How to Keep Your Cool Around Your Kids, Even When You Feel Like Losing It
Every parent has those moments they're not proud of — the time when, for whatever reason, they just lost it. Maybe the kids tried to push their buttons and it worked. Maybe it was already a high-stress situation, and the little ones just toddled in at the wrong time. Or maybe something was building up for a while, and it finally reached a boiling point. While blowing your lid every once in a while comes with the territory of parenting and is something you can get past, it's never fun when you fail to keep your cool.
Carla Naumburg, Ph.D. and author of the newly released and aptly titled How to Stop Losing Your Sh*t With Your Kids, wants parents to learn how to open the release valve on those tense moments. "Remember, your kids are probably not trying to antagonize you," she says. "They're just doing what kids do. It's really our job as parents to get ourselves calm enough so we can react to our kids in helpful ways." Here's how.
Know your triggers.
Call them pet peeves, mood killers, or whatever you like, but every person has those specific situations that automatically put them in a bad mood, and figuring out what they are is the first step. "Sometimes triggers can be a place that you need to go to with your kids — for many parents it's even something like going to the grocery store," she says. "A certain time of day can also be a trigger. For example, there's a reason we call the early evening the 'witching hour,' because it's triggering for everybody. You're exhausted, you're hungry, and there's a lot to do before bedtime." Spending time with certain people, too, like difficult family members or needy friends, can also get the stress hormones flowing.
Once you have your triggers identified, you can learn how to manage them. One way to deal? There's no shame in trying to avoid them all together. "Parenting and life are hard enough," Naumburg says. "If there's something we can do to make it easier, why not do that? When my daughters were little, I couldn't stand music classes with my kids. Those were triggers for me, for whatever reason. But they weren't a necessity, so my husband just took them. And that was one thing I could just avoid."
But it might be a tall order to say you'll never take your kids to the grocery store again. If the thing that gets under your skin is unavoidable, you'll have to work on some strategies to get through it. "The way we get better at managing our triggers and not losing it with our kids is with practice," she says. "Fortunately, our kids give us plenty of opportunity to practice." She suggests find a lower-stakes version of your triggering situation to practice in — say, a quick midday trip to the store to pick up one or two things, as opposed to doing the big shop on a busy weekend.
Prep beforehand.
For me, my biggest trigger is taking my 3-year-old daughter to a public bathroom. I think everything is gross and want to get out of there as quickly as possible, she wants to linger, chat, and touch everything in sight. (I swear, one time she looked up at me from the toilet seat and asked, "What happens after we die?") And while I hand off bathroom duty to my husband as much as I can, I sadly can't avoid taking her to pee forever.
In this situation, Naumburg tells readers that setting some groundwork is key. Before I get locked in a three-foot-by-four-foot stall with my daughter, it's useful to run through my expectations with her. "Sometimes, I'll break things down into steps with my daughter," Naumberg says. "I break it down into as few words as possible, because that's helpful for kids. Adults talk too much to our kids. We use too many words, and then we turn into the teacher from Peanuts to them and the message gets lost." Now, my daughter and I have a mantra: "Pee. Wash. Leave." We repeat it on the way to the bathroom every time, and I haven't been asked about death since.
Recognize what happens to you before you lose your sh*t, and try to short-circuit it.
It might happen fast, but there is a physical and mental ramp-up that happens before you blow. "There's all this sort of neurobiological stuff happening in your body, even if you don't realize it," Naumburg says. "Your stress hormones are increasing, your muscles are tensing, and maybe you're having stressful thoughts. You're basically going into a lower version of fight-or-flight mode, even though the intellectual part of you knows that there's very little danger that's likely to come to you or child." Most of the time, you probably don't even know it's happening to you, since it takes time to notice these things and your body doesn't want to slow down the fight-or-flight response.
It's worth it to try to tap the brakes and acknowledge what actually happens to you before you lose it. "You need to figure out where your tension, stress, and anxiety live," she says. "Is it primarily in your thoughts? Do you think about how awful it's going to be? Or is it in your body? Do you notice your stomach aching or getting tight, your shoulders going up, and your breathing quicken?"
Once you know what your stress response is, you can actually intervene directly with your body. "When I get tense, I literally walk around with my eyebrows pushed up, and my shoulders way up," Naumburg says. "The minute I notice it, I just drop my shoulders and relax my eyebrows, and I feel an instant reduction in my stress."
You can try to change what you're thinking, too. "Give yourself a little bit of space from unhelpful thoughts," she suggests. "You can sing your favorite rock song in your head. You can recite a poem or a prayer. It really doesn't matter, but the minute you catch yourself going down that spiral of, 'This is going to be terrible,' you can choose to think of something else." Your mind will probably try to jump back to your negative thoughts, but switch them out again to keep those stress hormones away.
It doesn't hurt to level with your kid when you feel your ire rising, either. Some parents fear that owning up to the bad mood might hurt their stature as a figure of authority, but it actually helps kids realize that they're not entirely the source of your anger. Just be sure to say, something along the lines of, "Mommy gets really cranky in the bathroom," and not, "You're making me really cranky in here." If you don't mention it, they'll still notice your bad feelings, and they'll internalize and react to your stress (possibly by doing more of the behaviors that are stressing you out in the first place).
Give yourself a break.
No parent can live an entirely stress-free life. Whether you snapped or really blew your lid, you have to be able to bounce back.
"Try to have compassion for yourself," Naumburg says. "Try not to think things like, 'I really screwed this up; I must be a bad parent.' We're just stressing ourselves out all over again when we do that. Perhaps a more skillful thought: 'Parenting is hard for everyone. It's okay that this hard for me.' When we take this compassionate approach to our own experience, not only does it feel better, it makes it less likely that we're going to lose our temper with our kids in the future, and more likely that we'll behave in the way we want to."
Instead of beating yourself up about a blow-up, learn how to move past it. Naumburg says it's best to take responsibility, apologize, and make a plan for moving forward and handling things differently next time. The art of a good apology is another skill your kids will do well to see modeled by their parents. "I don't want my children to think that the model of a healthy relationship is one in which no one expresses intense emotions," Naumburg says. "You need to learn how to mend and repair, or even fight in ways that aren't super toxic." Words to think about next time you're, stay, stuck in a public bathroom with a dawdling 3-year-old.
For can't-miss news, expert beauty advice, genius home solutions, delicious recipes, and lots more, sign up for the Good Housekeeping newsletter.
You Might Also Like
