustration, they need experiences with frustration. If they’re developing impulse control, they need boundaries and repeated opportunities to practice stopping, waiting, thinking, and trying again. How much support they need while doing those things will change as the skills develop. There will be areas where your child is ready for you to step back and allow them to carry more responsibility. There will be other areas where expecting complete independence leaves them repeatedly failing at something their brain still needs help managing. This is something we’re constantly adjusting as parents: What can my child meaningfully participate in right now? Where can I step back? Where do they still need structure, modeling, reminders, or co-regulation? And that answer is going to change as they grow. Your Response Becomes Part of the Practice Children develop these capacities through years of using them. Your child gets thousands of opportunities throughout childhood to wait, remember, plan, organize, recover, solve problems, tolerate disappointment, change course, consider another person’s perspective, and try again. A lot of that practice happens in relationship with us. Your child may not be able to solve a problem independently yet, so you help them think it through without immediately solving it for them. They may struggle to organize a multi-step assignment, so you provide enough structure for them to participate in the planning rather than taking over the entire process. They may become deeply upset about a boundary, and you continue holding the boundary while helping them move through the emotions that come with it. As their capacity grows, the amount and type of support you provide can change too. Something that once required you to be heavily involved may eventually need only a reminder, and later your child may manage it independently. We can’t demand our child’s capacity into existence. Children need opportunities to use developing skills while they still have access to the support that helps them succeed with those skills. And Then There’s Their Nervous System This adds another layer to what we’ve been talking about with the nervous system thermometer . Last week, we talked about how stress changes a child’s access to skills they already have. Now we can consider the developmental capacity underneath those skills too. When your child is struggling, ask: How developed is this skill in the first place? How much access does my child have to that skill right now? Imagine a child whose impulse control is still developing. When they’re regulated, they have better access to the impulse control they currently possess. As they become increasingly frustrated, overwhelmed, angry, scared, or dysregulated, using that developing skill becomes harder. So when a child is at the top of their thermometer and we’re saying, You know better. Think before you act. Use your words. Make a better choice, we may be asking them to rely on a skill that is still developing while their nervous system is also making that skill harder to access. If a child hits when they become overwhelmed, we still address the hitting while also looking underneath it. Were they so dysregulated that they lost access to impulse control? Is impulse control itself still a skill that needs more development and support? Was there an unmet need contributing to what happened? Those answers help us understand what needs attention beyond simply stopping the behavior. All behavior is communication. Behavior can tell us about dysregulation, an unmet need, a missing or developing skill, and often some combination of those things. Lo oking underneath the behavior gives us more information about what our child is struggling to manage and what still needs support, teaching, practice, or development. Your Child Is Building a Brain I think we can forget this because we live with our children every day. We see how smart they are. We hear their surprisingly mature observations. We watch them explain complicated ideas and remember things we’ve completely forgotten. And then we’re baffled when that same child cannot find the shoes that are directly in front of them or falls apart because their brother touched their pencil. A child can be incredibly intelligent while still having age-appropriate limitations in planning, working memory, impulse control, emotional regulation, flexible thinking, organization, and all the other skills their developing brain is working on. We don’t have to wait for those systems to fully mature before asking children to use them. Childhood gives them years of opportunities to practice these skills with gradually increasing independence. So when you find yourself thinking, I know you can do this, get more specific about what “can” means for your child right now. How consistently can they do it? Under what conditions? How much support do they still need? What happens to this skill when they’re tired, frustrated, distracted, or overwhelmed? The answers give you a much clearer picture of what you can reasonably expect your child to manage independently right now, where they still need support, and which skills need more time and opportunities to develop.

You probably know what the top of your child’s nervous system looks like. Is it screaming, hitting, throwing things, running away, sobbing, slamming a door, or saying things they would never say when they’re calm? Maybe your child goes in the opposite direction and completely shuts down. They stop talking. They hide. They curl up somewhere and want everyone to leave them alone. When you’re raising a child with big behaviors and emotions, you get pretty familiar with this version of them. But what happened before that? Not the thing that caused the meltdown. I mean what was happening in their body and behavior as their nervous system was gradually moving from okay, to a little stressed, to overwhelmed, to completely unable to cope. And while all of that was happening in your child, what was happening in you? Because there are two nervous systems at play during a meltdown: theirs AND yours. Understanding both of them can completely change what you notice about your hardest parenting moments. Think of Your Nervous System Like a Thermometer One of the tools I learned long before parent coaching was a nervous system thermometer. Imagine a thermometer that starts in deep green at the bottom and gradually moves through yellow, orange, red, and finally white at the top. Deep green is where you feel calm, present, connected, and able to engage with what’s happening around you. As you move up the thermometer, your body begins giving you signs that something is changing. You may feel slightly on edge at yellow. By orange, your jaw might be clenched, the noise around you may suddenly feel unbearable, or anger may be building. At red, your breathing might become shallow, your chest tight, your thoughts faster, and your ability to think clearly much smaller. At the very top- once you’ve hit white, BOOM. Capacity- gone. Ability to think- gone. Reaction is all that is happening. And that top level doesn’t look the same for everyone. While we tend to picture nervous system dysregulation as an explosion, it can also look like shutting down, withdrawing, going silent, disconnecting, freezing, or feeling like you just cannot engage anymore. The same is true for our kids. You Probably Know Your Child’s Red. But What Does Their Yellow Look Like? If your child has big behaviors , you could probably describe their red or white level in great detail. The harder question is: What does yellow look like? Maybe your child starts getting silly. They ask the same question over and over. They become more sensitive to what their sibling is doing. Their body starts moving more. They suddenly need everything done a very particular way. They begin arguing about little things that usually wouldn’t bother them. For another child, yellow might get quieter. They stop responding as much. They move away from everyone. They start saying “I don’t know” to questions they could answer earlier. And in homeschool, you may see it show up in the work. Your child knew how to do these math problems yesterday, but now every question is “I don’t know.” They start making jokes. They wander away from the table. They complain that their pencil feels weird. They erase one letter six times. They argue about whether the assignment is necessary. It’s easy to see each of those things as a separate behavior that needs correcting. But the thermometer gives us a vital piece of information: Where is my child’s nervous system right now? Likely that behavior you are seeing is one of their early signs that their capacity is changing. The meltdown at the top of the thermometer gets our attention, but learning what happens on the way there gives us a lot more room to intervene, teach, and regulate than after the meltdown is already under way. Your Child Has Different Capacity at Different Places on the Thermometer This is where the thermometer connects to something I talk about constantly with parents: knowing something and being able to access it are different. Your child can understand a boundary at green. They can know how to take turns. They can know hitting hurts. They can know how to ask for a break. They can know how to solve the math problem. They can know the breathing exercise you have practiced tons of times. But as their nervous system climbs, access to those skills changes. Yet we are stuck in this loop where we keep asking for the skill with more intensity. “You KNOW this.” “We already talked about this.” “Use your words.” “Take a breath.” “Just tell me what you need.” “Stop and think.” So we’re actually asking a child to use skills that are getting harder for them to access as their nervous system becomes more overwhelmed. The thermometer helps us stop looking at behavior as though their ability and capacity should always be the same. Your child at green and your child at red are the same child with the same knowledge. But they do not have the same access to that knowledge in both states. That’s an important distinction when we’re deciding what this moment actually requires from us. But Where Are You on Your Thermometer? This is the part parents often miss. We become incredibly skilled at watching our children. You hear the change in their voice. You see their body getting restless. You notice the refusal beginning. You hear the way they just answered their sibling and think, Oh boy. You know exactly where this is headed. But while you’re watching their nervous system, yours is responding too. Imagine you sit down for math. Your child is already tired. Three problems in, they start complaining. They erase a problem aggressively and say they can’t do it. Their thermometer is moving. You feel the first little wave of irritation. We just started. Then they push the paper away. Now you’re thinking about everything else you need to accomplish today. You can feel your jaw tighten. They say, “I’m NOT doing this!” Your voice gets firmer. “You absolutely are. We are not doing this again today.” Now there are two thermometers climbing. Your child has less access to flexibility, problem-solving, language, impulse control, and regulation. And so do you. That doesn’t make you a bad parent. It makes you a human being with a nervous system. But your nervous system is part of what happens next. Your First Warning Sign Probably Isn’t Yelling This is where I think the thermometer becomes incredibly useful for parents. If the first sign you notice in yourself is, I yelled, you noticed yourself very late in the process. What happened at yellow? Maybe your shoulders rose, your jaw tightened, you started talking faster, you began repeating yourself, you suddenly became very rigid about something being completed exactly the way you planned. Maybe you felt hot, or the television, the dog barking, and your other child asking for a snack suddenly felt ten times louder. And you think, “ I cannot deal with this today.” That is information. Your body has been communicating with you throughout the entire interaction. Learning your thermometer means becoming familiar enough with those earlier cues that you can recognize, I'm moving. And then you can start DOING something about it. We Don’t Need to Keep Everyone in Green I want to be careful here, because nervous system work can very quickly become another parenting standard that you are measuring by perfection. The goal is not to keep yourself calm all day, and your job is not to keep your child in green. Humans, adults and children alike, are supposed to experience frustration, anger, disappointment, anxiety, sadness, excitement, overwhelm, and stress. Moving up the thermometer isn’t failure, and regulation doesn’t mean staying in the green all the time. What we’re developing is awareness of what is happening in our bodies, how our capacity changes as our nervous systems become more activated, and what those shifts communicate. That awareness gives you information you didn’t have when the entire interaction was “ The meltdown came out of nowhere and I finally lost it.” Your Child’s Nervous System Will Affect Yours This is also where things get uncomfortable. Your child’s dysregulation can activate you. Their crying might create an intense urge to fix whatever is wrong. Their anger might make your body brace for a fight. Their refusal might trigger fear that you’re becoming too permissive. Their yelling might make you want to get louder. Their inability to complete schoolwork might bring up anxiety about whether they’re falling behind. Their meltdown might make every part of your body scream, MAKE THIS STOP. And when we don’t recognize what is happening inside of us, that activation can start driving our parenting. We lecture. We threaten. We over-explain. We rescue. We push harder. We withdraw. We try to make the feeling disappear because we cannot tolerate being in the room with it anymore. This is one reason learning your own nervous system matters so much when you’re parenting a child with big behaviors and emotions. You aren't observing their thermometer from outside the situation. You're in it with them. Start Watching Both Thermometers The next time things begin going sideways, see what you notice before you get to the hardest part. What does your child look like in green? What changes first? What does yellow look like for them? What tells you they’re moving toward orange? And then turn that same curiosity toward yourself. What happens in your body first? What thoughts start showing up? What changes in your voice? What starts feeling harder to tolerate? You don’t need to perfectly identify five levels in the middle of a meltdown. Start learning the patterns. The more familiar you become with both thermometers, the easier it becomes to understand what is happening before you reach the point where everyone has lost access to the skills they needed most.  The meltdown may feel like the main character, but the nervous system story started much earlier.

You love your child. You like being with them. You want them to know they can come to you when they need help. And also... Sometimes you would really, really like them to need you a little less. They want you to sit beside them while they do something you know they're capable of doing. They follow you into the kitchen while you're trying to make lunch because they need to tell you one more thing. They call you back after you've tucked them into bed. They want help solving a problem you know they could probably figure out. They have another enormous feeling about something that seems very small to you, and you can feel yourself thinking, I cannot do this again. If you're homeschooling a child with big behaviors and emotions, this can feel especially relentless because there often isn't much natural separation in your day. You're their parent, their teacher, the person helping them regulate, the one working through sibling conflict, the one they find when something feels hard...and sometimes it feels like there is always someone needing something from you. So when you hear yourself thinking, Why do you need me for EVERYTHING? , I'm not interested in making you feel guilty for it. I'm interested in getting curious about it. When being needed starts to feel like too much Sometimes our children really do ask more of us than we have available in that moment. Parents have needs too. You need quiet. You need space. You need to finish making dinner without answering seventeen questions. You may need a break after spending an hour helping your child through a meltdown. Secure attachment doesn't require you to be endlessly available or to abandon your own needs every time your child has one. But there can be another layer here that's worth noticing. Some of us become particularly uncomfortable when our children depend on us in ways we think they should have outgrown. You're nine. You can do this yourself. You know how to calm down. You don't need me to sit here. Why are we still talking about this? You're okay. Sometimes we're accurately recognizing a skill our child is capable of using. And sometimes we may be bumping into our own discomfort with being needed. That's where attachment can give us a really interesting lens. We learned something about needing people, too When we talk about attachment, we're really talking about what we learned through relationships. Some people grew up with caregivers who were comfortable with emotions, closeness, comfort and dependence. Their needs could be expressed and responded to. They could move toward their caregiver when they needed support and gradually move away again when they felt ready. That's part of what we see in secure attachment. But some of us learned something different. Maybe strong emotions weren't particularly welcome in your family. Maybe you were praised for being mature, easy or independent. Maybe the adults around you were uncomfortable with vulnerability or weren't emotionally available themselves. Maybe you learned to handle things on your own because asking for help didn't reliably result in connection. You may not even look back on your childhood and think anything was particularly wrong. You may simply think, That's just how we were. We weren't an emotional family. And you adapted. You learned how to keep going. You became independent. Maybe you're good in a crisis. Maybe you don't need a lot from other people. You give people space and don't hover. You may be very capable of looking at a difficult situation logically and figuring out what needs to happen next. There are strengths in that. But those same adaptations can sometimes make another person's dependence or emotional intensity uncomfortable. This is one way insecure avoidant attachment patterns can show up in parenting, not necessarily as a parent who doesn't love or care about their child, but as a parent whose system has become very comfortable with independence and much less comfortable with need. And then you get handed a child who needs you A LOT. “They're too needy” may be worth getting curious about Maybe your child follows you everywhere. Maybe they want you beside them during school even though you know they can read the directions themselves. Maybe they get overwhelmed and can't seem to access all those coping skills you've practiced unless you're there helping them. Maybe they're eleven and still want you nearby when they're upset. Or maybe every feeling seems to require a conversation, and by 3:00 you're thinking, Can we please just move on? It's easy to start viewing the need itself as the problem. They're clingy. They're too dependent. They're being dramatic. They need to learn to self-soothe. They need to be more independent. And sometimes children absolutely do need support developing skills they can eventually use more independently. But there's a question I think is worth asking before we rush them there: Is my child actually ready to carry this without me, or am I uncomfortable that they still need me? Those are two very different things. A child can technically know how to do something and still need support accessing that skill when they're tired, frustrated, overwhelmed or dysregulated. Your nine-year-old may absolutely know how to complete their math independently. That doesn't mean their request for you to sit nearby is automatically manipulation or unnecessary dependence. Your child may know several ways to calm their body. That doesn't mean they will always be able to access them without another regulated person nearby. And honestly, this doesn't end when childhood does. Adults still call friends. We still ask our spouses to sit with us when something hurts. We still need reassurance. We still sometimes know exactly what to do and find that doing it feels easier with someone beside us. Healthy independence was never supposed to mean I don't need anybody. We can accidentally hurry children toward independence This is where I think things can get particularly interesting for parents. Independence sounds like an unquestionably good goal. We want children who can solve problems, manage responsibilities, advocate for themselves, regulate their emotions, make decisions and eventually function without us managing their lives. Of course we do. But sometimes, without realizing it, we start measuring progress by how little our child needs us. They did the whole lesson without me. They finally stopped coming out of their room every time they were upset. They didn't cry when I left. They handled it themselves. Again, any one of those things could represent healthy growth. But the question is whether our child is becoming more independent because they feel increasingly capable or because they've learned that needing someone is unwelcome. Those can look surprisingly similar from the outside. Secure attachment gives children room for both dependence and independence. They can move out into the world, try things, struggle, develop competence and discover, I can do this. And they can come back. I need help. I'm overwhelmed. Can you stay? I don't know what to do. The eventual goal isn't a person who never needs another person. It's someone who can trust themselves and participate in relationships where people can depend on one another. But what about when I genuinely need space? is important, because I don't want this conversation to turn into one more message telling parents, especially mothers that if their child needs something, they should somehow find more of themselves to give. That's not secure attachment either. One of the things we see in secure attachment is the ability to recognize that both people in the relationship have needs. Your child may need connection. You may need ten minutes without someone touching you. Your child may want you beside them for every math problem. You may know that you cannot sit there for the next forty-five minutes. Your child may desperately want to process what happened right now. You may be too activated yourself to have that conversation well. Both experiences matter. Secure attachment doesn't require you to erase yourself so your child never experiences disappointment, waiting or separation. In fact, part of healthy relationship is learning that another person can love us deeply and still have boundaries, limitations and needs of their own. The difference is that we don't have to make our child's need wrong in order to honor ours. Maybe you can't sit through the entire assignment, but you can help them get started and check back. Maybe you genuinely need space after a hard interaction, and you can communicate that rather than shutting down or disappearing emotionally. Maybe you can't listen to the entire Minecraft story while you're trying to get everyone out the door, but their desire to tell you about it doesn't have to become annoying or ridiculous simply because this isn't a good time. Sometimes the answer really is, I need some space right now. And sometimes the deeper work is noticing how quickly we want space whenever someone else's emotions, dependence or vulnerability gets close to us. You don't need to diagnose yourself I don't want you finishing this article wondering, Oh no. Do I have avoidant attachment? Did I give my child avoidant attachment? That's not particularly useful. Attachment patterns aren't character judgments, and individual behaviors don't diagnose an attachment style. A child who wants to be alone after a meltdown may need sensory space. A child who doesn't want a hug may simply not want to be touched. Neurodivergence, temperament, development, stress and the context of the moment all matter. What is useful is noticing patterns. What happens inside you when your child needs comfort? What happens when they need more help than you think they should? Do you find yourself quickly moving toward logic, fixing or positivity when emotions become uncomfortable? Does your child's dependence sometimes feel suffocating? Do you feel an urgency to teach them to handle things on their own? And maybe most importantly: Is there room in your relationship for your child to need you without that need becoming something they have to outgrow as quickly as possible? Because secure attachment isn't raising a child who never needs you. It's helping them experience enough safety in relationship that they can venture farther and farther out into their own lives knowing that connection is still available when they need to come back. And for some of us, creating that kind of relationship with our children may also mean learning something we didn't fully learn ourselves: There’s nothing wrong with needing, or even wanting, people. Needing people is part of being human.

Long before you became a parent, you were learning what parenting was supposed to look like. You learned who got to make decisions. You learned whether children were allowed to disagree with adults. You learned what happened when a child became angry, made a mistake, broke a rule, or said no. You learned whether adults apologized. You learned whether children's feelings changed anything, whether rules required explanations, and whether being a "good kid" meant being quiet, agreeable, obedient, independent, successful or something else entirely. You probably weren't consciously studying any of this. You were just growing up. But those experiences gave you some of your earliest lessons about power in relationships. And now, years later, you're the adult in the relationship. We all learned something about who was supposed to have the power One way we can understand these early experiences is through a continuum of power over, power under, and power with . Power over is closely associated with authoritarian parenting. The adult holds the power, and the child is expected to comply. There may be very little room for the child's perspective, feelings, needs, or developmental capacity to influence what happens because the adult's authority settles the question. You may recognize phrases like, "Because I said so," "Don't talk back to me," or "Children should be seen and not heard." Mistakes may have been met with punishment, lectures, criticism, shame, or consequences designed primarily to make sure the behavior didn't happen again. That doesn't mean every parent who ever said "because I said so" had an authoritarian household, and it certainly doesn't mean we need to go back through our childhoods assigning labels to every interaction. We're talking about patterns. At the other end is power under, which can show up as permissive or, in some circumstances, uninvolved parenting. Here the adult may struggle to confidently occupy the leadership role at all. Boundaries can become very loose or disappear because conflict feels unbearable. A parent may silence their own needs, avoid upsetting the child, or allow the child to make decisions they aren't developmentally ready to carry. Sometimes this happens because a parent doesn't feel confident in their own leadership, especially when holding a boundary or making a decision their child doesn't like creates conflict. Sometimes they're exhausted or unsupported. Sometimes maintaining peace feels more manageable than staying present through a child's anger or disappointment. And sometimes people who experienced a lot of power over as children become very uncomfortable exercising power at all when they become parents. They know exactly what they don't want to recreate. They're less sure what belongs in its place. When you're trying not to become your parents This is where I think things get particularly interesting for those of us trying to parent differently than we were raised. Maybe you remember what it felt like when your opinion didn't matter, so you are deeply committed to listening to your child. Maybe punishment or shame was common in your home, so you don't want your child afraid of you. Maybe emotions weren't welcome, so you've worked hard to create a home where feelings can be expressed. Those can be really meaningful shifts. But sometimes, in our determination not to use power over our children, we become hesitant to use our power at all. Your child doesn't want to leave somewhere, and suddenly holding the boundary feels controlling. They're furious about a screen limit, and you start wondering whether maintaining it means you're ignoring their needs. They don't want to do something you've asked, and you're caught between, I don't want to force them and I also don't think an eight-year-old should be making this decision. You can end up bouncing between the two ends of the continuum. You hold everything tightly until the fighting becomes unbearable, then give in. You accommodate and accommodate until you're resentful or overwhelmed, then suddenly become much firmer than you intended. Neither position feels quite right, but the alternative can be hard to imagine when the models most familiar to us are adult controls child or child controls situation . There is another way to think about power. Power with doesn't mean giving up our leadership role Power with can sometimes get confused with stepping out of the leadership role altogether, letting the child decide, avoiding limits they don't like, or believing that honoring a child's voice means we can't make a decision they disagree with. But our children need our leadership. They are in our care, and we have a responsibility to protect them, advocate for them, create appropriate structure and boundaries, teach and guide them, and support needs and skills they aren't yet able to manage entirely on their own. Power with doesn't ask us to give up that leadership. It asks us to consider how we use it . Good leaders don't need to control or micromanage the people they're leading. They create safety, provide direction and support, listen, make thoughtful decisions, and help the people in their care become increasingly capable of thinking, problem-solving, and making decisions for themselves. Our child's perspective can matter without determining every decision. Their feelings can be welcomed without changing every boundary. We can be curious about what's driving a behavior while still addressing the behavior. We can recognize developmental limitations while continuing to teach skills and hold appropriate expectations. Sometimes leadership means holding a boundary our child really doesn't like. Sometimes it means intervening for safety or making a decision because that responsibility belongs to us. And sometimes good leadership means listening to our child, considering information we didn't have before, and realizing that we need to change course. We can say no without needing our child to agree that our no is reasonable. We can also acknowledge when we got something wrong, take accountability, and repair. Power with makes room for both people in the relationship while keeping the parent grounded in their responsibility to lead. We're not using our leadership to control who our child is or make every situation easier for us. We're using it to support, guide, protect, and help them develop the skills they'll gradually take ownership of themselves. What feels normal isn't necessarily what you've consciously chosen Last week, we talked about determining the values you actually want guiding your parenting. This is one reason that work matters. You can consciously decide that mutual respect is important to you and still feel something flare inside you when your child says, "No." You can value emotional honesty and still have a strong urge to shut down your child's anger. You can believe children deserve explanations and still hear, "Because I said so!" come out of your mouth when you're exhausted. You can value collaboration and then panic that you've become too permissive when your child doesn't immediately cooperate. Sometimes there's a gap between what we've consciously decided matters and what our bodies and brains learned through years of experience. What we grew up with often feels normal long before we've decided whether we agree with it. And the opposite can happen too. If you were hurt by the way power was used in your childhood, anything that resembles authority may feel uncomfortable even healthy, grounded authority. So when you notice yourself struggling with your child's refusal, disagreement, anger, or need for support, the question isn't always simply, What parenting strategy should I use here? There may be an older question underneath it: What did I learn was supposed to happen when a child behaved like this? Fear has a way of pulling us toward the ends Power over and power under can both become particularly tempting when we're afraid. We worry that our child won't be able to function in the world. That we're coddling them. That they'll become entitled. That other people are judging our parenting. That we're losing control. That we're failing them somehow. Fear can make control feel necessary. But fear can also make conflict feel intolerable. One parent responds to, I'm losing control of this situation, by tightening their grip and trying harder to control the child. Another responds to that same feeling by backing away from a boundary, silencing their own needs, or handing a decision to the child because staying present in the conflict feels overwhelming. And the same parent can do both at different times. That's why I don't think these categories are particularly useful when they're treated as identities. I'm a power-with parent. My mother was a power-over parent. That parent at co-op is permissive. Human beings are more complicated than that. These are patterns we can move into and out of depending on our stress, support, self-awareness, history, skills, and what is happening in the relationship. You may recognize all three of them in yourself over the course of a single day. The goal isn't to prove that you always operate from power with. It's to become better at recognizing when you don't. You don't have to erase where you came from to choose where you're going Understanding how you were raised isn't about putting your childhood on trial. Your parents had histories too. They were influenced by their families, cultures, communities, beliefs, fears, resources, and whatever understanding of children was available to them. You may look back and feel tremendous gratitude for much of what you received while still recognizing patterns you don't want to continue. You may also recognize things that hurt. Both can be true. What matters now is that you're no longer the child simply absorbing someone else's model of what parenting is supposed to be. You get to examine it. You get to notice what you want to carry forward, what you want to leave behind, and what you may need to learn because it was never modeled for you. And when you catch yourself moving toward power over or power under, you don't need to turn that observation into another reason to criticize yourself. You can get curious. What feels threatened right now? What am I afraid will happen if I don't control this? What makes holding this boundary feel so uncomfortable? What did adults do when I behaved like this? Because power with isn't a parenting identity you earn once you understand the concept. It's something we practice and return to. Sometimes that means loosening our grip enough to hear our child. Sometimes it means finding our footing and confidently using our leadership to hold a boundary, make a decision, or provide the structure and support our child needs from us. And sometimes it means realizing that the parenting response that feels most familiar to us isn't necessarily the one we want to keep choosing.

If I asked you what matters most to you as a parent, you could probably give me an answer pretty quickly. You might say connection. Respect. Kindness. Faith. Independence. Responsibility. Honesty. Family. Maybe you want your child to grow into someone who is compassionate, confident, resilient, or willing to stand up for what they believe in. But then Tuesday morning happens. Your child refuses to start the lesson you planned. They snap at you when you remind them of their chores. Their sibling walks through the room and suddenly they're arguing about something that seems completely unrelated. You're looking at the clock because you need to leave in forty minutes, the lesson still isn't finished, and now you're wondering whether you need to be firmer because lately it feels like nobody listens until you've asked five times. In those moments, the question of what matters to us can become much less clear. Not because we've stopped caring about our values, but because parenting rarely asks us to live them under ideal conditions. It asks us to live them when we're tired, embarrassed, worried, rushed, frustrated, or staring at a child whose behavior is bringing up every fear we have about whether we're doing this right. We're always parenting from something Every parenting decision comes from somewhere. When you decide that a behavior needs a boundary, you're using something to determine that the boundary matters. When you decide to give your child more autonomy, you're making a judgment about what matters. When you require an apology, change a homeschool expectation, intervene in a sibling conflict, insist that something gets done, or decide that something really isn't worth fighting about, you're drawing from beliefs about children, relationships, responsibility, respect, learning, family, and the kind of person you hope your child becomes. The tricky part is that we don't consciously examine all of those beliefs before we use them. Some came from the way we were raised. Some came from school, church, culture, social media, parenting books, or people we respect. Some developed because of experiences we've had with our particular child. And some are connected to fears about what will happen if we don't respond a certain way. So we can find ourselves parenting from a belief without ever stopping to ask whether it actually reflects what matters most to us. Maybe you were taught that respectful children don't question adults, but you also deeply value raising a child who can advocate for themselves. Maybe independence matters to you, but you find yourself stepping in quickly whenever your child struggles because watching them struggle is uncomfortable. Maybe you value connection and emotional safety, but when your child becomes angry, your own nervous system becomes so activated that ending the behavior feels more urgent than understanding what's happening. Then we find ourselves parenting from a belief without ever stopping to ask whether it actually reflects what matters most to us. And when we notice that happening, it gives us an opportunity to get curious about where that belief came from and whether it's one we still want guiding us. Values get complicated when two good things collide A lot of parenting decisions would be easier if there were always one obviously correct value at stake. Usually there isn't. You may value both kindness and honesty. You may value your child's autonomy and your responsibility to lead them. You may value perseverance and knowing when something genuinely needs to change. You may value family connection and personal boundaries. You may want your child to respect other people while also wanting them to question authority when something feels wrong. You may value academic growth while also believing that your relationship with your child matters more than completing today's worksheet exactly as planned. These aren't necessarily contradictions. They're tensions. And homeschooling gives us opportunities to bump into those tensions constantly because so many roles overlap. You're the parent, teacher, boundary-holder, safe person, schedule-maker, advocate, and person trying to figure out whether your child needs encouragement to persist or permission to stop. Consider a child who becomes overwhelmed during a difficult lesson. If perseverance matters to you, you might feel strongly that they shouldn't simply quit whenever something gets hard. That's reasonable. If emotional safety and responsiveness matter to you, you may also recognize that pushing a child whose nervous system is completely overwhelmed isn't necessarily teaching perseverance. Now you're not choosing between caring and not caring. You're trying to figure out how two things you care deeply about can coexist. Fear can sound surprisingly similar to a value This is where I think the conversation gets especially important for parents of kids with big behaviors. Because when behavior is intense, repetitive, public, disruptive, or simply exhausting, fear can become very loud. If I let this go, they'll think they can get away with everything. If I help them with this, they'll never become independent. If I don't give a consequence, they won't learn. If they talk to me this way at eight, what will they be like at sixteen? If my child can't handle this now, how are they ever going to function in the real world? Those fears don't mean you're doing anything wrong. They're often connected to very real hopes we have for our children. We want them to become capable. We want them to take responsibility. We want them to have healthy relationships. We want them to be able to function in a world that won't always accommodate them. But fear tends to rush us toward the future. Values can help bring us back to what we're actually trying to build. If responsibility matters to me, I can ask what responsibility developmentally looks like for this child right now rather than reacting from fear that helping them means they'll never become responsible. If respect matters to me, I can get more curious about what I mean by respect. Is respect immediate obedience? Is it speaking to each other with dignity? Does respect move both directions in our family? What do I want my child to understand about respect when they're eventually an adult in relationships of their own? And that's why getting clear on our values requires more than choosing the words that sound right. We have to think about what those values actually look like in our relationships with our children. Sometimes the behavior distracts us from the bigger picture When you're living with a difficult behavior every day, it makes sense that stopping it starts to feel like the goal. You want the morning arguing to stop. You want your child to stop screaming at their sibling. You want them to stop fighting every transition. You want to be able to say it's time for school without the entire house becoming tense. Behavior matters. Sometimes it needs immediate intervention. Sometimes there are boundaries that need to be held, skills that need to be taught, environments that need to change, or expectations that need to become clearer. But behavior can become so consuming that we start making decisions around How do I make this stop? without asking the larger question of What am I actually trying to build? Those questions can lead us in very different directions. If my only goal is to stop my child from arguing with me, I may prioritize whatever produces the fastest compliance. If what matters to me is raising a child who can disagree respectfully, listen to another perspective, advocate for themselves, and remain connected through conflict, then I have a much longer developmental goal. That doesn't mean I allow my child to speak to me however they want. It means I'm thinking beyond eliminating the behavior in front of me. I'm considering what I want them to be learning through our relationship. Your values give your parenting somewhere to point Last week, we talked about intentions: deciding how you want to show up when parenting gets hard . But eventually we have to ask where those intentions come from. Why do you want to remain curious? Why does connection matter? Why are you holding this particular boundary? Why are you asking your child to persist here but choosing flexibility somewhere else? There isn't one universal list of values that every family needs to choose. And even families who use the same words may mean very different things by them. What's useful is becoming more conscious of what is actually guiding you. Because there will be moments when your child's reaction makes you question yourself. There will be parenting advice that sounds convincing but doesn't sit right with you. There will be situations where two things you care about seem to compete with each other. There will be seasons when something that worked before no longer fits the child in front of you. Values don't remove that complexity. They give you something to orient yourself toward inside of it. And perhaps that's the more useful question when you're deciding how to respond to your child's behavior . Not only, How do I get through this moment? But also, What matters to me here, and what am I hoping my child experiences and learns through the way I lead them? Because we're not only trying to raise children who behave well in front of us. We're raising people who will eventually carry what they've learned about themselves, relationships, responsibility, conflict, boundaries, compassion, and respect into a life of their own.