How To Be A Better Parent After Losing Your Cool
Setting The Scene
You are getting ready to run errands and you politely ask your child to put on their shoes and jacket for the third — no, fourth time. It seems trivial, but before you even step out the door your frustration is rising. After you buckle your child into their car seat, they proclaim they need to go potty even though they just went right before they walked out the door. You are not sure how to feel — on one hand you are happy they are taking charge of their bathroom needs, but on the other hand how is there possibly one more thing that delays your trip? Then, it happens – you have reached your breaking point and you find yourself yelling or snapping at your child.
The simplest of tasks sometimes turn into time consuming, pseudo battles that are a mix of joy as you witness your child grow, and frustration as you try to keep some semblance of a schedule and normalcy.
We have all been there — no judgement. So, what do you do about it? Is it normal? Should you never yell at your kids? What about the guilt? How much yelling is too much? Use the potty and buckle up, because there are some surprise benefits to losing your cool with your kids (but you still should not do it too much).
Understand What You Can Control As A Parent
First, understand what you can actually control in these types of situations. Which, unfortunately, is not a whole lot outside of your own personal mood and actions. Your child is just that, a child. They do not have the cognitive function, attention span, forethought, or understanding of time and emotion to make decisions that align with adult schedules. There are many reasons your child might be driving you batty and most of the reasons you help guide your child but not actually control.
Maybe your child did not sleep well and needs a nap, maybe your child is hungry, bored, or uncomfortable for some other reason. Your child might be feeling anxious and searching for boundaries to help them sooth. Whatever the reason, your child’s behavior tells a story and it is their way of communicating. An adult’s job is to keep cool and remain in control to model how we want our kids to eventually be able to handle stressful situations.
It Is OK to Have an Occasional Outburst
It is OK if you have an emotional outburst because there is a silver lining. Is it good to have emotional spillovers or yell at your child all the time? No. But, it is OK for children to see how their behavior affects other people. It is part of how children learn cause-and-affect, and that their actions have meaning and implication to others. If you are doing repair work (the silver lining) you can use your outburst as a learning moment and mitigate the damage done by yelling at your child.
The Silver Lining: Parental Repair Work
So, you popped your top. As you regain your composure you can remind yourself that it is okay, there is a silver lining. And here it is: you now get the opportunity to show your child how to apologize and take ownership of their behavior.
It is your job to be in control of your emotions — you are the adult. You do not need to be perfect; it is impossible. But the new expectation is that you do repair work if you lose your cool. Repair work is when you return to your child after you have cooled off and talk to them about your behavior, which you will want to do as soon as possible, optimally within 30 minutes after the incident.
Repair work teaches your child that it is not shameful to have emotions, that it is OK to apologize, that their actions do affect other people, and shows how to take ownership of your actions. When your child is pushing your buttons and boundaries it is important to remember that this is normal, and a necessary part of childhood learning.
What Repair Work Should Address
Repair work should address your child’s behavior, how it made you feel, and what they can do differently next time. It also needs to include an apology to your child so they can see and hear you take responsibility for losing your cool. A child’s behaviors are sometimes not within their control and because of that, parents need to take responsibility for their own actions no matter how batty your child is behaving. It is a parent’s job to stay in control, take initiative, and address the situations with their child when they lose their cool. The expectation is to instruct your child through example. Do not expect your child to apologize back. It’s not entirely fair, but your child is learning how to apologize by watching you and it might take them a bit to catch on — this is OK.
Examples of What Repair Work Should Sound Like
- “When you refuse to get dressed, I feel frustrated because we need to leave the house on time. I am sorry for yelling at you, I should not have yelled. Next time, let’s work together to get dressed on time.”
- “When you hit me, I feel upset because it hurts. I am sorry for yelling at you, I lost my temper. Next time, let’s talk about how you feel instead of hitting.”
- “When you don’t clean up your mess, I feel exhausted because I need help keeping the house clean. I am sorry for yelling at you, I should stay calm. Next time, please pick up your mess.”
Good children sometimes do bad things. It is part of learning. Tell your child this. It can help them understand that when they do something “bad” it does not mean they are bad. Repair work helps children externalize incidents (I did something bad and I can change this next time) versus internalizing the situation (I am bad and do bad things).
The Formula for Repair Work
Here is the basic formula for repair work, though this is not set in stone:
When you ________________________ I feel ________________________ because ________________________. I am sorry for ________________________ , I should not have ________________________. Next time, please ________________________.
Notice you are not blaming anyone nor citing fault. You are simply saying what happened, saying your reaction, saying you are sorry for not keeping your cool, and saying what your child can do differently next time.
Do Not Underestimate Your Child’s Cognitive Abilities
You might think this is over your child’s head. It is not. They do not have to “get” or understand every lesson within the repair work scheme. Do not ask them, “do you understand?”. The reality is, if the only thing your child takes away from the conversation is that you are willing to say sorry for taking your anger out on them, then it is a win. Remember, you are teaching your child a lesson but also modeling for your child how to express feelings, how to say sorry, and offering advice to find a solution to a problem. As your child gets older, they will understand repair work on a deeper level that is appropriate to their age.
How to Get Through the Moment: Adopting a Helpful Parenting Persona
Sometimes you just need to get through the moment and adopting a helpful parenting persona can help. I adopt Mr. Rogers as my persona when times get tough. If I think I might lose my cool I ask myself, “what would Mr. Rogers do in this situation?”. You can adopt whoever you feel would handle a stressful situation well, just make sure to do planning and have your persona ready before the next situation unfolds.
In the moment, you can say to yourself, “what would ________ do right now? I am going to handle the situation like him/her.” This can help you distance yourself from the emotions of the moment and make it easier to stay calm.
Pick someone before the fireworks start and give it a try!
When You Are Losing Your Cool Too Much
There is no metric for when losing your cool becomes an occasional thing to when it has become a problem. If you find yourself needing to do repair work multiple times per day, feel you’re yelling at your child too much, having trouble emotionally recovering after you overreact, or feel overwhelmed with guilt about yelling, then it’s probably time to get in contact with a mental health counselor. A mental health counselor can help you implement these and other tools, so staying in control feels a lot easier.
Remember, staying calm and in control will make a much happier and smoother household — a happy and content child is more likely to follow directions and push boundaries less.
When You Should Start Repair Work
You should aim to start repair work within 30 minutes after an incident occurs. This may not mean that after 30 minutes you are in a great mood about the situation or stress free. But you should be able to emotionally recover, regain composure, and have a constructive repair work conversation with your child within 30 minutes of an incident happening. If you are not able to do immediate repair work, it’s still important to do it later, even if it’s the next day.
If you find that you routinely take longer than 30 minutes to start repair work, it may be time to talk to a mental health therapist. I cannot stress this point enough: you are allowed to feel stressed, angry, or frustrated and still do repair work. Initiating repair work does not mean that you feel happy or content with the situation. The reason I think this aspect is so important is parents who have trouble emotionally recovering from stressful situations are typically not reinforcing self-soothing techniques and put their child in an impossible situation, usually without ever realizing. Children are intuitive and when they see their parent struggle to feel better, they often try and help in their own way. While this sounds sweet, it can lead to power struggles, people pleasing, and can shift the dynamics of parental authority.
This does not apply to situations where your child is supportive of your emotions or comforting you for natural reasons, such as hearing bad news or if you get hurt. It specifically applies to when your child is helping you sooth from your own emotional outbursts.
How Mental Health Therapy Can Help You Be A Better Parent
Mental health therapy can help you manage your temper or mood when parenting. Oftentimes, I find that people’s anger or frustration begins well before they notice they feel angry or frustrated. Start by keeping a closer eye on your emotions throughout the day and you will notice more subtleties to how your mood fluctuates. You may notice that when you are ready to pop your top you are ten steps into frustration. It is more manageable to head off these emotions at step one, two, or three rather than step ten. Mental health therapy can also help you find your blocking beliefs, which are thoughts you believe about yourself (such as I am not in control or I am a failure) that can make keeping your cool much harder.
Finding Your Parental Blocking Beliefs
Blocking beliefs are internalized beliefs that prevent you from solving a problem (such as “I am not in control” or “I am weak”). Finding your blocking beliefs can significantly speed up sorting through mental health issues because they can help you find what is blocking you from solving your problem organically. I often ask people to tell me their problem in one sentence (“I cannot keep my cool when my child runs away from me”) and then fill out the blocking belief sheet attached below. This will highlight your blocking beliefs for that specific problem, which are great areas to focus on in counseling.
Find Past Memories or Themes
Resolving memories of how your parents treated you as a child is extremely helpful in keeping your cool in the present. Clients often come into therapy and cannot find exact apple-to-apples memories from childhood that match the problem they are having in the present. Sometimes, finding visual memories feels like grabbing smoke and people may have more success finding a common theme or life experience from the past that is popping up in the present.
Similar memories that create a theme may sound like, “my parents had little patience for me when I was a child, this taught me that I don’t need to show patience to my child”. Obviously, you need a ton of patience when parenting so it is clear how this early lesson would cause problems in the future. Other times, people have exact memories of similar situations, such as, “I remember my dad was always ready to blow when we ran errands as a family. Today, I feel on edge when I take my child out, just like I did when I was with my father.” Themes or memories like these prime your brain to expect what happens next. If you expect yelling, fighting, or anxious situations to unfold next, because that is what happened in your childhood, you will feel or act the same way today.
Resolve Past Memories or Themes with EMDR
Resolving these memories or themes is something you will want to do with a trained therapist. Oftentimes, people do not consider the situations listed above as trauma, but it is indeed a form of trauma. It is just not the type of trauma we are all conditioned to spot, like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Small, isolated events tend to not cause harm. But when these events are repeated over time, they affect your brain as much as large scale traumatic events — just in different ways. Resolving these memories takes a specific type of therapy, such as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or EMDR for short.
EMDR helps your adult conscious disconnect from the emotional leftovers or themes from the past so you can stay in present, free of those leftover emotions. I have helped many people resolve these types of issues by using EMDR and people are amazed at how much their past influences the present. When these past interactions influence the present day, the emotional spillover is called an emotional flashback.
Emotional Flashbacks
An emotional flashback is not the typical flashback people think of when they think of those related to PTSD. An emotional flashback brings back the feelings you had from another time into the present. For example, you might have felt shame and embarrassment when your parents lost their cool because you did not bring your dishes to the sink or got a bad grade. You might have hated that feeling so much that when you see your child do the same thing you find yourself using anger to “squash” this behavior.
Parents sometimes use anger to squash behaviors they do not like. Though, sometimes parents never used anger towards you when you were a child, but instead they used shame to let you know, “don’t do this again.” Either way, people tend to link these feelings when they see their child make the same “mistakes” and feel that if they can pound it out of their child, their child will learn not to do it again. The issue is that this is confusing to a child and in reality is your emotional baggage spilling over to your child’s situation. Imagine a child trying to make sense of your leftover baggage, it is not going to end well and often turns into internalized shame.
Its Never Too Late To Be A Better Parent
If I could give one piece of advice to anyone in this situation, it is that it’s never too late. Never underestimate the power of telling your kids, “I was wrong, I am getting help with this situation because I want to be a better parent for you.” Kids get this, they really do. The key here is to remember your behavior, when isolated, is not that detrimental. It is when your child internalizes your over-the-top behavior as shame or guilt that they then carry your baggage into adulthood.
The proof of repair work is proven when I have clients who had parents who did not do repair work. Once the client understands that though they may have caused the situation it still was not their fault that their parent lost their cool, they are able to begin to shed their leftover baggage caused by childhood. This shifts the baggage back to the proper person and frees the client of emotions, shame, and embarrassment that was never theirs in the first place.
If you think you might be someone who wants to explore this in therapy, do not hesitate! Remember, many therapists are parents too and understand that the reason we yell at our kids is often rooted in our own childhood, which is not your fault and is something you can improve upon. By fixing these things you will find you are more present, which will lead to more fulfilling, calmer, and productive engagements with your child.
Have any tips, advice, or strategies you use at home? I would love to hear from you in the comments below!
Mike