Is it my child that is distressed - or is it me?
As we enter week four of the summer holidays and I start my annual leave I can’t help but breathe a sigh of relief as the juggle of work and having children off school comes to a temporary end. As much as I love working with clients, trying to offer appointments whilst make sure children are cared for and entertained has felt nothing other than an uphill struggle!
It would seem I’m not alone in this, and one theme that has come up in therapy these last few weeks has been parents trying to manage boundaries with their kids, and struggling to tolerate when they have to say no to their child or hear them distressed.
Sometimes they describe giving in - handing over the extra biscuit, switching on the TV, cancelling the planned activity to avoid the tears. Other times, they describe snapping, raising their voice, or trying to shut down the reaction quickly. Underneath, the story is almost always the same: the child’s distress feels unbearable.
What I see, time and again, is that the parent isn’t only responding to their child’s emotion- they’re also responding to something inside themselves.
A child’s tears or anger can pull at old threads and more often than not- we aren’t usually aware of which threads, but they are usually underpinned by memories of being told to ‘stop crying’ or ‘calm down’ as a child, an unspoken family rule that emotions were messy or unwelcome. Typically with older generations there can be a long history of people-pleasing, keeping the peace, or being the ‘easy’ one.
When those threads are tugged, the present moment can feel more charged than it really is. The parent isn’t only dealing with a child refusing to get dressed- they’re also managing their own nervous system’s reaction to what distress has always meant.
Boundaries are an essential part of feeling safe in relationships. They tell children:’I can hold steady when you can’t.’ But they’re hard to hold if you associate someone’s upset with rejection, failure, or danger.
In those moments, a parent’s body might go into one of two modes: appease or control. Appease is when we might soften the rule, remove the limit, make the feeling stop. Control is when we shut it down quickly, get louder, or force control ‘because we said so’.
Both are understandable survival strategies, but neither gives the child what they truly need: a calm, consistent anchor.
When parents rush to ‘fix’ or end every moment of their child being upset, they unintentionally teach children that discomfort is dangerous, that big feelings should be avoided, and that love only exists in calm seas.
But distress is part of life. And it’s not the presence of distress that harms children — it’s feeling alone with it. When a parent can sit beside a child’s tears without either removing the limit or punishing the emotion, they’re showing: ‘You can feel this, and we’re still ok.’
In therapy, the work is rarely about finding the right script. It’s about slowing the moment down enough to notice: ‘Am I reacting to my child’s distress, or to something old in me?’ Practice noticing what you are telling yourself that this means. Can you stay steady without rushing to fix?
Over time, this practice can change the texture of parenting. It becomes easier to validate the feeling and hold the limit at the same time: ‘I know you’re upset I said no. I hear you. And the answer is still no.’
If you feel yourself wobble in the face of your child’s upset, try pausing long enough to ask yourself:
What’s happening in my body? Notice your breath, heart rate, muscle tension.
What am I telling myself right now? Is this about my child’s behaviour, or what I believe it means about me?
Is this feeling familiar? Does their upset remind me of something from my own childhood or past?
Can I slow this down? Even two deep breaths can help you respond rather than react.
Have I named their feeling? “You’re really frustrated about that,” can go a long way.
Can I hold the limit kindly? Be firm without rushing to fix or punish.
Do I need to repair afterwards? If you lost your cool, name it and reconnect.
What support do I need? Sometimes the next step is about your own regulation — a walk, a call to a friend, therapy.
Struggling to tolerate a child’s distress isn’t a sign of being a bad parent. It’s often a sign of having lived in a world where distress felt unsafe, ignored, or punished.
When parents begin to notice and work with that discomfort, they’re not only building emotional resilience in their children- they’re healing something deep in themselves, too.