When Parenting Brings Up Your Own Childhood

The short answer: when a small thing your child does sets off a big reaction, the past may be speaking. Measure your anger on a sensitive scale, repair when you overdo it, and treat the past as a teacher, not a weapon.

A sigh, a rolled eye, a “whatever”, and your reaction comes out far bigger than the moment. Afterwards the size of it frightens you. Sometimes the voice that came out of you was one you remember from your own childhood.

Go easy on yourself. You are not a bad parent. But I will not tell you it does not matter, because it does. Your anger should be measured on a sensitive scale. A child needs to know that your displeasure is real. A child does not need to be afraid of you. Those are very different things, and the difference is often decided in exactly these moments.

I have two principles for this. The past is a teacher, not a weapon. And apology is part of authority, not the loss of it.

The match and the dry grass

A match does not make a fire. Dry grass does.

The sigh, the eye roll, the spilled drink: these are the match. The dry grass is everything that was already there. A short night. An empty stomach. A difficult call at work. And sometimes, underneath all of it, an old rule from the house you grew up in. Children who answer back are disrespectful. A good child does not make a mess. If they don’t listen, you have lost control.

Nobody chooses these rules. We absorb them, the way we absorb an accent. And they wait, unnoticed, until a child’s ordinary behaviour seems to break one of them. Then the reaction is not only to the sigh. It is to every time we were not allowed to sigh ourselves.

This is not said to excuse the yelling. It is said so you can find the grass before the next match.

The ordinary dry grass

Some of the dryness is not old at all. It is today.

Research with parents found that after nights of shorter or poorer sleep, they reported more strain between work and family and less time with their children the next day (Penn State, on daily sleep). Hunger can tilt us too: in a set of experiments, hungry people read situations more negatively, but those who paused to notice their feelings did not become more hostile (American Psychological Association, 2018).

There is hope in that last finding. Noticing “I am hungry and tired” did not fix the day. It just kept the day from deciding for them.

What yelling may leave behind

It is worth being honest about this, gently. In a study of almost a thousand families, harsh shouting, cursing and insults at age 13 were linked to more low mood and behaviour problems a year later. Warmth at other times did not cancel it out (University of Pittsburgh, on Wang & Kenny 2014). The American Academy of Pediatrics notes that harsh verbal discipline may frighten a child in the short term but does not improve behaviour over time (AAP).

This is not written to add guilt to a parent who already feels plenty. It is written because knowing the cost is what makes the next pause worth the effort.

Repair: coming back after the storm

Here is the other half of the truth. Relationships between parents and children are not made of perfect moments. They are made of breaks and returns.

In research with babies and parents, small mismatches happen constantly and are usually repaired within moments; the repair itself seems to teach the baby that a break is not the end (Tronick & Beeghly 2011). That research is about babies, and we should not stretch it too far. Nothing shows that repair erases a yell. But the instinct behind it, coming back, holds at every age.

A repair is not a long speech. It can be three sentences, when everyone is calm:

• “I shouted at you. That was not okay.”
• “I was tired and I lost my temper. It was not your fault.”
• “Next time I’ll try to stop and take a breath first.”

And then, the hardest part: no “but”. Not “but you also…”. The rule about the eye roll can be talked about another day. Today is for the repair.

Some parents fear that apologising will cost them respect. I believe the opposite. A child looks to their mother as the best woman in the world and to their father as the hero. When a parent makes a mistake and pretends it was right, the picture shakes, and the child’s sense of right and wrong shakes with it. A mistake in front of a child must be named as a mistake. That does not weaken your example. It is your example.

Children seem to know the difference between an apology that is meant and one that is forced. In one study, children aged four to nine thought a hurt child felt better after a willing apology, and saw forced apologies as less effective, especially the older children (Futurity, on Smith and colleagues 2018). Our own apologies are lessons too.

Kindness toward yourself is not letting yourself off

Many parents fear that being kind to themselves will make them careless. The research suggests the opposite. In a series of experiments, people who were encouraged to treat a mistake with self-compassion were more motivated to make amends and to avoid repeating it (Breines & Chen 2012).

Self-compassion, as Kristin Neff describes it, has three parts: kindness instead of harsh judgment, remembering that every parent struggles, and noticing the pain without drowning in it (Self-Compassion.org).

Shame tends to hide. Kindness tends to repair.

When you are afraid of what you might do

If you ever feel you might hurt your child, this advice comes from the Raising Children Network: put your child somewhere safe, ask another adult to take over if you can, step away for a few minutes if it is safe to, and call someone (Raising Children Network). If this happens more than once, reach a doctor or a family support service today. If anyone is in danger now, call your local emergency number.

Asking for help here is not failure. It is protection.

Finding your dry grass

For one week, after any moment you lost your temper, write two lines:

1. What was the match? (What did my child actually do?)
2. What was already dry? (Tired, hungry, rushed, or an old rule?)

By the end of the week, you may find that the matches change but the grass stays the same. That is the place to water.

Try it tonight

Tonight, before the hardest hour of the evening, check the dry grass. Ask yourself three quick questions: Have I eaten? Did I sleep? What is still sitting on me from today?

If the answer to any of them is no, or too much, do one small thing first. Eat something. Drink water. Tell another adult in the house, “I’m low tonight, can you take bath time?” If you are alone, choose the simplest possible version of the evening. Simple is not failure. It is protection.

If you do lose your temper, wait until everyone is calm, even if that is tomorrow morning. Then say the three sentences of repair, and nothing after them.

At the end of the week, read your two lines from each hard moment. Look for the dry grass that keeps returning. That is where to put your care next week: not into trying harder in the moment, but into the hours before it.

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Next step

After a hard moment. Answer a few questions about what happened and what was already there, and get a 7-day sheet for repair and for the next pause. After I snapped →

Sources

• Penn State. Daily antecedents and consequences of nightly sleep. Record
• American Psychological Association (2018). Hungry? Press release
• University of Pittsburgh (2013), on Wang, M.-T. & Kenny, S. (2014), Child Development. News release
• American Academy of Pediatrics. HealthyChildren.org
• Tronick, E. & Beeghly, M. (2011). Infants’ meaning-making and the development of mental health problems. American Psychologist, 66(2). PMC
• Futurity (2018). Forcing kids to say “I’m sorry” doesn’t fool anybody, on Smith, C. E. and colleagues, Merrill-Palmer Quarterly. futurity.org
• Breines, J. G. & Chen, S. (2012). Self-compassion increases self-improvement motivation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Article
• Neff, K. What is self-compassion? Self-Compassion.org
• Raising Children Network. When you feel you might hurt your child. raisingchildren.net.au