What Is "Emotional Regulation" for Parents?
Before I had children, I thought is would be hard and fun. I expected to be tired. I expected to have less time for myself. But I never expected to be so challenged by the emotions I had, like guilt and anger. And I was not equipped with the knowledge, skills, and tools I needed to navigate my emotions at that time.
The emotional lives of parents is complex and important especially for mental health. That's because parenting evokes some of our biggest and most complicated emotions.
For example:
You can adore your child and still feel furious when they refuse to get dressed.
You can feel deep gratitude and, five minutes later, feel overwhelmed, resentful, anxious, or exhausted.
You can know exactly how you want to respond to your child and then hear yourself saying something you wish you hadn’t said.
You can genuinely want to hear and understand your adult child, while still feeling defensive when they criticize you.
Having “negative” emotions towards children doesn’t mean we’re bad. It just means we have emotions, like all humans do.
What does emotional regulation actually mean?
Emotional regulation refers to a calm and balanced nervous system. But as parents, we are regularly thrown off balance because our children evoke strong emotions.
The goal isn’t to become a parent who never gets angry, frustrated, afraid, or overwhelmed. That’s simply not possible because emotions are hard-wired into the brain and body and cannot be eradicated. Pushing emotions down dysregulates the nervous system, making it harder for us to come back into a balanced state, and adding stress to the mind and body, which worsens anxiety and depression.
A better goal is to learn about emotions and develop emotional awareness. For example, being able to recognize and name the anger, fear, shame, sadness, or disappointment that you're feeling begins the process of regulation, helping us feel and function better.
That’s a very different approach than ignoring your emotions and simply telling yourself to “calm down.”
Why is emotional regulation so difficult for parents?
Parenting is uniquely emotional because our children matter so much to us. We are wired for connection and there is no stronger connection than the one we have to our children. It’s biology.
Their crying can activate our fear. Their defiance can activate our anger. Their struggles can activate our feeling of helplessness. Their rejection can activate our sadness. Their needs can sometimes activate resentment or make us feel overwhelmed.
Our children’s behavior can also touch places inside us that existed long before we became parents. For example, a child who doesn’t listen might trigger old feelings of powerlessness, like when our own parents ignored us at times when we really needed their support. A teenager who pulls away might activate old feelings of rejection, like when our own parents, siblings, or friends led us to feel rejected or judged.
When we’re unaware of what is happening inside us, we are more likely to react automatically without considering the long-term costs to our own and our child’s mental health.
Emotional regulation doesn’t mean suppressing your feelings
When I was young, I thought the only way to feel calmer was to get rid of my emotions by pushing them away or distracting myself. This is a common way most people think because we aren’t taught about emotions and how to be with them in healthy ways.
However, to regulate our nervous system, we need to notice and validate the emotions we are experiencing as they appear in our bodies. We need to feel them physically and listen to what they are telling us. And to do this, we need to create a space to feel, process, then think, BEFORE we take any actions.
Feeling an emotion is not the same as acting on an emotion
Did you know that:
You can feel angry without yelling.
You can feel anxious without becoming controlling.
You can feel resentful without punishing your child.
You can feel sad without shutting down.
You can feel disappointed without making your child feel guilty about disappointing you.
In fact, feeling without acting is precisely what we, as parents, need to practice. How do we learn this?
The Change Triangle®: A roadmap for emotional regulation
One very effective way to understand and work with difficult emotions is through the Change Triangle®, an emotional roadmap I adapted from AEDP psychotherapy.
Initially, the Change Triangle helps by teaching us the ABCs of how emotions work in the mind and body. As a result of this newfound emotions education, we become less fearful of our emotions and more curious about what is happening inside us.
When something triggers us, we can turn inward and find where we are on the Change Triangle. We can plot ourselves at one of the four places on the Change Triangle.
We may be on the top left of the Change Triangle avoiding our emotions with protective defenses. Yelling, withdrawing, controlling, and drinking are just some of the many brilliant and creative ways we avoid dealing directly with our emotions.
We may find ourself on the top right corner experiencing anxiety, guilt, or shame. These inhibitory emotions help push down our core emotions.
We may have identified that we are experiencing one of the 7 core emotions at the bottom corner of the Change Triangle.
Or we may be feeling good: calm and balanced. This is a regulated state where we feel like this is me. We want to spend as much time in this openhearted state of the authentic self.
Protective defenses and inhibitory emotions obscure deeper core emotions such as anger, sadness, fear, disgust, or joy. Naming and validating our core emotions opens the door to regulation.
Next time you get upset, Instead of immediately reacting, pause and ask yourself:
What am I feeling right now?
Where do I feel it in my body?
What is the emotion trying to tell me?
Is there another emotion or need that is deeper?
This kind of curiosity creates space between feeling and action. And that space can change how we parent.
What does emotional regulation look like in real life?
Imagine your eight-year-old refuses to turn off the television. You feel your body tighten. Your heart beats faster. You hear yourself thinking, Why won’t this kid ever listen to me? (Quiz: which core emotions does this scenario evoke: anger, shame, sadness, fear, guilt, anxiety, disgust?)
You could yell: “TURN IT OFF RIGHT NOW!”
Or you could pause.
You might notice: I’m really angry.
When you listen to the anger and get curious about why you’re angry and what you need, you might notice something underneath the anger: I’m exhausted. I feel powerless. I need cooperation.
The situation hasn’t magically changed. Your child still needs to turn off the television. But now you’re responding from greater awareness rather than simply discharging the emotion.
You can set the same boundary without making your child the target of your unprocessed feelings. That’s emotional regulation.
Instead of yelling: You gently the remote from your child, turn off the TV, and tell your child calmly, "TV time is over."
What if you do lose your temper?
You will sometimes lose your temper. Emotional regulation is not perfection.
If you yell at your child, you can come back and repair.
You might say:
“I was really angry, and I yelled. I wish I had handled that differently. You didn’t deserve to be yelled at. I’m sorry.”
Repair teaches children something profoundly important: relationships can survive difficult emotions, and mistakes can be acknowledged and repaired.
You don’t have to model perfect emotional control. You can model emotional awareness, responsibility, and repair.
Parents need emotional skills, too
We spend enormous amounts of time teaching children about their emotions. We tell them to use their words. We teach them to take deep breaths. We encourage them to name their feelings and calm down. But parents need these skills, too. In fact, one of the most powerful ways to teach children emotional intelligence is to develop our own emotional intelligence. When parents learn to understand and process their emotions, they become better able to help their children do the same.
The goal isn’t to feel less. It’s to know what to do with what you feel.
You don’t have to become a perfect parent. There's no such thing! However, you can become a more emotionally aware parent—one who has more choices about what to do with the feelings that parenting brings. That is the kind of emotional skill we can pass on to our children. And it begins with us.
More Resources for Emotions Education
A practical roadmap for understanding and processing your emotions: Parents Have Feelings, Too: A Guide to Navigating Your Emotions So You and Your Family Can Thrive
If you struggle with anxiety and depression read, It’s Not Always Depression: Working the Change Triangle to Listen to the Body, Discover Core Emotions, and Connect With Your Authentic Self (Random House & Penguin UK)
