The Most Common Reasons Why You Lose Your Cool

You’re not alone.

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I meet so many people who say, “I try really hard to stay calm when parenting my children, but it feels impossible.” They may start the day strong but inevitably lose their cool. Snapping and yelling are common challenges for many parents. There are several reasons why we do this, but over the years, I’ve realized these are the most common.

You Lack Support and Feel Isolated

You don’t need me to tell you that parents are under a great deal of stress. Between managing a household, keeping up with academics and activities, and trying to tackle one developmental phase after the other, parents are left exhausted and depleted. We live in a culture that feels like we’re inside of a pressure cooker. We have to give 100% in our jobs, at home, with our partners, kids, families, friends, etc. We’re over-committed and running from one obligation to the next, often unable to remember how we got from point A to point B.

When life starts feeling this way, we must pause and reflect. I teach my clients the benefits of honoring simplicity by utilizing a practice called check-in and check-back. You can do this as often as you’d like, but I suggest starting it on Sunday evenings. A check-in asks us to pause, find stillness, and just check in with ourselves. How are you feeling? Now, check back and look at the last week. What worked, and what didn’t? Where did you say yes instead of saying no? Where do you need support? Where can you turn for support?

Parents who have children with challenging behaviors often experience isolation. When I started working with them, they expressed how they felt alone in their parenting struggles, and they don’t ever see their friends’ kids behave in the same way. This sense of isolation, though it’s not accurate- several parents struggle- makes the challenges feel insurmountable, and as a result, we fatigue. In that fatigue, we’re less equipped to respond calmly, and instead, we become dysregulated just as quickly as our kids.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, taking care of yourself is where you need to start. When you’re depleted, you can’t meet your child’s needs when they struggle. Any form of support can be helpful. Consider reaching out for help from a medical team or join a parenting group where you will feel less alone. There is power in numbers and seeing yourself in another person’s story.

You Struggle to Regulate Your Emotions

Most parents did not learn how to process hard emotions. When you were younger, it is likely that you were met with a negative response when you experienced hard emotions such as sadness, anger, or fear. You were either yelled at, punished, abandoned, or told to stop immediately. As a result, the primal part of your brain learned that it’s unsafe to feel this way. Therefore, you either avoid these feelings altogether or suppress them.

When you cannot process these emotions yourself, it’s understandable that you won’t know what to do when your child has a tantrum or expresses defiance.

Taking the time and learning a process to inner-parent yourself is key. The more you can tolerate discomfort and allow your child to feel all their feelings, along with frustration, the more resilient they, and you, will be. This is one of the best things you can do for your child. Teach yourself to work through these feelings so you can be the calm anchor your child needs when they’re experiencing any struggle.

You’re Not Sure How to Respond to Challenges

When your child engages in an undesired behavior, you try everything you can to stop it. From being calm to yelling to ignoring and everything in between, nothing seems to deter the behavior. As a result, you get overwhelmed, take the behavior personally, and are far more likely to lose it, yell, or overreact.

This is where support and resources are your friend. When I coach families, once they have a roadmap and tools to better decode and understand how to respond to their child, staying calm becomes a doable task. It’s when we don’t know what to do that we feel like our back is against the wall, and then we react,

You Think in Binaries: Bad Behavior = Bad Kid and Bad Kid = Bad Parent

Several parents adopt this type of thinking. When your child engages in a behavior you don’t want, you feel embarrassed and assign your value as a parent to how well-behaved your child is. If you don’t take the time to interrogate these subconscious beliefs, you will inevitably lose your cool. You’re making it personal when it’s not; now, connecting with your child’s needs is much harder.

When you determine your worth as a parent based on how your child presents to the world (i.e., well-behaved or not), you are more likely to overreact when your child engages in an undesired behavior. You are operating from an insecure place. Instead, look at the behavior and your response without judgment. What is your child’s behavior communicating? What skill are they lacking (i.e., self-regulation skills, inhibition, impulse control, etc.), and how can you help them develop that skill? When you take yourself and your value as a parent out of the equation, you can connect with the child in front of you with acceptance and curiosity. Not resentment and wishing they would behave differently.

Every parent has lost their cool—it’s impossible not to. What matters is that you take these moments and allow them to teach you. Parenting is a journey where you continue to grow alongside your child. When you can see the process as such, you will recognize the transformative and healing potential parenting can bring you.