It’s a Tuesday morning. It starts like every other morning - the (dreaded!) alarm, the cereal, the hunt for the missing shoe. And then, somewhere between the kitchen and the front door, it comes. “I hate school. I’m not going.”

Maybe your child is eight. Maybe they’re twelve. The words might come out quietly, almost to themselves. Or they might arrive with a force that stops you in your tracks. Sometimes it’s tears. Sometimes it’s a stomach ache that’s appeared from nowhere. Sometimes it’s pure defiance, arms folded, not moving.

You’re standing there with a packed lunch in your hand and eighteen minutes before the bell goes, and your heart is doing two things at once: panicking about getting them out the door, and trying desperately to work out what is actually going on.

Because here’s what every parent knows in their gut, even in that frantic moment: “I hate school” rarely means just that. It means something, the question is what.

What’s Really Going On

Children are not, as a rule, particularly subtle. When something is wrong, they show it in the place where the feeling is strongest, and sometimes that place happens to be right between the kitchen and the front door on a Tuesday morning.

“I hate school” is almost never about school as a whole. It’s almost always about something specific that has made that building feel unsafe, too much, or just really hard. The message is real even when the words are too big for what they’re pointing at.

Here’s what most commonly sits underneath it.

Social difficulty. This is one of the most common drivers, and it doesn’t always announce itself clearly. A child who is having trouble with friendships, who is on the edges of a group, who has fallen out with their best friend, will often show their distress through school resistance before they ever manage to name what’s actually happening. We looked at friendship struggles last week, and this is where it can show up in a different form. The school building is where the pain lives, so the school building becomes the thing they want to avoid. And for some children, the social side of school is hard for a different reason: they find reading other children’s cues very difficult, they need more time to warm up, or the noisy, unpredictable social world of a classroom or yard is simply exhausting for them to navigate. If you’ve ever had a quiet sense that your child is wired a little differently - that certain things are much harder or more intense for them than they seem to be for others - it’s worth holding that gently. A conversation with the school or your GP is a good starting point. This isn’t about labels. It’s about understanding what they’re actually dealing with.

A struggle with learning. A child who is quietly lost in class, who dreads being called on, who has started to associate school with feeling not good enough, will often resist going long before they tell you they’re struggling. There’s a lot of shame attached to academic difficulty for many children, and “I hate school” is sometimes the only way they know how to say “I don’t understand, and I’m scared everyone can see it.” Sometimes it’s more specific: a child who is noticing, even if they can’t quite put words on it, that certain things are harder for them than they seem to be for others. When a child is quietly aware that they’re not keeping pace, the classroom can start to feel like a place where their differences are on show every single day.

Anxiety. We’ve talked before in this series about how anxiety in children often doesn’t look like worry - it looks like avoidance. It looks like stomach aches that are completely real (the gut-brain connection is powerful and well-documented) but have no physical cause. It looks like a child who is absolutely fine at home and miserable the moment school becomes close and real. Morning is often the hardest time for anxious children because the thing they fear is no longer hours away; it's only minutes away. The dread of something is almost always worst just before you have to face it.

Sometimes it’s not about school at all. This is the one that catches parents off guard. A period of tension at home, a separation, a parent who hasn’t been well or has had to be away, a bereavement - when something feels frightening or uncertain in their world, school can suddenly feel very far away from the people they need to be near. “I hate school” can sometimes really mean “I’m worried about things at home and I need to be close to you.”

When this is what’s driving things, one of the most important things you can do is talk with them openly, in language that suits their age. I know the instinct is to shield them, and it comes from love. But children nearly always know more than we give them credit for. They pick up on atmosphere, on strained silences, on adults who seem upset but won’t say why. And when they can’t get information, they fill the gap themselves. Often with something far worse than the reality. “Maybe it’s my fault.” “Maybe something terrible is going to happen.” “Maybe they’re splitting up and nobody is telling me.”

Two things are needed here, not one. Acknowledgement is the first - letting them know you’ve noticed they seem worried and that it makes sense. But acknowledgement alone isn’t enough. Children also need an honest explanation of what is actually going on. Not every adult detail, and not in a way that loads your worry onto their shoulders. But something real. If Dad has been unwell: “Dad hasn’t been well lately, and that’s been hard for everyone. The doctors are helping him. It’s not your fault, and we’re going to be okay.” If there’s been tension between parents: “You might have noticed that Mam and I have been finding things hard. We are trying to get along better it’s been tough for us all. But that’s between me and mam. It’s nothing you’ve done. We’re working on it and will really try harder to stop arguing so much.” The explanation should tell them what is happening and that it is not their fault.

Children who are given honest, gentle explanations are so much more resilient than we expect. They are stronger when they are included in what is real than when they are kept outside a silence their nervous system is already picking up. (Bereavement deserves its own article, and we’ll come back to it in this series.)

None of this is your child being difficult. It’s your child telling you something is wrong in the only language available to them right then.

What Doesn’t Help (But We All Do It Anyway)

Trying to talk them into it while they’re in it. When a child is in the grip of real distress, the thinking brain is largely offline. You cannot reach a dysregulated child with logic - “but you love art on Tuesdays!” is going nowhere useful in that moment, however true it might be. It tends to make things worse, not better.

Minimising. “It’s not that bad, everyone feels like this sometimes.” Said out of love, but for a child who is really struggling, it communicates that their experience is a bit too much. The feeling doesn’t go away, it goes underground.

Catastrophising. Some parents, especially those with their own complicated history with school, feel something deeply alarmed fire up when they hear these words. That alarm seeps out in the urgency of how they respond, and children pick this up immediately. If they sense their feelings are frightening you, it adds to their own sense that something is very wrong.

Letting avoidance become the pattern. Keeping a deeply distressed child home occasionally, while you find out more, is sometimes the right call. But avoidance can feed anxiety - every time the feared thing is escaped, the nervous system learns that it was right to be afraid. For most children, school remains the expectation, even when it's hard, and holding that expectation warmly and firmly is important.

What Actually Helps

Get alongside them before you do anything else. In the moment, the most important thing isn’t to solve the problem, it’s to make sure they feel met. “That sounds really hard. Tell me more.” This is not agreeing that they don’t have to go. It’s making space for whatever is underneath to start coming to the surface. Children who feel truly heard are much more likely to tell you what’s actually going on.

Ask the real questions at the right moment. Not “what’s wrong with school?” but “is there anyone you find it hard to be around?” Not “are you struggling with your work?” but “is there anything in class you find confusing or tricky?” Children can often answer a specific, gentle question that they’d never be able to answer a broad one. And sometimes they can’t answer any question at all, and what helps most is just staying alongside them, making it clear that you’re paying attention and that you’re on their side.

Make a plan together. Once they feel heard, the next step isn’t to solve it for them — it’s to figure it out with them. “I get that this is really hard. We’re not going to ignore it, and we’re not going to just hope it goes away. Let’s think together about how to make it a little easier.” Children who help shape the plan are far more likely to try it. And the message underneath, we’ll get through this together, is often more powerful than whatever the plan actually contains.

What the plan looks like will depend on the child. For younger children, something visual can help: a simple picture map of the morning, step by step, so the sequence feels predictable. For older children it might be talking it through and writing a few things down - a breathing exercise before they go in, a song in the car, getting up ten minutes earlier so mornings feel less frantic, identifying one person at school they can go to if things feel hard. We touched on some of this in the anxiety article earlier in the series. Make it concrete, make it small, and do it alongside them.

If they say “I don’t want to talk about it” - acknowledge that, properly. Then hold the line with warmth: “I know, and I hear you, this is really hard. But we have to figure it out. Let’s have a snack first and then chat through what we can do…”

Work with the school. A quiet word with the class teacher, framed as “I want to share what I’m noticing at home and hear what you’re seeing at school,” is almost always a better starting point than going in with a complaint. Teachers often have pieces of the picture you don’t. Going in curious tends to get better results than going in certain.

From the therapy room:

I worked with a family a few years ago where an eight-year-old had stopped wanting to go to school almost overnight. Lovely child, always settled before. The parents were doing everything right, they were warm, they were patient, but every morning had become a battle and they were exhausted with it.

What came out gradually, over a number of weeks, was a combination of things: some friendship difficulty on the yard, and a real anxiety about reading aloud in class. Nothing dramatic. Nothing that would have been obvious from the outside. But it had built into something that felt really big to her.

What helped wasn’t any single strategy. It was the consistency of her parents staying curious rather than panicking, holding the expectation that school was happening while also actually working with her on making it feel more manageable - a small plan for the mornings, a code word she could use with her teacher, one-to-one time with each parent in the evenings that had nothing to do with school. It took about six weeks before mornings started to feel easier. It wasn’t linear, there were harder days in the middle of better ones. But it shifted. Very often it does, when children feel their parents are truly with them in it. Not easy at all but worth sticking with, plenty of deep breaths!!

Moving Forward

If this is where you are right now: the fact that your child is telling you, in whatever form they’re telling you, is not a sign that something has gone fundamentally wrong. It’s a sign that they feel safe enough at home to let you know something is hard. That’s attachment doing its job.

And keep an eye on the pattern over time. A rough few mornings is different from six weeks of consistent resistance accompanied by real changes in mood, sleep, or appetite. If things are persistent and aren’t shifting, that’s worth taking seriously, and worth getting some professional support to help you think through.

Your job in this isn’t to make school brilliant overnight. It’s to understand what’s going on, to stay someone they feel they can come to, and to keep showing up alongside them. That last part is not a small thing. It might be the most important thing.

This Week, Try...

Find a quiet moment when school isn’t imminent - bedtime, or in the car, and ask your child: “Is there anything about school you find hard right now, even a small thing?” Don’t push if they say no. Just let them know you’d want to know, whatever it is. Sometimes planting that question, with no pressure attached, is enough to open a door later.

A question to reflect on:

When you were at school, was there ever a time you really struggled - with the work, with other kids, or just with the feeling of going? And did anyone at home know?

Next week, we’re going to look at something that comes up in nearly every family and that almost nobody talks about honestly: what happens when you just don’t like your child very much, right now, in this particular phase. It’s the guilt that dares not speak its name, and it deserves a proper airing.

Have you been through this with your own child? What helped, or what didn’t? I’d love to hear in the comments below - other parents reading this might need exactly what you’ve learned. And if this resonated with you, please share it with someone who might need it today.

Dr Daire Gilmartin

Consultant Counselling Psychologist and Psychotherapist

www.oaktreetherapy.ie

You drive home with this information sitting like a stone in your chest. You want to fix it. You want to ring the other parents. You want to go into the school. You want to say the thing that will make it better, except you have a horrible feeling there isn’t ‘a thing’. And underneath all of this is a fear you can’t quite name: what if this isn’t just a rough week? What if my child is genuinely lonely?

Few things are harder to sit with as a parent. Let’s talk about what’s actually happening, what makes it worse, and what genuinely helps.

What’s Really Going On

Children’s friendships are not a simple, stable thing. They shift and shuffle constantly, particularly in primary school, and the stakes feel enormous to the children involved even when what’s happened looks small from the outside. To a seven-year-old, being left out at break time is not a minor social hiccup. It can feel like total rejection, like proof of something terrible about themselves.

This intensity isn’t dramatic overreaction, it’s developmental. Children at this age are working out, for the first time in their lives, where they fit in the social world beyond their family. They are asking, through every friendship interaction: am I likeable? Am I interesting? Do people want me around? The answers they get from peers in these years matter to them in a very immediate, felt sense. Peer acceptance isn’t a luxury at this stage. For most children, it feels like something closer to survival.

Sometimes social difficulties are primarily about group dynamics or exclusion. Sometimes they reflect skills a child is still learning. Often it’s a bit of both. Children process social pain in the same area of the brain that processes physical pain. When your child says that being left out “hurts,” that’s not just a figure of speech. The same neural pathways are active. This is worth holding in mind when their distress feels out of proportion, because from inside their nervous system, it really does hurt.

That said, not every child who experiences social difficulty is in trouble. Some children are quieter by nature and prefer one deep friendship over a wider group. Some go through rocky patches with friends and find their feet again. What we’re looking for is patterns over time, not individual bad days. A difficult week is not a crisis. Months of consistent exclusion or distress is something to take more seriously.

What Doesn’t Help (But We All Do It Anyway)

Rushing to fix it. The instinct to solve the problem is completely understandable and comes from a good place, but when we leap straight into problem-solving mode, we often miss the thing our child actually needs, which is simply to feel heard first. “Have you tried asking if you can join their game?” offered before they’ve had a chance to say how bad they’re feeling can land like a door being closed rather than opened.

Reassuring too quickly. “Oh, you’ll be fine, you’re great, they don’t know what they’re missing.” This sounds encouraging, and it comes from a place of love, but let’s be honest: early reassurance is often for us as much as it is for them. When our child is upset, we feel it too, and the instinct to make the feeling stop is as much about our own discomfort as theirs. The problem is that when we rush to reassure before the feeling has had a chance to breathe, we communicate something we never intend: that their sadness is something to get past rather than something worth sitting with.

There’s a beautiful scene in Inside Out (the Pixar film) where Bing Bong is utterly heartbroken, and Joy, desperately trying to help, does everything she can think of to cheer him up. Nothing works. It’s Sadness who eventually sits beside him, acknowledges how much he’s lost, and just stays there with him. And that’s what actually helps. You can watch the clip here:

Children need the same. Sadness isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s a feeling to be felt, and when we let it move through rather than trying to stop it, it passes more naturally than when we fight it.

Getting more upset than they are. I know this one is difficult, because it’s almost impossible not to feel it when your child is hurting. But if your distress visibly overtakes theirs, it can make them feel responsible for managing you, which is the last thing they need in that moment. They need you to be steady enough to hold the weight of it with them.

Getting on the phone before the dust has settled. Contacting the school the morning after your child had a rough day, or ringing another parent to sort it out, can feel like taking action, but it can also make things more complicated for the child and remove their sense of agency entirely. Sometimes it’s the right move. Often it needs a bit more waiting and watching first.

Catastrophising quietly. Children pick up on parental anxiety even when we don’t say it out loud. If you are convinced, somewhere in your gut, that this means your child is destined for social isolation, they will sense that fear in how you talk about it, and it will add to theirs. Your ability to hold a bigger, more hopeful picture matters, even when it’s hard to access.

What Actually Helps

Let them feel it before you do anything else. The most important thing in the first conversation is that they feel genuinely heard. Get alongside them, not across from them. You don’t need to have the right words. “That sounds really hard” or “I can see that really hurt” or just “tell me more” will do more in that moment than any advice. Sometimes the kindest thing we can offer is simply: “That sounds really tricky. I’m glad you told me.”

And then stay with it for a bit. You don’t need to fill the silence. Sitting beside a child who is sad, just being present while they feel what they feel, communicates something important: that this feeling is manageable, that it isn’t going to overwhelm either of you, and that you trust them to get through it. That message, absorbed over time through dozens of small moments like this one, is one of the most important things we ever give our children. Hard things will keep happening throughout their lives. What we’re really teaching them, in how we respond right now, is whether hard feelings are something to be frightened of or something they can learn to live with.

Normalise without dismissing. There’s a difference between minimising (“you’re fine, don’t worry”) and genuinely normalising (“friendships can be so hard at your age, this happens to a lot of children, even when it doesn’t feel like it”). The second one doesn’t deny the pain. It gives some context and some companionship. It’s the difference between “this isn’t a big deal” and “this is hard AND you’re not the only one going through it.”

Ask what would help them. Once they’ve had a chance to feel heard, try asking rather than telling: “What do you think might help? Is there anything you want to try?” You’d be surprised how often children have their own ideas, and being asked for them builds agency rather than helplessness. You’re not passing the problem back to them. You’re holding it with them while letting them have a hand in it.

Look at the wider picture. If your child has even one solid friendship, that is genuinely protective. Research on children’s social development is consistent on this: one close, reciprocal friendship matters far more than being widely popular. Some children are temperamentally less social than others, and that's okay too. If they have a good friend, name it and build on it. If they don’t, that’s worth paying attention to over time.

Build connection outside school. School is not the only social arena, even though it can feel that way to children inside it. A club, a sport, a drama class, an art group, anything that puts them in regular contact with other children around a shared interest, can be genuinely helpful for a child who’s finding the school social scene difficult. Children who feel socially competent in even one context carry that confidence into others over time.

Stay connected to the school, calmly. You don’t need to go in all guns blazing. But a quiet word with the class teacher, framed as “I just wanted to let you know what I’m hearing at home, I’m not asking for anything specific right now, just for you to keep an eye out” is almost always well received. Teachers notice a lot more when they know what to look for.

Watch for the signs that something more is needed. Difficulty sleeping, not wanting to go to school, loss of appetite, significant changes in mood or behaviour over a period of weeks, these are signals worth taking seriously and worth bringing to your GP or to a professional who can help you think it through.

What one parent told me:

“My daughter went through a really rough stretch in second class where her best friend moved to a different school and she suddenly had no one she felt close to. She was miserable, and honestly, so was I. I was so tempted to ring the school every other day. What actually helped was when I stopped trying to fix it and just made a point of sitting with her after school every day and asking about one good thing, anything at all, even if it was small. She started coming home and telling me herself without me asking. And I enrolled her in a street dance class on Saturdays, just to try it. She wasn’t particularly good at it but she loved it, and she made a friend there who she’s still close to now, two years later. The school situation did improve, slowly, but the dance class got her through the roughest bit.”

Moving Forward

Watching your child struggle socially is genuinely hard, partly because you can’t do it for them, and partly because it can stir up memories of your own experiences of being left out or not fitting in. If you notice it’s hitting you harder than you’d expect, that’s worth paying attention to in its own right (last week’s article might be useful to revisit here).

What your child needs most in this situation isn’t a parent who can make the problem disappear. It’s a parent who can sit beside them in it without panicking, who can hold the feeling alongside them without rushing to end it, and who believes they’ll find their way through. That belief, communicated quietly through how you respond, is one of the most powerful things you can offer.

You are not just helping them through this particular rough patch, you are teaching them something about feelings themselves - that sadness, disappointment, loneliness, these are hard but survivable. They pass. And the people who learn that lesson early, in the safety of a relationship where someone stayed with them through the hard bit, tend to carry a quiet resilience into everything that comes after.

This Week, Try...

After school one day this week, instead of asking “how was your day,” try asking: “What was the best bit, even if it was tiny?” or “Was there anyone who was kind to you today?” See if it opens a different kind of conversation.

A question to reflect on:

When you were a child, did you have a place where you felt like you belonged? And if so, what made it feel that way?

Next week, we’re going to look at something that comes up in almost every family at some point: what to do when your child says they hate school. Not the odd morning grumble, but a real, repeated resistance that tells you something deeper might be going on. We’ll look at what’s usually underneath it and what actually helps.

Have you been through something like this with your own child? I’d love to hear what helped, or even what didn’t. Share in the comments below, because other parents reading this week might need exactly what you’ve learned. And if this resonated with you, please pass it on to another parent who might need to read it today.

Dr Daire Gilmartin

Consultant Counselling Psychologist and Psychotherapist

www.oaktreetherapy.ie

Afterwards, when it’s quiet again, you might find yourself turning it over. That wasn’t really about the dinner. So what was it about?

I’ve sat with hundreds of parents (including myself) over the years who’ve asked some version of that question, usually a little sheepishly, as if noticing it makes them strange. It doesn’t. It means they’re paying attention. Today I want to look at where those outsized reactions actually come from, because almost without exception, they lead back to our own childhoods. Not in a way that’s anyone’s fault. But in a way that, once you can see it, changes what you’re able to do with it.

What’s Really Going On

Every parent carries an invisible inheritance from how they themselves were parented. Not just the obvious stuff, the values you hold onto or the things you swore you’d never repeat, but something deeper and far less conscious: a set of emotional reflexes, laid down early, that get triggered by very specific things your own child does.

We’ve talked before in this series about “shark music,” a term from Circle of Security (video below).

It's the idea that certain behaviours in our children stir up an old, ominous feeling in us, completely disproportionate to what’s actually happening in front of us. Today I want to go further into where that music comes from and what to do when you hear it playing.

Here’s the bit that surprises people: it’s not really about logic. You can know, with your thinking brain, that your child whinging about dinner is a totally normal, forgettable moment. And still feel your whole body react as if something much bigger is happening. That’s because the reaction isn’t coming from your thinking brain at all. It’s coming from somewhere much older and much faster, a part of you that learned, a long time ago, that certain feelings or behaviours meant something was about to go wrong.

Think about it this way. If you grew up in a house where whinging led to a parent who got cold and withdrew, your nervous system may have learned: whinging is dangerous, it makes people leave. If you grew up where any sign of need was met with irritation, you might have learned: needing things is a burden, don’t ask. If your home was loud and unpredictable, calm might never have felt safe, because calm was often the lull before something erupted. None of this is something you decided. It was absorbed, the way children absorb everything, through thousands of small repeated experiences long before you had words for any of it.

And then, decades later, your own child does the very thing that used to predict trouble in your childhood home, and your body responds the way it learned to respond back then. Not because your child is in any danger. But because some old, much younger part of you genuinely believes, for half a second, that it might be.

This is why two parents can witness the exact same bit of cheek from a child and have completely different reactions. One barely registers it. The other is instantly furious, or instantly anxious, or instantly desperate to shut it down. The difference isn’t about which parent is more skilled. It’s about which buttons that particular moment happened to press.

What Doesn’t Help (But We All Do It Anyway)

Beating yourself up over the reaction. “Why do I always do this?” “What is wrong with me?” I understand this instinct completely, but shame doesn’t get you any closer to understanding yourself. It just adds another layer of distress on top of an already activated nervous system, which makes the next reaction more likely, not less.

Assuming your reaction is simply correct. The opposite trap. Because the feeling is so strong, it can feel like proof that the situation really is as serious as it feels. “I’m this angry, so this must actually be a big deal.” Strength of feeling and accuracy of feeling are two completely different things, and shark music is loud precisely because it’s old, not because it’s right.

Deciding you’re just “a shouty person” or “highly strung” and leaving it there. This one feels almost like self-acceptance, but it actually closes the door on the very thing that would help: curiosity about where the pattern came from and whether it still needs to run the show.

Avoiding the topic of your own childhood altogether. Some of us grew up being told, in one way or another, that you don’t go digging around in the past, that what’s done is done. I get the appeal of that. But the patterns don’t go away just because we don’t examine them. They just keep operating without anyone at the wheel.

What Actually Helps

Get curious instead of critical. The next time you notice a reaction that feels bigger than the moment warrants, try asking yourself, gently, almost like you’d ask a friend: that was a lot. I wonder where that came from? Not as an exercise in self-blame, but as genuine curiosity. This single shift, from judging the reaction to getting curious about it, is probably the most useful thing in this whole article. Psychologists sometimes call this reflective functioning, the capacity to wonder about your own inner world rather than just reacting from inside it. You don’t need a clinical term for it. You just need to start asking the question.

Notice your specific triggers. For most parents, it’s not everything that sets off shark music. It’s particular things. Whinging. Being ignored. A certain tone of voice. Being challenged in front of other people. Tears that go on too long. See if you can name yours. What is the specific thing your child does that gets a reaction from you that feels bigger than the moment? Once you can name it, you’ve already taken some of the power out of it, because you’ve moved it from “automatic and invisible” to “something I’m starting to understand.”

Trace it back, if you can. Sometimes the connection to your own childhood is obvious the moment you look for it. Sometimes it takes a bit longer. You might ask yourself: when I was little and I did this thing, what happened? How did the adults around me respond? Some parents grew up with real adversity or experiences that went far beyond ordinary mistakes. Others were raised by adults who were doing the best they could with what they had. Understanding your own wiring isn't about excusing anyone or putting them on trial. It's about making sense of what shaped you, because understanding it is what helps you respond differently now.

Build in a pause. This is the practical, in-the-moment piece. When you feel the old reaction rising, even a single breath, even three seconds of silence before you speak, gives your thinking brain just enough time to come back online. You’re not trying to suppress the feeling. You’re creating a tiny gap between the feeling and what comes out of your mouth. That gap is where choice lives.

Talk to the part of you that’s reacting. This sounds unusual, but it works. Internally, something like: I know this feels huge right now, but it’s not actually an emergency. You can say this to yourself in the middle of the moment. It won’t switch the feeling off instantly, but it starts to put some distance between you and the old reflex.

Know that awareness doesn’t mean instant change, and that’s alright. You won’t notice every trigger in real time, and you’ll still lose your temper sometimes even once you understand exactly why. That’s not failure. The understanding is what makes the gap a little wider each time, and what makes repair, when you need it, come from a place of genuine insight rather than just guilt.

There is much hope too, as I know this whole topic can sound a bit heavy: you are not simply destined to repeat your childhood. Researchers call this “earned security”: the idea that people who didn't experience a particularly secure childhood can still develop a more secure way of relating as adults. Through reflection, relationships, therapy for some, and the repeated practice of doing things differently, people can grow beyond the patterns they inherited. You don't need a perfect childhood to become the parent you want to be. You need curiosity and enough self-compassion to keep looking, even when what you find isn't entirely comfortable.

What one parent discovered:

“My son has a habit of going completely silent when he’s upset instead of crying or talking about it, and it used to make me almost frantic with anxiety. I’d push and push to get him to tell me what was wrong, and the more I pushed the quieter he got, and I’d end up nearly in tears myself over nothing. It took me ages to realise that silence was exactly what used to happen in my house growing up before things went badly. My father went quiet before he lost his temper. So some part of me had decided silence equals danger, and I was reacting to my eight-year-old as if he was about to explode, when really he was just a quiet kid processing his feelings in his own way. Once I understood that, I stopped pushing. I just sat near him and said ‘I’m here whenever you’re ready.’ It made things so much easier, not just for him, for me too. I wasn’t braced for impact anymore.”

Moving Forward

None of this is about blaming your own parents, and it’s certainly not about blaming yourself. Most of us are doing the best we can with the wiring we were given, in a job that comes with no training manual and far too little sleep. You didn't choose the patterns you inherited. But once you can see them clearly, they stop being something that simply happens to you, and start being something you can actually work with.

This is some of the most important work a parent can do, not because you need to overhaul yourself completely, but because every bit of understanding you bring to your own reactions is something your child won’t have to inherit unexamined. You are quietly rewriting the story for the next generation, one paused breath, one moment of curiosity, one repaired rupture at a time. That’s not a small thing. It might be one of the biggest gifts you ever give them.

This Week, Try...

Think of one reaction you’ve had recently that felt bigger than the situation warranted. Don’t judge it, just get curious. Ask yourself: what does this remind me of? Where might I have learned that this particular thing was a big deal? You don’t need to solve it or fix anything this week. Just notice, and see what comes up.

A question to reflect on:

When you were growing up, what got the strongest reaction from the adults around you? And do you find yourself reacting strongly to that same thing in your own child now?

Next week, we’re going to talk about something that doesn’t get nearly enough airtime: friendship struggles, and what to do when your child is being left out, or can’t seem to find their people. It’s one of the harder things to watch as a parent, and there’s a lot we can do to help, even when we can’t fix it for them.

What’s your shark music? I’d love to hear what you’ve noticed about your own triggers in the comments, sometimes naming it out loud is half the work. And if this resonated with you, please share it with another parent who might need to read it today.

Dr Daire Gilmartin

Consultant Counselling Psychologist and Psychotherapist

www.oaktreetherapy.ie

And then the familiar aftermath. They go quiet, or they cry, or they stomp upstairs. The room settles into a particular kind of silence. You stand there feeling like the worst parent in the world. You pour a glass of wine you didn’t particularly want. You scroll your phone without taking anything in. You go to bed that night with it still sitting on you.

I know this feeling. I know it from my own life and from sitting with hundreds of parents over the years who have described it in almost exactly the same words. The inner voice that comes afterwards is not gentle: What is wrong with me? I swore I’d never do this. My child is going to remember this. I’m damaging them.

What I want to talk about today is what happens in that space after. Not why you lost it (we’ve been into the shark music and the depleted tank and all of that in earlier articles). Today I want to look at the guilt that follows, the things that stop parents from going back, and what repair actually looks like when you do it properly. Because repair is where the real work happens, and most of us were never shown how.

The Guilt Loop (And Why It Doesn’t Actually Help)

The shame that follows losing your temper can be crushing. And it feels like it should be. It feels appropriate, given how bad you feel. But here’s what the guilt doesn’t do: it doesn’t protect your child. It doesn’t undo the moment. What it does instead is deplete you further, which makes you more reactive, which makes the next blow-up more likely. Shame, inconveniently, is a fuel source for the very pattern you’re trying to stop.

Guilt is useful only in the direction of repair. The moment you’ve decided you’re going to go back to your child, the guilt has done its job. Anything beyond that point is just punishment, and it doesn’t serve anyone, least of all your child.

You need to be able to put the guilt down long enough to actually go back. And that requires a degree of self-compassion that some parents find genuinely difficult, particularly if they grew up in a home where mistakes were handled harshly. But you cannot repair from inside a shame spiral. You need enough of yourself available to be present for the conversation. Being kind enough to yourself to do that isn’t weakness, it’s a prerequisite.

What Gets in the Way of Going Back

Most parents want to repair. So why doesn’t it always happen?

Pride is one reason. There’s something about apologising to a child that can feel exposing, even a little humiliating. A worry that it undermines your authority. That they’ll see you as weak, or use it against you the next time. I understand this completely. But, children don’t become disrespectful because their parents take responsibility. They become disrespectful when they learn that adults don’t. What you’re modelling when you repair is exactly the behaviour you want your child to be capable of when they’re older.

Not having a model for it is another real obstacle, and one that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. If the adults in your life growing up didn’t repair with you, you have no felt sense of what it looks like. You know you should apologise to your child, but the actual mechanics of it are unfamiliar in a deep way. What do I say? How do I even start? What if they react badly? These aren’t silly questions. They’re the questions of someone trying to give their child something they themselves didn’t receive. That takes real courage.

And then there’s a fear I hear from parents regularly: what if I open a can of worms? What if I bring it up and it all starts again? What if they get upset and we end up in a worse place than before? So they say nothing, and the child seems fine, and gradually the moment just passes.

But here’s what I want you to hold onto: the can of worms is already open. It just went underground. Children don’t move on from difficult moments the way we’d like to think. What looks like moving on is more often a quiet carrying of it, the child left wondering whether you noticed, whether it mattered, or if they’re okay with you. The unrepaired moment doesn’t disappear. It becomes something they hold privately, and they hold it alone.

This matters hugely as children get older. The relationship you’re building right now, the patterns you’re setting around whether hard things get talked about or quietly buried, these are what shape whether your teenager will come to you when something is really wrong. Children who’ve grown up seeing that difficult moments are followed by openness and conversation learn that they can bring things back. That the relationship can hold hard things. That’s the foundation you want in place before they’re fifteen and navigating things that are genuinely frightening. Repair isn’t just good for right now, it’s an investment in your future relationship.

A Word About “Soft Parenting”

I want to name something, because I know it’s in some parents’ heads when this topic comes up. For those who didn’t grow up receiving repair, the whole idea of sitting down and apologising to your child can feel a bit suspicious. A bit too much. Too soft. What some people now call “gentle parenting.” And there’s sometimes a version of: if I got through just fine without any of this, why does my child need it?

I hear this and I respect it as a real concern. And my answer is straightforward: repair is not soft. Telling your child that you got it wrong, that they didn’t deserve how you spoke to them, that you’re going to handle it better, that takes guts. It is one of the harder things parents are asked to do. And the research on what it does for children is not ambiguous. Children who receive genuine repair from the adults who care for them develop stronger self-worth, better emotional regulation, and more resilience in their relationships. Not because they’ve been wrapped in cotton wool, but because they’ve learned, through direct experience, that relationships survive difficulty. That adults can be wrong and own it, and that they themselves are worth coming back for.

That’s not soft. That’s solid.

What Repair Actually Looks Like

The repair conversation doesn’t have to be long or formal. With younger children especially, simpler is better. But it does need a few specific things to actually land.

Wait until everyone is genuinely calm first. Not just surface calm, but actually settled. This might be thirty minutes later, or it might be that evening, or even the following morning for a teenager. There is no rush. A proper repair done two hours later is far better than a scrambled one done ten minutes later when everyone is still raw.

Get physically close and at their level. Sit beside them, or get down so you’re eye to eye. This changes the whole texture of the conversation. It signals: I’m coming to you, not standing over you.

Name what happened, simply and without qualification. “I lost my temper this evening and I shouted at you.” Full stop. No addendum. Just the clear, plain truth of what happened.

Then acknowledge what it was like for them. This is the part parents most often skip, and it’s the most important part. “That wasn’t fair on you.” Or: “I imagine that felt frightening.” Or even: “I think that was hard on you.” You’re not asking them to confirm they were upset. You’re naming that your behaviour had an impact, and you’re taking responsibility for that. Children need to hear this. They need to know that you noticed and that it mattered to you.

Take responsibility, clearly and without escape routes. “I was exhausted and completely overwhelmed, but that’s mine to manage, not yours to carry.” This is not an excuse offered in mitigation. It’s an honest account that puts the responsibility exactly where it belongs: with you.

And here is something I want you to hold onto very firmly: the repair ends there. No “but.” Not “I’m sorry I shouted, but you shouldn’t have...” Not “I know I raised my voice, but if you had just listened...” The moment a “but” appears, everything before it gets cancelled out. Children hear the “but” and they know. They know the apology just became a negotiation. A real repair stands completely on its own, with nothing added to the end of it that redirects the focus back to them.

If their behaviour also needs to be addressed (and sometimes it does), that is a completely separate conversation, at a separate time, when connection has been restored. You can own your part entirely, without any of that muddying it, and then later, when things are genuinely calm between you, you can say: “I also want to talk about what was happening earlier, because that matters too.” Two conversations, kept clean from each other. Both get to land properly that way.

After the words, reconnect. A hug if that’s natural. A hand on their shoulder. Sitting together for a few minutes. The physical reconnection is what signals, in a way words can’t quite do, that everything is alright between you.

It’s also very possible that sometimes your child won't immediately accept the repair. They may still be angry, hurt, or unwilling to talk. That's okay too. The point isn't controlling their response; it's taking responsibility for your part.

What Repair Does for Your Child (And Why It Matters So Much)

I think about repair not just as something that fixes a difficult moment, but as one of the most important things we do for our children’s future relationships. When a child grows up experiencing that rupture is followed by repair, that the person they love most can get it wrong and come back and name it and make it right, they are learning something foundational about what relationships are.

They are learning that love doesn’t vanish when things go badly and that: conflict doesn’t mean abandonment; the people who matter to you can hurt you and then actually come back and acknowledge it; and that they are worth coming back for.

These are not small lessons. They are the architecture of every significant relationship your child will have for the rest of their life. How they will handle conflict with a partner, a friend, a colleague. Whether they will be able to repair in their own relationships, or whether they will go underground the way so many of us learned to do. The repair you offer your child now is showing them what healthy relationship actually looks like, from the inside.

When Your Child Comes Back

One of the unexpected things about repairing with children is that they often begin doing it themselves. The child who hears “I got that wrong and I’m sorry” over and over eventually learns that mistakes don’t have to be defended forever. They can be acknowledged.

So when your child comes back after a difficult moment, perhaps muttering a reluctant apology or awkwardly trying to reconnect, try to receive it generously. Don’t make them earn forgiveness through a longer lecture, even if it’s really tempting!

Repair is a skill. They’re learning it from somewhere.

From the Therapy Room

The parents I work with who find repair hardest are almost always the ones who received it least. When I ask what happened after difficult moments in their families growing up, the answer is usually some version of: “We just got on with it.” Or: “It was never talked about.” Or: “My mam or dad never apologised. That wasn’t something that happened.”

When you didn’t grow up receiving repair, offering it to your own children can feel deeply strange. You have no felt memory of what it’s supposed to look like, or even that it’s supposed to happen at all. And so even when you know you should go back, getting yourself to actually sit down beside your child and say the words out loud can feel almost impossible.

What I see, again and again, is that parents who push through that discomfort, even clumsily, even when the words come out imperfectly, find something they really didn’t expect: their child is relieved. Genuinely relieved, and often visibly lighter. Not because the apology was perfectly worded, but because the parent came back at all. Because the child who had been quietly carrying the weight of the difficult moment suddenly sees that they’re okay with the person who matters most to them. The repair tells them: we’re alright. You’re safe with me.

Sometimes children respond warmly. Sometimes they shrug and wander off. Both are fine. One parent I worked with described doing her first proper repair with her ten-year-old son. She expected it to be awkward. He cried almost immediately. She asked him what was wrong. He said, “I’m not crying because I’m sad. I’m happy because you still like me, I thought you didn’t.” Heartbreaking, and a reminder of how much children can carry when difficult moments are left unexplained.

Moving Forward

Losing your temper doesn’t make you a bad parent. It makes you a parent. The question has never been whether difficult moments will happen. They will, for everyone, as long as we’re raising children while also being human. What matters is what you do when they do.

Repair is not a patch on a damaged relationship. It is part of what makes the relationship real. It tells your child, over and over, that they matter enough for you to come back. That the relationship between you is solid enough to hold hard things. That you are the kind of person who takes responsibility.

This is not a small thing to give someone. It is, in fact, one of the most important things you will ever give them.

This Week, Try...

If there’s a moment from the last while still sitting with you, a moment where you lost your cool and nothing was said afterwards, use it this week. Don’t wait for the right words or a perfect moment. Find a quiet few minutes, sit beside your child, and say something simple: “I’ve been thinking about the other night. I didn’t handle that well and I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that.” No “but” at the end. Just that. And see what happens.

A question to reflect on:

When you were growing up, what happened after difficult moments in your family? Was there repair, conversation, some acknowledgment? Or did everyone just move on? And what does that bring up for you now, when it’s your turn to be the one who goes back?

Next week, we’re going to go somewhere that I think is one of the most important places this series can take us: your own childhood, and how it shows up in the parent you are today. Not in a blaming way, not in a way that opens old wounds without purpose, but in a way that might finally explain some of the reactions that have puzzled you most about yourself. Because the patterns we carry are not our fault. But once we can see them clearly, they become something we can actually work with. See you then.

What does repair look like in your house? Is it something that comes naturally, or something you’re still finding your way with? I’d genuinely love to hear in the comments. And if this resonated with you, please share it with another parent who might need to read it today.

Dr Daire Gilmartin

Consultant Counselling Psychologist and Psychotherapist

www.oaktreetherapy.ie

Football training starts at six. It’s half five and your ten-year-old is deep in a game on the PlayStation. You give a ten-minute warning, no response. You give a five-minute warning. Nothing. At six minutes to six, you tell them it’s time to go, and the screen goes off, and what follows is fifteen minutes of argument, tears, slammed doors, and a child who arrives at training in a foul mood that has nothing to do with football.

On the way home, you find yourself wondering: why is this so hard every single time? Is this normal? Should I even be letting them play before training?

The screen conversation is one of the most exhausting recurring arguments in modern family life. Guilt when you hand over a device, guilt when you take it away, conflicting advice everywhere you look. Let’s try to make it a bit more manageable, because it depends hugely on which screen we’re talking about, how old the child is, and what’s actually happening on it.

Not All Screens Are the Same Thing

One of the reasons this conversation gets so muddled is that we use one word for a vast range of completely different experiences. A child watching something with a parent on the sofa is not in the same situation as a teenager alone in their bedroom scrolling social media at midnight. Both involve a screen, but that’s roughly where the similarity ends.

The family television or a shared games console in the sitting room is visible, in a shared space, and often a genuinely connecting experience. The risks are more limited. But even here, extended time affects mood, and coming off can be genuinely difficult. More on that shortly.

A laptop for schoolwork or creative projects is different again. Most children will need access to one, and helping them use it purposefully is good preparation for the world. The key questions are whether it’s being used for what it’s supposed to be used for, whether the screen is visible to you, and whether it goes offline at a reasonable time.

A personal smartphone is something else entirely. It is a discreet portal: to social media, to messaging apps, to video platforms, to search engines that will find anything. It fits in a pocket, goes to school, and goes to bed. The decisions around it deserve to be taken seriously, and I’ll come back to it.

What Screens Do to Mood (And Why Coming Off Is So Hard)

Back to the football training scenario. Gaming and fast-moving video content are genuinely absorbing in a way that makes transitioning away difficult. The brain gets caught up in something stimulating and being pulled out of it suddenly produces a real physiological response. The irritability afterwards is not purely wilfulness. It is partly a nervous system that has been running hot and hasn’t had a chance to settle.

There is also something worth naming about multiplayer games specifically. When a child is playing online with friends or as part of a team, the social stakes feel real to them. They don’t want to be the one who leaves mid-game and lets everyone down. The pull to stay on is not just about the game; it’s about belonging. “Just turn it off” can feel to a child less like a reasonable request and more like being asked to walk out on their friends. It doesn’t mean they get to stay on indefinitely, but it’s worth approaching with a bit of empathy rather than just (very understandable) frustration.

Children who have been on for a long stretch often come off already irritable and harder to reach. If you regularly notice your child is in a worse state after an hour on the console than before it, that’s worth a calm conversation at a neutral time. Not a lecture, just noticing it together: “I’ve noticed you often seem a bit flat after gaming for a while. Do you notice that too?” That kind of question opens something.

Practically, a few things help: give warnings that are real (five minutes means five minutes), agree the length of the session before it starts rather than negotiating at the end, and build in a short wind-down buffer where you can. A child who has agreed to forty-five minutes and had a five-minute warning is in a much better position than one who is cut off mid-game without notice.

A Word About Bedrooms

When screens and gaming consoles migrate into children’s bedrooms, something shifts in the whole texture of family life. The bedroom becomes the place they disappear to, and the sitting room empties out. The natural, unplanned moments of connection, conversations over nothing in particular, shared laughter, get hollower and less frequent. Over time, without anyone really deciding it, the family stops spending as much time together.

I’d strongly encourage keeping gaming devices out of bedrooms if you can. The sitting room console, visible and shared, is a fundamentally different object from the bedroom console running until two in the morning with nobody knowing. The same goes for phones: a charging station outside bedrooms at night removes the late-night pull for everyone. Sleep quality is genuinely affected by screens before bed, and the difference in a child’s mood and regulation the following day can be striking. These limits work best when they’re discussed and agreed as a family rather than imposed, but they are worth holding.

The Phone Question: When Is the Right Time?

My honest answer is: later than the social pressure suggests.

I have this conversation with parents regularly. “All their friends have one.” I understand that. The pressure falls on children and parents alike. But the fact that many children in a class have smartphones is not evidence that smartphones are developmentally appropriate for that age. It is evidence that a lot of families are in the same difficult position. Those are different things, and it’s worth holding onto that distinction when the pressure mounts.

I have yet to hear a developmental argument that convinces me a primary-school child benefits from unrestricted access to everything a smartphone brings. A basic phone that calls and texts addresses the practical need to reach them without opening the door to everything else. A reasonable threshold, if you can hold it, is around the move to secondary school: twelve or thirteen, depending on the child. Even then, the phone should come with a proper conversation before it arrives rather than after. Agreed limits are far easier to establish at the start than to negotiate once the phone is already in their hands. I know, easier said than done!! But it makes a big difference.

The Risks Are Real: Name Them With Your Children

If you watched the Netflix drama Adolescence, you will know the conversation it started. It held a lens up to what can happen when the online world, its misogyny, its radicalising content, its group dynamics, operates in silence, without parents knowing what their children are absorbing and without the relationships in place to talk about it. It was difficult to watch, but it prompted the honest conversations that many families need to have. We owe our children that, and we cannot let our own discomfort get in the way of it.

The internet contains things children should not see: pornography that presents a completely distorted picture of sex and relationships; content that glorifies self-harm or eating disorders; material pushing extreme and often misogynistic views; and radicalising content of various kinds. Children encounter this without always looking for it, through recommendation algorithms, shared links, curiosity. Pretending otherwise leaves them alone with it when it happens.

Cyberbullying is real and can be devastating. The group chat that excludes, the comment that humiliates, the image shared without consent: because they happen on a device that goes everywhere, there is no respite. They follow children home, into their bedrooms, at midnight.

Social comparison is built into most platforms children and teenagers use. What is posted is filtered and performed, but the developing brain does not always process it that way. The comparison is felt as real. The research connecting heavy social media use with anxiety and lower self-esteem in young people, particularly girls, is consistent enough to take seriously.

These platforms are designed to be compelling. The infinite scroll, the notification, the like, the streak: features engineered to hold attention and make stopping hard. Being honest with children about how this works is far more useful than simply telling them to put it down.

Conversations, Not Lectures

The families who manage screens well are not the ones with the strictest controls. They are the ones where children feel they can talk to their parents about what they are encountering online. Where they know that if they see something disturbing, or someone is unkind to them, or they end up somewhere they didn’t mean to go, they can bring it to you. That happens because parents have shown genuine, non-anxious interest over time. When something came up, they managed their own reaction well enough that the child felt safe to keep talking.

Our children are also educating us here. The platforms and social dynamics they’re navigating are genuinely new territory and they often understand aspects of it better than we do. Approaching this as a mutual conversation rather than a one-way transmission of rules is not permissiveness. It is respect, and what actually works.

The harder conversations matter too. Talking to your teenager about pornography, about the gap between what it shows and what real relationships look like. Talking about misogynistic content that circulates in some online spaces, about how it gets in through humour and gradually normalises things that should not be normal. These are not things to protect children from knowing. They are things to help children think through, to get perspective on, to hold against values that you’ve talked about together. Your job is to be the person they come to when something goes wrong online. That happens through calm, repeated conversation over time, not through over monitoring.

Checking devices is sometimes necessary. Checking because you genuinely want to protect your child, openly and as part of an agreed approach, is very different from covert surveillance designed to catch them out. Children feel the difference. One builds trust, the other erodes the relationship you most need them to use.

Your Own Screen Use Matters Too

Children whose parents are frequently distracted by their phones show more attention-seeking behaviour and more dysregulation. They are working to get the connection back. When they can’t, some give up and retreat to their own screen instead, at which point we notice their screen use without noticing what preceded it.

If we want our children to be thoughtful about when they’re on and when they’re genuinely off, they need to see us working on the same thing. The conversation about screens in your family will land very differently when it comes from a place of “we’re all figuring this out together, including me.” That is not an easy thing to ask of ourselves. But it matters, probably more than any individual limit we set for them.

Moving Forward

Screens are part of your children’s world. Keeping gaming devices and phones out of bedrooms can make a real difference to how much time families actually spend together. Delaying the smartphone can be worth the pressure to hold on. Every family reaches this decision differently, and circumstances vary. But in my experience, most parents rarely regret waiting a little longer. Reviewing limits as children grow, staying curious about what they’re doing online, being honest about your own use: none of this is dramatic. It is just steady, engaged parenting in a world that is genuinely new for all of us.

The warmth and honesty in how you talk about all of this will do more for your children than any parental control setting. That much, at least, has not changed.

This Week, Try…

Ask your child to show you something they enjoy on their screen this week. Sit beside them. Be genuinely curious about it, without negative comment. Just be present with them in their world for a few minutes and notice what opens up.

A question to reflect on:

When you were growing up, was there something you did with your free time that your parents didn’t understand or felt uneasy about? How did it feel to be on the receiving end of that worry? What does that bring up when you think about how you approach your own children’s screen use now?

Next week we’re going somewhere a lot of parents find uncomfortable: what happens after you lose your temper. The moment itself, but also the guilt, what gets in the way of coming back from it, and the practical steps that make repair real. We’ve touched on repair before in this series, but next week is the proper deep dive. See you then.

What does the screen conversation look like in your house right now? Is the phone question something you’re wrestling with, or have you found an approach that works for your family? I’d genuinely love to hear in the comments. And if this resonated, please share it with another parent who might need to read it.

Dr Daire Gilmartin

Consultant Counselling Psychologist and Psychotherapist

Oak Tree Therapy

www.oaktreetherapy.ie

Knowing how everyone is looking forward to holidays and a good break, I penned this bonus article in the hope that it helps set you all up for successful adventures! Have a great summer when you get there.

The Holiday:

You’ve been planning this for months. Flights booked, accommodation sorted, itinerary loosely mapped. You’ve imagined it dozens of times: the kids splashing in the pool, everyone relaxed, the kind of golden family memories that make the year feel worth it.

Then the actual day arrives.

You’re at the airport by 6am. Someone has already cried about the early start. You’re juggling bags and passports and trying to remember which pocket you put the boarding passes in, and your nine-year-old is asking every three minutes when the plane is leaving, and your teenager has headphones on and is walking approximately four steps behind you as if they’ve never met you before. The security queue is longer than expected. You’re getting that tight feeling in your chest. You snap at your partner. Your youngest announces they need the toilet, right now, just as you reach the top of the queue.

By the time you get on the plane, you’re exhausted and you haven’t even left the country yet.

Sound familiar?! Family holidays are wonderful AND they are genuinely hard, especially the getting there and the settling in. The rest of this article is about making all of that a bit more manageable.

Why Holidays Can Bring Out Big Feelings in Children (And in You)

Holidays, for all their excitement, involve a LOT of change, and children’s nervous systems notice change. New environments, disrupted sleep, different food, the unfamiliar sounds of a strange bedroom at night. Add in the airport - busy, noisy, full of adults under pressure, multiple checks, time constraints, sensory overload, and you have a genuinely activating experience for many children (and adults!).

This is not a sign that something is wrong. It’s a sign that your child’s nervous system is doing exactly what nervous systems do: scanning for the familiar, noticing the unfamiliar, and sending signals that feel a lot like anxiety, irritability, or just... being really, really difficult.

Some children love every second of it! But plenty of perfectly well-adjusted, typically developing children find holidays genuinely hard at different points and that often looks like out-of-character behaviour, clinginess, meltdowns over small things, or sleep difficulties in a new place. Understanding what’s driving it doesn’t make the behaviour disappear, but it changes how you respond to it and that can make a big difference.

The Airport Is a Lot (For Everyone)

Let’s be honest: airports are objectively stressful. They’re noisy, crowded, full of strangers, time-pressured, and require everyone to do a lot of specific things in a specific order. Adults who travel all the time find them stressful. So for a child who has never flown before, or who only flies occasionally, the airport can feel completely overwhelming before the holiday has even started.

You’ll be feeling the pressure too. And children are extraordinary barometers. They feel your nervous system before you’ve said a word. When you’re anxious and snapping at everyone to hurry up, they register that as a signal that something might not be safe and their own systems ramp up accordingly. Then they’re harder to manage, you’re more stressed, and they’re more dysregulated. You know how this goes.

One of the most helpful things you can do for them, and for you too, is to name what’s coming. Not as a warning, but as a normalising conversation. Something like:

“I want to give you a heads-up about the airport. It's quite busy and loud, and there are a few things we all need to do before we get on the plane. I sometimes get a bit stressed there because there’s a lot to keep track of, so if you see me looking a bit flustered, that’s why. It’s nothing to worry about, I’ll be fine once we’re on the plane!”

That small conversation does a few things at once. It prepares your child for what they’re about to experience. It names your own state before you’re in it (which is a kind of magic as children cope far better with a parent who said “I might be stressed” than one who is inexplicably snapping). And it gives them a framework for interpreting your behaviour that doesn’t lead to the conclusion that something is catastrophically wrong.

Preparing Younger Children: Make It Playful

For children under about eight, preparation through play is incredibly powerful. Children this age process experiences through play, it’s how they make sense of the world, rehearse things they’re not sure about, and metabolise what’s coming. A little bit of purposeful, playful preparation can genuinely transform the holiday experience.

Set up a pretend airport at home. Line up chairs for the plane. Get everyone to put their shoes and a bag through the pretend scanner. Give them a pretend passport to hand over. Let them be in charge of parts of it. Laugh about it, be silly about it, the point is to make the unfamiliar feel familiar in a low-stakes way before you’re actually in the middle of it.

If you can, show them photos or short videos of where you’re going. The hotel, the apartment, the beach, what the town looks like. This builds a mental picture in advance, so when they arrive it doesn’t feel completely unknown. “Look, there’s the pool! And there’s the restaurant right next to it.” A child who has seen images of where they’re going can orient themselves much faster on arrival.

Some families do a countdown with visuals, a simple paper chain or a calendar with the destination marked. Anticipation is fun when it’s contained; it reduces the sense of a sudden change appearing from nowhere.

Preparing Teenagers: Involve Them

Teenagers are a different challenge entirely, and “prepare through play” is not going to work! What works with teenagers is almost the opposite of what works with younger children: instead of preparation handed down from above, you want collaboration.

Teenagers who have some genuine input into the holiday are far more invested in it. That doesn’t mean they get to dictate everything but it means they get a real say in some things that matter to them. What’s one thing they’d really like to do? Is there somewhere they want to eat? Could they plan a day of the trip themselves?

Before the holiday, have an actual conversation, not a briefing, a conversation. “What are you looking forward to? What would make this feel like a good trip for you?” And then listen to the answer, even if it’s delivered with an eye-roll and a shrug. Teenagers often know exactly what they want; they just need to feel that it’s worth saying.

It’s also worth having an honest conversation about phones and expectations before you go rather than in the middle of an argument on a sun lounger. What’s the plan for screens? When is connection time and when is everyone free to be on their own? You’re much more likely to get buy-in before the trip than during it.

And one thing to hold onto: side-by-side connection (yes, there it is again!!) often works better with teenagers than face-to-face conversation. A walk to the local shops. Watching something together on a laptop in the evening. Cooking something together. They will often open up when you’re not looking at each other.

Food, Sleep, and the Small Things That Actually Matter

Food is easy to underestimate. When children are hungry or out of their food routine, everything becomes harder, and unfamiliar food can be a surprisingly big deal for some children. Packing a bag of familiar snacks for the journey (and ideally some easy food for the first evening before anyone has figured out where anything is) is one of the best investments you can make. The first few hours in a new place are genuinely easier when you’re not also trying to navigate mealtimes in an unfamiliar language while everyone is tired.

Sleep disruption is normal for a night or two, new sounds, a different bed, the light coming in at a different angle. Bringing a familiar item (a comforter, a well-loved soft toy, their own pillow) helps a lot with younger children. For teenagers, agreeing in advance that the first night or two might be rough, and not catastrophising if it is, helps everyone.

Lower your expectations for the first 24 hours. Give everyone, including yourself, time to land.

What one parent discovered:

“I used to go into every holiday hoping it would be brilliant from the minute we arrived. And then I’d be devastated when the first day was hard. The kids were overtired, there were meltdowns over nothing, and I felt like we’d wasted the whole trip. This year I did it differently. We did a pretend airport at home the week before, which my seven-year-old absolutely loved and my ten-year-old pretended to think was babyish but actually got really into! I showed them both loads of photos of the apartment. And I actually told them I find airports stressful - I’ve never done that before. On the day, when I was clearly flustered trying to find the boarding passes, my seven-year-old turned to me and said ‘It’s okay Mam, you’ll be grand when we’re on the plane.’ Amazing!”

Moving Forward

Family holidays are genuinely one of the best things you can give your children — not because they’re perfect, but because shared experience, the bumpy bits included, is the stuff that family becomes made of. The grumpy first day or the flight where someone cried over the headphones. The dinner where nobody could agree and you ended up eating crackers in the apartment. Those become stories too, often the best ones.

Go easy on yourself when it’s hard. You’re managing a lot - the logistics, your own regulation, theirs. A holiday with imperfect moments is not a failed holiday. It’s a real one.

This Week, Try...

Before your next trip, even if it’s weeks or months away, have one five-minute conversation with each of your children about what they’re looking forward to and what they might be a bit nervous about. Just that. Not a briefing or a checklist, a conversation. See what comes up.

A question to reflect on:

What was the family holiday experience like when you were growing up? And how does that show up in what you’re hoping or worrying about your own family holidays?

Next time, we’ll be looking at screens and children, a topic that every parent struggles with and almost nobody feels good about. We’ll cut through the noise and look at what actually matters.

What’s your biggest holiday challenge, the journey, the settling in, or something else entirely? I’d love to hear in the comments. And if this resonated with you, please share it with another parent who might need it before the summer!

Dr Daire Gilmartin

Consultant Counselling Psychologist and Psychotherapist

Oak Tree Therapy

www.oaktreetherapy.ie

You’re sitting in the car outside the house. You’ve just collected your teenager from wherever they’ve been, and the drive home has been pretty standard. In the sense that nothing terrible was said. But you’ve also exchanged approximately twenty-five words in fifteen minutes. You tried. “How was it?” “Grand.” “What did you get up to?” “Just hung out.” “Is Ciarán still going out with that girl?” And here they turn and look at you with something that lands somewhere between mild exasperation and genuine bafflement, as if you have asked something deeply invasive. “Why are you asking me so many questions?” You pull into the driveway. They’re out of the car before you’ve even turned off the engine.

You sit there for a moment. A year ago they would have talked the whole way home. Two years ago, they were holding your hand, telling you everything before you’d left the car park. And now this. The pulled-away feeling, the careful blankness, the sense that you are somehow always saying the wrong thing without quite knowing what the right thing would be.

What happened?

They’re a teenager. And what is going on inside them right now is, in my experience, the most consistently misunderstood developmental story in parenting.

What the Teenage Years Add

Last week we talked about how the tween years mark the beginning of the brain’s great restructuring project: the prefrontal cortex being rebuilt, the emotional centres running hot, the regulatory centres lagging behind. If you read that and thought “well that explains a lot,” you were right; it does.

But here’s the thing: in the full teenage years, the work goes deeper. The tween version was the opening act. What happens from thirteen or fourteen onwards is the same renovation project operating at much greater intensity, and with much higher stakes.

Two things stand out in particular.

The first is risk-taking. In the teenage brain, the circuitry that evaluates “what could go wrong here?” is still genuinely incomplete. This is not attitude (although there is attitude too!). It is not a character flaw. It is a brain that is wired, at this stage of development, to weight the potential reward of an experience far more heavily than the potential consequence. But it is also worth understanding that risk-taking in adolescence is not just neurological: it is purposeful. Teenagers are experimenting. They are testing the world, testing themselves, finding out what they are capable of and what they can handle. This experimentation is part of how they move toward independence: it is clumsy and sometimes alarming to watch, but it is doing something important. Limits still matter enormously, but the question worth asking when something worrying happens is not just “why would they do that?” but “what were they reaching for?” Understanding the reach can change the conversation.

The second is the force of social belonging. Peer acceptance registers in the teenage brain with a neurological weight that can feel like physical pain. Being excluded, humiliated, or left out socially at this age is not something they can just brush off. To their nervous system, it is an emergency. This is why something that seems minor to us (who said what in a group chat, who walked past without speaking, whether they were included or left out of something) can send them completely sideways. It isn’t oversensitivity. It is a nervous system responding to something that feels, at a deep level, like a threat to survival itself. I remember this time of my life so well and am glad not to have to go through any of it again!

The Push-Away Isn’t What It Looks Like

The push-away hurts. When the child who used to climb into your bed on a Saturday morning now sighs at you from across the kitchen, when the conversations get shorter and the door stays more often closed, when you feel like a stranger to someone you’ve known every single day of their life, that is a real loss and it’s allowed to feel like one.

And yet, this same age can be genuinely brilliant too. The humour gets sharper, the conversation more interesting, the energy more infectious. There are teenagers who will have you in stitches, who surprise you with what they notice, who bring a creativity and a passion for things that is wonderful to be around. The push-away is real but so is the craic. Both can be true on the same afternoon, sometimes within the same hour!

But here is what we must hold onto: the teenager who rolls their eyes, gives one-word answers, and seems embarrassed by your mere existence still needs you. Deeply. They just cannot tell you that. In many cases, they genuinely don’t know it themselves.

The developmental work of adolescence is individuation, the gradual construction of an identity that belongs to them rather than to the family. They are trying, in a hundred ways, to answer the question of who they are when they are not just someone’s child. And they are doing this work primarily through their peer group - trying on different versions of themselves, testing how they land, working out what fits. This is exactly what the developmental calendar asks of them at this age. It is healthy, necessary, and completely on schedule.

But the push-away is not a signal that they no longer need you. It is a signal that they need you differently. They need you to stay available without demanding access; to be there without requiring them to perform closeness on your timetable. To be the stable, warm, non-reactive presence in a life that is currently moving at a pace they often struggle to keep up with themselves.

When we take the push-away personally and pull back in response, we remove the very thing they need most: the felt sense that no matter how far they go, there is somewhere solid to come back to. A secure base doesn’t disappear when it stops being needed every day. It stays there.

What Doesn’t Help (But We All Do It Anyway)

Trying to have the meaningful conversation at the wrong moment. “Can we talk?” said with deliberate eye contact in a quiet room is, for many teenagers, about as inviting as a formal interview. Many of them simply cannot do face-to-face emotional conversation. It is too exposing, and it can feel like an ambush even when it is offered in love. If the only time you attempt real connection is the formal sit-down, you will get very little in return.

Taking the withdrawal as rejection and matching it with distance. I see this happen gradually in so many families. The parent has been pushed away one too many times and quietly begins to pull back too, giving them the space they seem to want, protecting themselves from the sting of being kept out. It feels reasonable. What the teenager experiences though, is the loss of the anchor. They push, and instead of finding you still there, they find you gone. And they don’t know how to tell you that this frightens them. So the distance grows, on both sides, until it feels enormous.

Reacting too dramatically to what they do share. This is a crucial one. If every time your teenager mentions that something difficult happened (a friend did something questionable, a party went somewhere unexpected, a situation you’d have strong feelings about), they are met with a spiral of alarm or a lengthy lecture, they will stop telling you things. They are calibrating, in real time, whether you are a safe person to bring things to. A dramatic reaction teaches them quickly, this is not a safe place to share. Keep a lid on it. And the cost of that, over time, is losing access to their world.

Long lectures when they’re already dysregulated. The three R’s still apply here, every bit as much as they did when they were five. Regulate first: let the storm pass, give it time to settle. Relate: come back when the temperature has dropped and the connection is easier. Then, and only then, reason: talk about what happened, what could be different, what needs to change. Trying to deliver a lecture in the thick of a teenage row is like trying to build a sandcastle in a wave. The wave will win every time.

Measuring them against your own teenage years. This one is worth a moment, because it can run quietly in the background without us fully noticing it. If you were significantly more independent at their age, more self-sufficient, more responsible, you might hold limits that are tighter than they need to be, or become more distant when they struggle, because the message you absorbed was that teenagers should just manage. On the other hand, if you got up to plenty of messing and experimenting yourself (and a fair number of us did), that can go either way: you might be more anxious about their lives than the situation warrants, knowing from experience what is possible. Or you might swing the other way entirely, too relaxed about things that do actually need your attention, telling yourself “I turned out fine” when their situation genuinely calls for a firmer approach. Also, if your own adolescence was painful or difficult in other ways, you might find their struggles landing harder than you’d expect, or find yourself wanting to protect them from things they actually need to move through.

This is worth getting genuinely curious about. When your reaction to your teenager feels bigger than the moment seems to call for (irritation that comes from nowhere, a cold distance you can’t quite explain, a need to hold a line that turns into something harder than it needs to be), the question worth asking is: whose story am I in right now? Theirs, or mine?

What Actually Helps

Side by side. Here we are again! This is perhaps the most practically useful thing I can offer you for the teenage years, and it is so simple it might not look like enough. Many teenagers open up when they are not in direct face-to-face contact with you: in the car, on a walk, cooking beside you, watching something on the sofa, playing a game. Something about the parallel activity removes the pressure of being looked at and assessed. The absence of direct eye contact creates a kind of conversational safety that sitting opposite each other simply doesn’t. If you are getting nowhere with the formal approach, try just being alongside them doing something, saying nothing in particular, and letting the talking come in its own time. Often it does - it really does.

Stay interested without interrogating. There is a world of difference between “how was your day?” (which gets “fine” or something very close to it) and genuine curiosity about what is actually going on in their life. Who is the friend they mention most these days? What is the thing they’re currently obsessed with: the music, the game, the creator, the team, the show? What is the social landscape of their year right now? You don’t need to know all of this. But taking a real interest in the texture of their world, as they experience it, communicates something they are hungry to receive: you, specifically you, are worth being interested in.

Stay non-reactive when they share difficult things. I know this is hard, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But if you can train yourself to receive difficult information with relative calm: the thing that happened at the weekend, the friend who did something worrying, the situation that makes your stomach quietly drop, you are building something invaluable. You are becoming the person they can actually tell things to. “Oh, that sounds like it was a bit much…” buys you far more, long-term, than “WHAT? When did this happen? Why are you only telling me now?” Even when your insides are genuinely alarmed, try to buy yourself a moment before responding. The calm, curious question keeps the door open. The big reaction closes it.

Help them think, rather than telling them what to think. When your teenager comes to you with something difficult (a friend who has been unkind a few times, a situation they’re not sure how to handle), the instinct is to give them the answer. Here’s what I’d do. Here’s what I think of that friend. This is usually well-intentioned and almost always irritating to a teenager. They are not always looking for a solution. Sometimes they are looking for a place to think out loud. Try sitting with it alongside them instead: “I wonder what was happening there...” or “What do you think you actually want from this friendship?” or “How are you with that?” A tentative, curious question opens far more than a piece of advice. And it gives them something more valuable, the experience of working things out themselves, with you alongside.

Learn the art of negotiated agreements. The teenage years require a shift in how we hold limits: less “because I said so” and more genuine back and forth. This does not mean giving in to everything, or pretending you don’t have views. It means being willing to hear their side properly, to acknowledge what’s reasonable in it, and to arrive somewhere that both of you can actually live with. “I hear you that everyone else is allowed to stay out until midnight. I’m not okay with midnight, but I could do eleven. Can we agree on that?” A teenager who experiences negotiation as real, not just a performance before you impose what you wanted anyway, is far more likely to honour the agreement, and far more likely to bring the next disagreement to you rather than around you.

Supervision, not surveillance. Teenagers need to know that their parents know roughly what’s going on; a parent who knows their friends’ names (or at least a few of them!), who has a general sense of where they are in the evenings, who can be contacted without judgement if something goes wrong at midnight. This is supervision: I’m here, I’m paying attention, and you’re safe. Surveillance is something different: checking phones without agreement, interrogating their friends, the constant sense of being watched and distrusted. Supervision says I trust you and I’m available. Surveillance says I don’t trust you and I’m monitoring. One keeps the relationship open. The other drives things underground, and fast. Teenagers move toward independence - helping them with that back and forth, rather than resisting it, is how they learn that the movement is safe. And they will respect the parent who demonstrates genuine trust far more than the parent who holds on so tightly there is nothing to respect.

Keep repairing. Ruptures happen quickly in the teenage years and can feel enormous in the moment. The row about the curfew, the blazing argument about revision, the door that shakes the walls when it closes. Repair still works here, exactly as it did when they were seven. Give the moment time to pass, come back when things are calm (which might be two hours later, or the next morning over breakfast when everyone needs a cup of tea), and say the simple things. “I’m sorry I raised my voice. I was worried and I didn’t handle it well.” A parent who repairs with their teenager is doing something significant: they are showing that adults can be wrong, can acknowledge it, and that relationships survive the hard moments. That is worth considerably more than winning the argument.

Have the respect conversation at a calm moment. This is related to repair but deserves a mention on its own. It is completely reasonable to hold a limit on how your teenager speaks to you: the dismissiveness, the eye-roll taken too far, the contemptuous tone that can creep in. But the moment to address this is not in the thick of a row. Later, when things have settled and the two of you are on reasonable terms, you can say something simple: “I want to talk about how we are with each other when things get hard. I don’t think either of us is at our best when that happens, and I’d like us to work it out together. How do you think we could handle it better so we don’t end up in a strop with each other?” You might be surprised by what they have to say. A teenager who has been involved in setting the tone of the relationship is far more likely to hold to it.

Small gestures carry more weight than you think. When the big conversations feel impossible, the small ones do quiet, steady work. Their favourite treat appearing on the counter without explanation. A genuine “I noticed what you did there, and I thought it was really good.” A hand on the shoulder, or an offer of a hug when it seems like it might land. These moments of “I was thinking about you” are not nothing, they are the ongoing message that the relationship is warm and you are safe, regardless of what happened yesterday. They don’t need to be elaborate. They just need to be real.

Something I’ve noticed:

Teenagers respond to availability even when availability is all you have to offer. You don’t need to be at your best. You don’t need energy you don’t have. What works is to be present enough to follow their lead and reflect back what you’re hearing.

“That sounds really annoying.” “It’s very tricky, it’s hard to know what to do there.” “I wonder what was going on for him when he said that.” These simple reflections do more than a dozen well-intentioned questions. They communicate something a teenager needs to feel, even if they’d never say it: I’m here, I’m listening, I’m with you in this, and I trust you to figure this out.

If something comes up in the conversation that you genuinely need to address (something that concerns you, something you want to follow up on), you don’t have to do it in that moment. You have a relationship, which means you have time. Let the conversation be what it is. Come back to the thing that needs addressing tomorrow, or over the next few days, when the temperature is right and they are more likely to be able to hear you. Trying to do everything in one go is one of the most reliable ways to turn a good moment into a difficult one.

Moving Forward

The teen years can be a hard stage to parent through. The rewards are less immediate than they were when your child was small and ran to meet you at the door. The feedback loop is longer. You can do everything right for weeks and still feel shut out. That is real and can be very challenging to navigate.

Be compassionate with yourself. Take time away when you can: something that lifts you, something that is genuinely yours. This isn’t a luxury and it isn’t beside the point. A parent who has some space and some replenishment is a parent who can stay warm and open rather than gradually closing off, becoming cooler, more irritable, harder to reach. You cannot stay genuinely engaged with a teenager on an empty tank, any more than you could with a toddler. Looking after yourself is part of looking after them.

The teenage years are not the end of closeness. They are a reshaping of it. The child who once needed you to tie their laces still needs you, but now they need you to be steady when they are not, available when they won’t admit it, and present enough that they know the door is there even when they’re choosing not to walk through it.

It is a genuine balancing act: letting go and reeling in, trusting and holding, staying close while giving real space. None of it is easy to calibrate and you will get it wrong sometimes. That’s fine. That’s what repair is for.

The parents I see who stay genuinely connected through adolescence are not the ones who held on tightest. They’re the ones who trusted the relationship enough to let it change shape. Who didn’t take every push-away as a final verdict. Who kept showing up quietly and consistently, even when there was no obvious return on that effort in the short term.

Connection in the teenage years is a long game but a game worth playing! And when it is going well, when the banter is flying and the laughter is easy and you catch a glimpse of the person they are becoming, it is really worth it!!

This Week, Try...

Find one side-by-side opportunity this week. Offer them a lift somewhere. Sit on the sofa while they watch something they’re into. Make dinner in the same room. Don’t engineer a conversation. Just be there, present and without an agenda, and notice what happens.

A question to reflect on:

When you were a teenager, what did you most need from the adults around you that you didn’t quite get? And how might that unmet need be shaping what feels hardest about parenting through this stage now?

Next week, we’re looking at one of the most contested topics in modern family life: screens. Not with a wagging finger, but with a genuinely honest look at what the research actually tells us, what really matters, and how to find an approach that works for your family without the guilt, the arguments, and the constant sense that you’re getting it wrong. See you then.

What’s the hardest part of staying connected with your teenager? Or if your children are younger, is there something about the teenage years you’re quietly dreading? I’d love to hear in the comments, it can help me plan future articles. And if this resonated, please share it with another parent who might be navigating this stage right now.

Dr Daire Gilmartin

Consultant Counselling Psychologist and Psychotherapist

Oak Tree Therapy

www.oaktreetherapy.ie

And then, somewhere around their tenth birthday, something changed. The chat didn’t stop exactly. It thinned. The answers got shorter. “Fine.” “Nothing.” “I don’t know.” You asked a question you’d have asked a hundred times before and they looked at you like you’d said something mortifying. Last week, you called their name across the school yard and they visibly flinched. They’ve started closing their bedroom door. The nickname that used to make them grin now makes them cringe. And at some point recently you caught yourself wondering, with a genuine pang: what happened to my child?

They’re a tween. And what’s happening inside them right now is every bit as significant, developmentally, as anything that happened when they were two.

The Forgotten Stage

We talk endlessly about toddlers and teenagers. There are entire bookshelves, podcasts, and parenting courses devoted to both. But the years roughly between nine and twelve (that particular stretch of childhood that doesn’t quite know what it is yet) get far less attention than they deserve. And yet this is one of the most important developmental periods in a child’s life: a time of enormous internal reorganisation that can look, from the outside, very much like moodiness, withdrawal, and attitude.

It isn’t. Or rather, it is those things sometimes, but there’s a reason for all of it. And understanding the reason changes everything about how we respond.

What’s Really Going On

The tween years mark the beginning of the second great wave of brain development. The first was in infancy, when the brain was building at a breathtaking pace, laying down the basic architecture of the world. This second wave, which begins around nine or ten and really gathers pace in early adolescence, involves something different: a massive process of pruning and reorganisation. The brain is being restructured. And the part under most active construction right now is the prefrontal cortex - the bit responsible for regulating emotions, thinking things through, managing impulses, and understanding that actions have consequences. It won’t finish this rebuild until your child is somewhere in their mid-twenties. At nine, ten, or eleven, the work has barely begun.

What that means in practice is that your child’s brain is more reactive and less regulated than it was even a year or two ago. The emotional centres are more active. The rational, moderating centres are still under construction. Add in the fact that puberty is either beginning or approaching (for many girls, this can start as early as eight or nine; for boys, it typically follows a year or two later), flooding the body with hormones that the brain isn’t yet fully equipped to process, and you start to understand why everything can feel so massive to them right now.

There’s a concept in developmental psychology called the “imaginary audience.” It describes something very specific to this age group: a powerful, persistent sense that everyone is watching and judging them at all times. The tween is, in a very real sense, always on stage in their own head. Every stumble, every awkward moment, every mispronounced word, every outfit decision feels magnified, because they genuinely believe everyone else has noticed it too. The blushing that seems to come from nowhere, the mortification over something that would barely have registered a year ago, the intense self-consciousness about how they look or sound or come across: this is the imaginary audience at work. And it doesn’t vanish with the tween years. For many young people it persists well into adolescence, gradually easing as identity solidifies and the judgement of others becomes a little less deafening.

Connected to this is what psychologists call adolescent egocentrism - not selfishness, but a very normal preoccupation with their own experience, and a deep sense that what they are going through is uniquely intense and that nobody else could quite understand how it feels. This is why “sure everyone goes through this” lands so badly. To them, nobody has ever gone through this in the way they are.

This is also why criticism lands so hard. It’s a nervous system highly attuned to social evaluation at exactly the moment when belonging feels existentially important. They are beginning to construct their identity (who am I, what kind of person am I, where do I fit) and they are doing it primarily in relation to their peer group. That group is becoming very important right now. Not because they don’t love you. But because this is exactly what development is asking of them: to begin separating, to begin finding their own place in the world, to test out who they might be outside the family.

Which is, of course, precisely why they don’t tell you everything anymore.

The Both/And of Tween Life

One of the things parents find most disorienting about this age is the contradiction of it. They seem so grown-up in some ways, and so much younger in others. One minute your eleven-year-old is making an observation that genuinely stops you in your tracks. The next, they’re undone by something that a six-year-old might have shrugged off. You can have both of those things in the same afternoon.

This is completely normal, and it’s because development at this age is uneven. Different parts of the brain and the nervous system mature at different rates. Your tween might have real social insight in one moment and then be completely overwhelmed by something small in the next, not because they’re being difficult, but because their capacity to regulate is genuinely patchy right now. They are feeling things more intensely than they ever have, while the capacity to moderate those feelings is still very much a work in progress.

And the secretiveness? That’s healthy too, hard as it is to sit with. A child who used to tell you everything keeping things to themselves now is not a warning sign. It is a developmental milestone. They are building an inner life that belongs to them: thoughts, feelings, preoccupations, friendships, and experiences they are not ready to share. This is supposed to happen. It is how they develop a sense of self that is separate from the family.

Something that doesn’t get talked about enough is the quiet grief that can creep up on parents during this stage. Not grief in the dramatic sense, but a real sense of loss for the child who used to run to meet you, who wanted you at every bedtime, who told you everything without being asked. That child is still there. But adjusting how you parent to meet who they’re becoming now is genuinely hard work. What felt natural and easy at seven can push them away at eleven. Finding the new shape of closeness takes patience, and a willingness to let go of some things that used to work. That loss is allowed to be named. It doesn’t make you a bad parent, it makes you human!

What Doesn’t Help (But We All Do It Anyway)

Teasing them, even gently, about things that feel important to them. The haircut, the outfit, the friend they’re suddenly inseparable from, the thing they’re into this week. What feels like a bit of harmless ribbing to you hits very differently to a child whose imaginary audience is already running at full volume. Their sense of themselves is still forming, and they don’t have the emotional scaffolding yet to laugh it off.

Interrogating them when they get home from school. “How was your day? Who did you sit with? What happened with that thing you mentioned? Come on, tell me everything.” The more you press, the more they retreat. This is a completely understandable response to feeling shut out - I’ve been there! - but it tends to make the shutting out worse. They feel surveyed rather than interested in.

Dismissing their social world. “It’s just kids’ stuff.” “You’ll have forgotten about this by next week.” “In the grand scheme of things...” The social landscape of a ten or eleven-year-old is, to them, every bit as real and high-stakes as anything you’re navigating in your adult life. When we minimise it, they stop bringing it to us. And we need them to keep bringing it to us.

Treating them as too young or too old. Doing things they’re fully capable of doing themselves, commenting on them in front of friends, using the nickname that is now excruciating: all of these undercut their need to feel competent and nearly-there. But expecting them to regulate in situations that would challenge a much older person, or sharing your own worries with them as if they were a peer, tips too far the other way. Finding the balance between the child they were and the adult they’re becoming is the whole work of this stage.

Handing over a phone without clear agreements in place, or before you’re both ready for it. Many tweens are getting smartphones around twelve, at exactly the point when peer pressure and social comparison are most intense. If and when a phone arrives, negotiating the limits from the start matters enormously: where it charges at night, what apps are accessible, what the expectations are around mealtimes and family time. These conversations go much better before the device arrives than after. Holding off for as long as is genuinely realistic isn’t being strict. It’s buying them a little more time before the round-the-clock social comparison machine lands in their pocket.

What Actually Helps

Find the right conditions for conversation. Tweens open up in cars, on walks, while cooking something together, or sitting on the sofa watching something. Not face to face, where the expectation to talk can feel like pressure, but in relaxed, low-demand moments where conversation can happen naturally, or not, and neither feels like failure. Offer to drive them somewhere and you might get more real conversation in fifteen minutes than in a week of dinner table attempts. Patience matters here too: trust that they will talk in their own time. Not making demands on them to open up is often what allows them to.

Stay interested without being intrusive. Ask about what they actually care about, even if it baffles you. The game. The YouTube person they think is brilliant. The music you don’t understand at all. You don’t have to love it. You just have to be genuinely curious about why they do. “Tell me what’s good about it” opens far more than “I don’t get why you like that.” Following their interest, even briefly and imperfectly, communicates something that matters enormously: you, specifically you, are worth my attention.

Don’t take the eye-roll personally. I know. I know!! It is very hard not to. But the eye-roll is not a rejection of you. It is developmental theatre. They are practising separation, testing whether the relationship can survive their awkwardness and their push-away. It can. The relationship is bigger than the eye-roll. You can set a reasonable limit on outright rudeness (“you can disagree with me, but let’s do it without the attitude”) while understanding that the underlying process is healthy. Those two things can coexist.

Respect the growing need for privacy while staying present. Privacy doesn’t mean disappearing entirely from their world. It means respecting growing boundaries while staying appropriately involved. Knocking before you enter their room is not a small gesture. Neither is not reading their messages, not interrogating their friendships, not needing to know everything. Respecting their privacy communicates trust. And trust, right now, is the currency that keeps the relationship open. The parent who respects their tween’s need for space is far more likely to be the parent that tween turns to when something genuinely important happens.

Take their opinions seriously. This is the age when they start forming real views on things: about fairness, about what’s right and wrong, about how the world works. These opinions might be half-formed, borrowed from a friend, or based on something they watched online. That doesn’t matter. The fact that they’re developing views at all is worth honouring. Debate with them when you disagree. Genuinely debate, not just override. Let them see that their perspective sometimes changes yours, even a little. Share your own views in a way that invites conversation rather than closing it down: “Here’s how I see it, what do you think?” A tween who feels their opinions are taken seriously by their parent keeps sharing them. And you want them still talking to you when the stakes get higher.

Stay close while they pull away. This is the central task of parenting a tween, and it can feel profoundly counterintuitive. When they push us away, every instinct says either push back or withdraw. Neither serves them. What serves them is a parent who stays warm and available while genuinely respecting the growing need for space. You can acknowledge the change too, warmly and without making a production of it: “You’re growing up. I can see it. It’s brilliant, even when it’s a bit mad for both of us.” Sometimes being named clearly, by a parent who isn’t frightened by the change, is exactly what they need to hear. “I’m here when you need me” is not passive. It is the right message. You can go further, and I’ll still be here when you come back.

A word about your own shark music. If the tween years feel particularly charged for you, if your child’s withdrawal or sensitivity brings up something stronger than you’d expect, it’s worth getting curious about what your own experience of this age was like. Our children’s developmental stages have a way of calling up our own. When they do, the reaction can be about more than what’s happening in the present moment. That’s worth knowing about, and worth being compassionate with yourself about.

What one parent discovered:

“My son changed completely around ten. It was like someone had swapped him for a quieter, moodier version of himself. He stopped talking the way he used to, started spending hours in his room, gave me one-word answers to everything. I kept asking what was wrong and he kept saying nothing, and I kept not believing him. I was convinced something awful was going on that he wasn’t telling me. What changed things was when I stopped pressing. I started just being around - sitting in the kitchen while he got himself a snack, offering lifts, not asking anything. One evening we were watching something on telly and he just started talking, out of nowhere. I nearly interrupted but stopped myself. He talked for about twenty minutes about his class, his friends, stuff I’d had no idea about. I don’t think he needed me to ask. He just needed me to be there, not wanting anything from him.”

Moving Forward

The tween years are not a problem to be managed. They are a passage: significant, sometimes baffling, occasionally a little heartbreaking, and entirely necessary. Your child is becoming someone. They are doing it slowly and unevenly and with a great deal of noise, and they need you close even as they tell you, in a dozen ways, to give them space.

Parenting through this stage asks something real of us: to let go of some of what used to work and find new ways in. The closeness doesn’t disappear. It just changes shape. And the relationship you build in these years - the one where they discover they can pull away and you’re still there, where they can be awkward and moody and you don’t love them any less, where they can close the door and you still knock rather than barge in - that relationship is the foundation for everything that comes next, in the years to come.

This Week, Try...

Find one moment this week to be alongside your tween without needing anything from them. No questions, no agenda, no check-in about homework. Just get into their orbit and stay there. Notice how it feels to be present without needing them to respond. And notice what they do with the space.

A question to reflect on:

What were the tween years like for you - and how might that experience be shaping how you respond when your own child starts to pull away?

Next week, we move into the teenage years proper: the stage that gets the most parenting column inches and is still, somehow, the most misunderstood. If you’re already in the thick of adolescence, or quietly dreading what’s coming, next week’s article should be useful. We’ll look at what’s really happening in the teenage brain, why the push-away gets louder, and how to stay genuinely connected when connection has never felt harder. See you then.

What’s the tween stage been like in your house? Has your child changed in ways you weren’t expecting? What have you found that helps? I’d love to hear in the comments. If this resonated, please share it with another parent who might be quietly wondering what happened to their child. It can help more than you know.

Dr Daire Gilmartin
Consultant Counselling Psychologist and Psychotherapist
Oak Tree Therapy
www.oaktreetherapy.ie

It’s a Sunday evening. The kitchen table is covered in notes, highlighters, a cold cup of tea, and what appears to be the entire contents of a schoolbag. Your teenager is hunched over it all, looking like they haven’t slept properly in a week (because they probably haven’t). You ask, gently, if they want something to eat. They snap at you. You try again. They snap harder. You take a breath and retreat to the kitchen where you quietly seethe, and then feel guilty for seething, because you know they’re under pressure, but still. Was that necessary?

You call up the stairs later to ask if they’ve done the bins. Silence. You ask again. “I’M STUDYING!” comes back down, with a tone that could strip paint.

And somewhere in the middle of all this, you’re wondering: am I helping? Am I making it worse? What exactly am I supposed to be doing right now?

What’s Really Going On

Exams are stressful for teenagers in a way that is genuinely hard for adults to fully appreciate. And I don’t mean that in a dismissive “you think YOU have problems” kind of way. I mean it neurologically.

The teenage brain is in the middle of a major renovation. The prefrontal cortex (the part responsible for managing stress, keeping perspective, planning, and regulating emotions) is still being built. It won’t be fully formed until the mid-twenties. So when your teenager tells you they’re going to fail everything and their life is over, they’re not being dramatic for effect. In that moment, that is genuinely how it feels inside their nervous system. The threat feels real. The stakes feel enormous. And their brain doesn’t yet have the full equipment to zoom out and say “this is just one moment in a long life.”

On top of that, exams arrive with a particular kind of pressure that is uniquely teenage. Everything feels public. Their results can begin to feel like a verdict on who they are. Their sense of self-worth can get tangled up with their results in a way that is painful and hard to untangle. And they’re trying to manage all of this while also navigating friendships, sleep disruption, social media, and a body that is still catching up with itself.

Here’s the thing: they need more from you right now, not less. Even if they are making it spectacularly difficult to give it.

What Doesn’t Help (But We All Do It Anyway)

Let’s be honest: when we’re watching someone we love under stress, our instinct is to fix it. Or at least to do something. And sometimes our “something” lands badly.

Asking constantly about how the study is going. Even if the intention is to show you care, it can feel like surveillance to a teenager who is already anxious. Every question about the study is another reminder of the pressure they’re already feeling.

Pointing out what they should be doing. “Have you done the biology yet?” “You should really start earlier in the morning.” All true, possibly. Not helpful in this moment.

Comparing them to siblings, to yourself at their age, or to anyone else. This one is rarely done intentionally, but it lands like a wrecking ball every time.

Catastrophising alongside them. When they say “I’m going to fail”, the worst response (though completely understandable) is to match their panic: “Well have you done enough work? How many hours have you put in?” That just confirms that the catastrophe might be real.

Minimising it. “It’ll be grand, stop worrying.” This is well-meant. But it can feel dismissive when they are not, in fact, finding it grand. It can close the conversation down rather than open it.

Piling on extra tasks and expectations. They have a job to do right now. Exam season is not the time to enforce the full rota.

What Actually Helps

First: look after your own regulation. Their anxiety is contagious. If you are wound up watching them be wound up, the house becomes a pressure cooker. Your calm is not just nice for the atmosphere, it is genuinely regulating for them. You are still an emotional anchor for them, even with a seventeen-year-old who acts like they don’t need you at all. They do.

Notice your own stress about their exams. It’s real and it’s understandable. But it is yours to manage, not theirs to carry.

Create a calm home. Not a silent, walking-on-eggshells home (that creates its own anxiety), but a steady, low-friction home. Reduce unnecessary noise where possible. Keep the evening atmosphere as easy as you can. If there are younger children in the house, see if you can buffer some of the chaos away from the studying teen.

Have their favourite things available. This is so simple and so powerful. The food they love. The snacks they reach for. Their favourite dinner appearing on a Wednesday night for no particular reason. These are not rewards. They are messages. They say: I see you. I’m thinking about you. I’ve got you.

Quietly take jobs off their plate. Not with fanfare. Not with “I’m doing this because you’re studying.” Just quietly. The bins. The dishwasher. Whatever they normally contribute. If there are other siblings, this is a good moment to redistribute. Explain it to the younger ones simply: their sister or brother has a really big job to do right now, just for a few weeks, and we’re all going to help by taking those jobs on. Children understand this if it’s explained with warmth. It also teaches them something about solidarity.

Be available without hovering. This is the art of exam season parenting. Being close enough that they know they can come to you. Not so close that they feel watched or crowded.

The cup of tea that appears on the desk without comment.

The “I’m heading to the kitchen, do you want anything?” that requires nothing in return.

Don’t make them ask twice for things. Food, a lift, a quiet space, a bit of extra grace. Just give it. They are spending a lot of energy holding themselves together. Small acts of ease matter more than you might think.

Listen without fixing. When they do talk (and they might, often at unexpected moments, often late at night), just listen. You don’t have to solve it. You don’t have to reassure them that it’ll all be fine. Just receive what they’re saying. “That sounds really hard.” “I can see how much pressure you’re feeling.” You don’t need a script. You just need to be present.

Give them permission to rest. Out loud. This one is important. Many teenagers are carrying a low-level guilt about every moment they are not studying. They sit down to watch something for twenty minutes and a voice in their head (or sometimes a real voice from somewhere in the house) asks whether they should really be taking a break right now. The result is that they’re not properly studying and not properly resting either. They’re stuck in a grinding in-between that exhausts them without restoring them.

Rest is not a reward for finishing. Rest is part of the process. The brain consolidates memory during downtime and during sleep. Stepping away from the books for an hour, going for a walk, watching something they enjoy, doing absolutely nothing for a bit: these are not wasted time. They are necessary. A teenager who rests well will actually retain more than one who grinds for twelve hours without a break.

So say it to them, clearly and without conditions. “You need to take a proper break this evening.” “Go for a walk, I’ll have dinner ready when you’re back.” “You’re allowed to stop for tonight. You’ve done enough.” They need to hear it from you because the exam machine around them is not going to say it. You giving them explicit permission to rest is not you being soft on them. It is you being smart about how human beings actually work, and it is you protecting them from the kind of exhaustion that makes everything harder.

Find the moments. Teenagers often open up when they’re not face to face. In the car. On a walk. Watching something together on the couch. Side by side, doing nothing in particular. These sideways moments of connection can carry more than a direct conversation. Don’t underestimate them.

What one parent discovered: “My son is sitting his Leaving Cert this year and by March I could feel the whole house tightening. I was anxious for him, he was anxious, his younger sister was picking up on all of it. I made a decision: I wasn’t going to ask him anything about the study unless he brought it up. I started just quietly making sure there was food he liked, that evenings were as calm as I could make them, and that I was around. Nothing dramatic. About three weeks in, he came down late one night and sat at the kitchen table and just started talking. He was scared. He cried a bit. I didn’t say much. Mostly I just listened and made him toast. I think he just needed to know I was there, without it becoming a whole thing. It was one of the most connected moments we’d had in months.”

This Too Shall Pass

Here is what I want you to hold onto through the next few weeks, especially on the days when it feels relentless and nothing you do is right.

Your teenager is doing something genuinely hard. They are sitting with sustained pressure, uncertainty, and the particular indignity of being assessed and measured at an age when their sense of self is still forming. They need to know that you are solidly behind them, no matter what.

Not “I’m behind you if the results are good.”

Not “I’m behind you as long as you’ve worked hard enough.”

Just: I’m behind you. Full stop.

The results they get will open some doors earlier than others. That’s real. But the results do not define them. They do not determine the size of their life or the depth of their happiness. I have been doing this work for over twenty-five years, and I can tell you: the most important thing your teenager carries out of this exam season is not a set of grades. It is the memory of how you were with them when it was hard.

Be the soft landing. Be the steady presence. Be the person who had their favourite food in the fridge and asked nothing in return.

That is what they will remember.

This Week, Try...

Once a day, do one small thing that says “I’m thinking about you” without any expectation attached. Their favourite dinner. A snack left outside their door. A lift offered without sighing. One small, wordless act of care. Notice what it does for both of you.

A question to reflect on: When you were facing something that felt overwhelming at their age, what did you most need from the adults around you? Did you get it? What would it have meant if you had?

We’ll be back again next week with our regular Grounded Parenting articles. In the meantime, take care of yourself too. Exam season is stressful for the whole family, not just the student. You deserve some grace as well.

What’s the hardest part of exam season in your house? I’d love to hear in the comments. And if this resonated, please share it with another parent who might need to read it right now.

Dr Daire Gilmartin Consultant Counselling Psychologist and Psychotherapist Oak Tree Therapy www.oaktreetherapy.ie

And the maddening thing is: you know (or strongly suspect) that there’s nothing physically wrong with them. You’ve been here before. By the time school ends they’ll be perfectly fine. They’ll come out chatting about what happened at lunch.

So what on earth is going on? And why does nothing you say or do seem to make any difference?

When Worry Doesn’t Look Like Worry

Anxiety in children is one of the most commonly misread things I see in my work with families. Not because parents aren’t paying attention, but because anxiety in children frequently doesn’t look the way we expect it to.

We expect worry to look like worry. A child wringing their hands, saying “I’m scared.” And sometimes it does look like that. But more often, childhood anxiety looks like this:

Tummy aches and headaches that appear reliably on school mornings but vanish by the weekend. Bedtime becoming a prolonged, exhausting ordeal. Sudden refusal to do something they used to do without a second thought, going to a friend’s house, joining the swimming class, sitting in the back seat of the car. Clinginess that seems to come from nowhere, a child who was independent last term and now won’t let you out of their sight. Irritability and what looks, on the surface, very much like defiance. The child who snaps, storms off, becomes rigid and oppositional when asked to do something anxiety-provoking. And meltdowns that seem wildly disproportionate to what triggered them.

None of these look like worry from the outside. They look like behaviour. They look like difficulty, or manipulation, or a phase, or something that needs a firmer approach. Parents respond to what they can see. And when what they can see is a tummy ache or a rigid refusal, they respond to that, often missing the anxiety underneath entirely. That’s not a parenting failure. It’s a mismatch between what anxiety looks like on the surface and what’s actually happening beneath it.

What’s Really Going On

Back in our first article together, we talked about behaviour as the tip of the iceberg: only about 10% of what’s really happening. Anxiety is one of the most important things in that hidden 90%, and it’s worth understanding a little about what’s going on in the nervous system, because it changes everything about how we respond.

When a child encounters something their brain has tagged as threatening (and for an anxious child, this might be school, social situations, new experiences, separation, the unfamiliar), a part of the brain called the amygdala fires an alarm. The threat detection system, the brain’s security guard, activates. It doesn’t wait around to check whether the threat is real or imagined, proportionate or not. It just fires. And what it does next is flood the body with stress hormones: the heart beats faster, the stomach tightens (there’s that tummy ache), breathing gets shallower. The body is, quite literally, preparing to face danger.

Now, here’s the crucial bit: the thinking brain (the part that can reason, weigh things up, hold onto reassurance, and make calm decisions) goes partially offline when this alarm is sounding. This is why telling an anxious child “You have nothing to worry about, everything’s fine” doesn’t work, even when it’s completely true. Their thinking brain can’t properly receive that information right now. The alarm is too loud. You’re trying to reason with a nervous system that is currently in a form of emergency mode. And it just can’t hear you.

This also explains why the child who seemed absolutely fine on Friday is genuinely, physically distressed on Monday morning. The anxiety is real, so is the tummy ache. It’s not performance, and it’s not manipulation. It is a nervous system that has learned to experience a particular thing as threatening, and is responding accordingly. Understanding this, really taking it in, changes the whole dynamic. Because when we stop responding to the behaviour and start responding to the anxiety underneath, we can actually help.

What Doesn’t Help (But We All Do It Anyway)

“You’ll be fine, there’s nothing to worry about.” This is the most natural response in the world, and it doesn’t work. Not because it’s wrong (often it’s completely accurate) but because reassurance, in the moment, doesn’t reduce anxiety. It temporarily soothes it, the child feels a brief moment of relief, and then the anxiety bounces back, often a little stronger. Over time, the child learns that the way to feel better is to get reassurance. So they ask again. And again. And the anxiety grows, not shrinks, because the reassurance is doing the regulating for them rather than building their own capacity to tolerate the discomfort.

Forcing through it without support. Sometimes pushing a child into the feared situation (“I’m dropping you off and I’m going, we can’t keep doing this”) does lead to them surviving the experience, and that’s something. But doing it without any acknowledgment of what they’re feeling, and without building their capacity gradually, doesn’t actually teach the anxiety anything. The alarm gets a bit quieter after surviving, but nothing has changed about what their nervous system believes. Next time, it fires again.

Avoiding the thing entirely. The other direction: pulling them out of school, excusing them from the swimming lesson, letting them skip the party. In the short term, this works perfectly. The anxiety disappears the moment the feared thing is removed. And for a child in a genuine state of distress, that relief feels enormous. The problem is that avoidance is anxiety’s best friend. Every time we avoid the feared thing, we teach the brain one thing: that the alarm was right. That the thing really was dangerous. The anxiety grows, the world shrinks a little more, and the list of things the child can manage gets shorter.

Long lectures. Explaining at length why there’s nothing to be afraid of, why school is safe, why they’re going to have a great day. All of it completely true. None of it reaching them in the state they’re in.

What Actually Helps

In the moment: name it, don’t fix it. When the tummy ache appears on Monday morning, the most useful thing you can do is simple: “I can see you’re really not feeling good. I think you might be worried about today.” Not “you’ll be fine.” Not “come on, we’ll be late.” Just acknowledgment. It tells your child that you can see what’s happening, that you’re not frightened by it, and that they don’t have to manage it alone. And then you walk in with them. “I know this feels hard. I’m going to come in with you. You can do hard things and I’ll be right beside you.” This is the difference between reassurance (which tells a child the fear is wrong) and accompaniment (which says the fear is understandable AND we’re going to face it together). It’s the difference between fixing and supporting. It matters enormously.

When things are calm: have the real conversation. The Monday morning doorframe is not the time to understand what’s going on. But the weekend is. Find a relaxed moment: a car journey, after dinner on a Saturday, a walk. And before you open the conversation, take a breath yourself. Check in with your own body. You want to come to this as the calm, steady adult, not the worried parent. That makes all the difference. Then open it gently. “Hey, that was a tough week, wasn’t it? You seemed really nervous about school. Is everything okay in there?”

Then stop talking and listen. Really listen. Not to solve, not to correct, not to jump in with reassurance. Just to hear. And communicate that you’re genuinely hearing them: “Okay... tell me more. What does it feel like when you get nervous about it?” Let there be silence. Let them find the words.

Some children can’t easily find the words, or genuinely don’t know what’s making them anxious. If that happens, it’s okay to offer a gentle, tentative suggestion. “I was thinking maybe it was that English project, I know you were finding that really hard.” Or: “I was wondering if maybe things with Alan were still bothering you a bit.” You’re not putting words in their mouth, you’re opening a door. If you’ve got the wrong thing, they’ll tell you. And often that “no, it’s not that” leads straight to what it actually is.

Sometimes children say they don’t want to talk at all. That’s worth acknowledging, but not necessarily agreeing to. “I hear you, love. We don’t have to go into it right this minute. But it’s really important that we do talk and figure this out together, because I’m not leaving you struggling with this on your own. What about this evening? Or Sunday morning?” You’re not forcing. You’re holding the door open and naming a time. And the quiet confidence underneath it all - I’ve got you, we’re going to work this out - is itself regulating for an anxious child. It tells them that a calm adult is in charge of this, and that is an enormous relief.

Before anything else, you need to know if something bigger is going on: is someone being unkind? Is there something specific that’s happened? If so, that needs to be addressed directly. But often, what you’ll hear is something more ordinary: worry about getting things wrong, not knowing what to do at breaktime, finding a particular subject hard, a general dread that’s hard to name. These feelings are real and they matter. And they’re also the ordinary work of childhood anxiety, not a sign that something is seriously wrong.

This is a good moment to normalise. “Do you know what? This happens to loads of children. And to grown-ups too, honestly! When we’re worried about something, our body really feels it.” That simple sentence, loads of children feel this, can be a genuine relief to a child who has been quietly wondering if something is wrong with them.

Help them understand what’s happening in their body. Once you’ve listened and they feel heard, you can introduce something really useful: a basic explanation of what anxiety feels like physically. “When we get nervous, our heart beats faster, our tummy gets tight or sore, we might feel a bit shaky or breathless. That’s not your body going wrong. It’s your body getting ready. It doesn’t feel great, but it won’t hurt you, and it does pass.” Children who understand their physical symptoms are less frightened by them. The fear of the feeling is often as bad as the feeling itself.

Make a plan together. This is where the conversation turns from understanding to doing, and the key is that you do it together. “So, what do you think might help? Let’s figure it out.” Involve them in this. Children are much more invested in a plan they helped create than one handed down to them.

Some things that genuinely work: a few minutes of physical movement before school (jumping jacks in the hall, a brisk walk to the gate) to help the body discharge some of the stress hormones building up; slow breathing together in the car (in for four, out for six); a small physical anchor they can keep in their pocket (a smooth stone, a little token from home) that gives the nervous system something concrete to return to. And music in the car can do more than you’d expect. Singing together, having a bit of craic on the way there, a favourite playlist that lifts the mood: these are not distractions from the anxiety, they are genuine nervous system regulators. A child who arrives at the school gate having been laughing with you two minutes earlier is in a very different physiological state than one who spent the journey dreading the day.

And then, crucially: plan the first five minutes of the day very specifically. “When we get there, we’re going to go straight to the door, you’re going to hang up your coat, and then find Ciara.” The beginning is the hardest part. If they can see it clearly in their mind before they arrive, the alarm doesn’t fire quite as loudly.

Write the plan down together if they’re old enough to engage with that. Something simple: When I feel nervous, I’m going to try... A piece of paper they can put in their bag. It makes the anxiety feel a little more manageable, something to be managed together, rather than something overwhelming happening inside them alone.

Review it afterwards and name what they did. This part is often missed, and it really matters. When things have gone okay (even a little bit okay), come back to it: “Hey, you did it. I know you were really nervous this morning, and you went in anyway, and you used your breathing in the car. That was really brave.” This is not empty praise. It is specific, it names what they actually did, and it builds their sense of themselves as someone who can manage hard things, even when they don’t feel like they can. That is how real resilience grows.

And if it was hard: “That was tough today. What helped, even a little? What might we try differently tomorrow?” The conversation continues. “I was thinking we were both a bit rushed, let’s make more time and do our breathing tomorrow.” The plan adjusts. You’re doing this together, step by step, not expecting it all to be solved at once.

Stay calm yourself and attend to your own regulation throughout. This runs through everything above, not just as a nice idea but as a practical necessity. Your regulated nervous system is the most powerful tool you have. When you’re visibly anxious about their anxiety, their amygdala picks that up immediately: another adult is alarmed, so this must really be dangerous. When you can hold a stance that says quietly, I see this is hard, and I’m not frightened by it, and I know you can get through it, you are already doing something really important before you’ve said a single word.

That means attending to your own state throughout this whole process. Before the weekend conversation: take a breath, soften your shoulders, slow down. In the car on the way to school: notice if your jaw is tight, if you’re bracing for the drama. Take a few slow breaths yourself before you say anything. Even in the middle of a hard Monday morning, if you feel the frustration rising, pause. The few seconds you take to steady yourself are worth far more than the perfectly chosen words. Children don’t need us to be perfectly calm all the time. But they do need us to be making our way back to calm, visibly and consistently. That alone communicates: this is manageable. I’ve got this with you.

A note on when to get support. Anxiety is normal and universal in childhood. Some level of it is healthy and appropriate. But when it is significantly limiting your child’s daily life, when avoidance is growing rather than shrinking, when they’re missing school or withdrawing from things they used to enjoy, or when it’s been going on for several weeks without improvement, it’s worth talking to your GP or a child psychologist. Childhood anxiety responds very well to proper support. It doesn’t have to just be waited out.

What one parent discovered:

“My daughter started complaining of tummy aches every single morning before school. I brought her to the GP twice, both times everything was fine. I was at my wits’ end because I couldn’t tell if she was at it or genuinely unwell. When I stopped saying ‘you’re fine’ and started saying ‘I think you might be feeling anxious about something, that’s allowed,’ something changed. She cried. Proper tears. And then started telling me things about school that I had no idea about: a girl in her class who was leaving her out, a teacher she found hard, her worry about getting things wrong. She wasn’t making up the tummy ache. It was completely real. I just hadn’t been asking the right question.”

Moving Forward

Anxiety in children is not weakness. It is a nervous system doing what nervous systems do when they’ve learned that something feels threatening. The child is not being difficult. They are not manipulating you. They are struggling in a way that often can’t find words yet, and so it finds tummy aches, and rigid refusals, and clinginess, and the clutched doorframe on Monday morning.

What they need from you is not to have the fear taken away. It’s to feel less alone in it. An adult who sees them clearly, who isn’t frightened by what they’re frightened of, who will walk alongside them rather than pushing them away or carrying them away from it entirely. That combination of warmth and quiet confidence, you can do this AND I’m with you, is the most powerful thing an anxious child can receive.

This Week, Try...

The next time your child seems anxious, try naming it without trying to fix it. “I think you’re feeling a bit worried about that. That makes sense.” Just that, said calmly. Notice what happens when you don’t rush to reassure or problem-solve. Often, being seen is already most of what they needed.

A question to reflect on:

When you were a child, what happened to your worry? Was it acknowledged and taken seriously, or were you told to stop being silly, push through it, toughen up? And how do you think that shapes how you respond when your own child is anxious?

Next week, we’re going to look at a developmental stage that doesn’t get nearly enough attention: the tween years, roughly 9 to 12. A lot shifts in those years, emotionally, socially, neurologically, and it can catch parents completely off guard. If your child has started seeming more secretive, more sensitive to criticism, more grown-up in some ways and much more childish in others, that’s exactly what we’ll be unpacking. See you then.

What does anxiety look like in your house? Does it show up the way you’d expect, or does it wear a different disguise? I’d love to hear in the comments. Sometimes just knowing that another child does the same thing is its own kind of relief. If this resonated with you, please share it with another parent who might need to read it today.

Dr Daire Gilmartin Consultant Counselling Psychologist and Psychotherapist Oak Tree Therapy www.oaktreetherapy.ie

That’s not how you wanted Sunday to go. It’s probably not how they wanted it to go either. And you’re left standing there wondering: why does a simple ‘no’ have to turn into this every single time?

The Choice We Think We Have to Make

There’s an idea that circulates in parenting culture that I want to challenge directly, because it causes a lot of unnecessary suffering. The idea is this: you have to choose between being warm and being firm. That if you’re too empathic and too understanding, you’ll raise a child who can’t handle being told no. That softness breeds entitlement. That the kind, connected parent is also the one being walked all over.

On the other side, there’s the older model: strict parenting, firm consequences, “because I said so.” The idea that respect is earned through authority and children need to know who’s in charge.

Here’s the thing: both of these, on their own, are incomplete. The research is very clear on this. Children who thrive don’t have parents who chose warmth or firmness. They have parents who offer both, simultaneously, as a package. Warmth tells a child: you are loved, your feelings matter, I am on your side. Firmness tells a child: someone is in charge, the world has edges, I can be trusted to mean what I say. Children don’t just need one of those messages. They need both of them, ideally delivered at the same time, often in the same breath.

Connection and limits are not opposites. They were never meant to be.

It’s worth pausing here to notice your own reaction to that. For some parents, firmness feels instinctively uncomfortable (perhaps because their own upbringing was harsh, controlling, or unpredictable, and the last thing they want is to replicate that). For others, warmth comes naturally but holding a limit feels almost impossible (perhaps because the household they grew up in was too rigid, and they swore they’d never be like that). Both of these instincts make complete sense. But they can quietly pull you too far in one direction: either too firm without enough warmth, or too warm without enough firmness. This is worth getting curious about rather than beating yourself up over. Your own experience of being parented is almost certainly shaping how you parent right now. We’ll come back to this.

Why Children Actually Need the ‘No’

This might sound counterintuitive, but children without clear, consistent limits are not more relaxed. They are more anxious.

A developing nervous system needs to know what to expect from the world. Predictability is not boring to a child’s brain: it is genuinely regulating. When the rules are clear and consistent, a child doesn’t have to keep pushing to find out where the edges are. They already know. And knowing creates a kind of safety that no amount of warmth alone can provide.

When limits are unclear, negotiable, or absent, or when a parent says something and doesn’t follow through, children push and push. Not because they’re difficult (well, sometimes they’re difficult!). But because their nervous system is still searching for the boundary. The testing is the search for safety. “Is anyone actually in charge here? Is there an adult who’s going to keep things okay?” When that signal doesn’t come back clearly, the testing continues. And it gets louder.

This is why children with parents who follow through consistently (not harshly, not coldly, but reliably) tend to be more settled. The limit isn’t just a rule. It’s a message: you can trust me to mean what I say, and the world has edges that will hold. For a child, that is profoundly reassuring, even if it doesn’t feel that way from the outside when they’re in the middle of losing the head about it.

What Doesn’t Help (But We All Do It Anyway)

Let’s be honest: when a limit is being pushed and the pressure is mounting, we reach for the same things. And they almost never work.

The repeated warning. “I said stop. I’m not telling you again. I mean it this time. Last warning. I really mean it this time.” Every repeated warning teaches your child that the first ten don’t count. They learn to wait for the version of you that actually means it, which is usually the version who’s already lost the head. That’s an exhausting system for everyone involved.

The escalating consequence. “If you don’t stop, you’ll lose the iPad. Right, you’ve lost it for a week. A month. The whole summer.” Consequences that you couldn’t realistically carry out, and don’t, teach children one thing above all else: that you don’t follow through. And once that happens, even reasonable consequences lose their weight.

The lecture. When a child is in the thick of their frustration about a limit you’ve just set, a long, careful explanation of why the limit is reasonable is not going to reach them. Their thinking brain is offline. They literally cannot process what you’re saying in that state. The longer you talk, the more it feels like an argument…

Giving in after holding out. This is the most human of all of them, and I say that without a trace of judgement, because I have done it, and every parent I have ever worked with has done it. You hold the line, they escalate, the whole thing has gone on far too long, and you’re exhausted and it seems easier to just let them have the extra fifteen minutes and draw a line under it. What that teaches (entirely unintentionally) is that persistence pays off. The next time, they escalate a little faster and hold on a little longer, because they’ve learned that’s what eventually works. Giving in isn’t a kindness in that moment: it’s a lesson in the wrong direction.

What Actually Helps

The shift I’m describing is not about being stricter or colder. It’s about being clearer, calmer, and, crucially, warmer. And it starts earlier than you might think.

Set them up for success: structuring transitions. Many of the battles around limits don’t actually start with the limit itself. They start with the surprise of it. A child who is deeply absorbed in something and then suddenly told it’s over has to make a massive, abrupt shift with no preparation. Their nervous system hasn’t been given any warning. No wonder they push back.

One of the most effective things you can do is give children advance notice of transitions - not as a vague threat, but as genuine preparation. “When that programme is over, it’s time for bed.” “We’re leaving the park in five minutes - get your last swing in.” “Dinner’s in ten, so this is the last game.” This is called structuring, and it’s used in therapeutic work with children because it makes the world predictable. When children know what’s coming, they can start to prepare themselves internally. They often still won’t want to stop, and that’s okay! But the abruptness that activates their nervous system is removed. You’re setting them up to succeed, not setting them up to fail.

Connect before you correct. Before you deliver the limit, make contact. Get down to their level or at least get close to them. A moment of genuine eye contact and a calm tone before “it’s time to turn off now” lands completely differently than shouting it out from the other side of the room. One of those approaches signals connection. The other signals interruption and possible threat. The limit is identical. How it lands is not.

Name the feeling before you hold the line. “I know you don’t want to stop this, you're enjoying it.” Say it and mean it. Let them feel heard for a moment. Then: “But it’s time to go now.” This is not softening the limit. It’s empathy alongside the limit, not instead of it. “I know AND it’s time.” Both things are true. You are not choosing between understanding their feeling and holding the line. You’re doing both. That’s the whole point.

Say it once and follow through. One clear, calm statement of the limit, said once and meaning it, is worth a hundred repeated warnings. “The tablet goes off at five” -followed by the tablet actually going off at five. It doesn’t have to be sharp. It just has to be true. And then you follow through, without drama, without negotiation. If they argue back, the answer is the same. Not louder. Just steadier.

Consequences that teach rather than punish. Sometimes, even with the best preparation and the warmest approach, children test the limit fully. This is where consequences come in, not as punishment, but as cause and effect. Part of your job is helping them experience, in a safe and consistent way, that their choices have real outcomes.

Here’s what this can look like in practice. The programme has ended. You’ve given the advance notice. You’ve connected warmly. You’ve said it once, calmly. And your child turns on another show.

“Love, the TV needs to go off now. If it doesn’t happen, there’ll be no TV tomorrow evening.” The consequence is named clearly, once, without heat or drama. The child now has a genuine choice.

They keep watching. You turn off the TV. You stay calm. “You decided to keep it on, so there’ll be no TV tomorrow. Now let’s head upstairs.” And you go. Warm. Steady. Moving. They’re upset, that’s okay. You don’t need to fix the upset. “I know it’s hard, love, but it’s time for bed now.” You keep going.

The next morning, when everyone has slept and the temperature has dropped, you return to it briefly. Not as a second round of punishment, not as a lecture, as a conversation. “Last night was tough. What do you think happened? What could we do differently next time?” You listen. You hold the consequence (no TV tonight, as agreed). And you close the loop.

This is how children learn that choices have consequences: not through fear or shame, but through the calm, predictable experience of living in a family where the rules are real. They’re also learning something bigger than that - that a consequence doesn’t damage the relationship. You can follow through on something they didn’t like and still be the warm, safe person you always are. That’s not a small lesson. That’s a foundational one about how relationships actually work.

One last thing, and it matters: balance. None of this means having a rule for everything. A household with too many limits is its own problem; children who are over-regulated tend to resent the rules, find ways around them, or go quiet and sneaky rather than genuinely learning. The goal is not a long list of dos and don’ts. It’s a small number of limits that genuinely matter, consistently held. And here’s a useful test: if you set a limit you can’t realistically enforce, don’t set it. An empty rule is worse than no rule, because it teaches children that rules are negotiable. Pick the limits that matter most to you and your family, hold those clearly and warmly, and let the smaller stuff go. Reasonable limits, reasonable consequences, applied consistently and with warmth, that’s the whole model. Easier said than done, I know!! But that’s the direction of travel.

What one parent discovered:

“Limits were always a battle in our house. I’d say no, she’d push, I’d repeat myself about a hundred times getting louder, she’d escalate, and eventually one of us would crack. Either I’d give in or she’d break down completely and we’d both feel awful. What I changed was one thing: I started saying it once. Just once. Calmly. And then I did it, without the five rounds in between. The first week was rough because she was waiting for me to repeat myself the way I always had. When I didn’t, she was actually a bit thrown. By the second week, something had shifted. She still pushed a few times. But it was shorter. Less intense. And one evening she came to me and said ‘Is it time to stop now?’ herself. I genuinely didn’t know what to do with that.”

Moving Forward

Warmth and firmness are not opposites. The parent who holds limits clearly and consistently is not being cold. They are giving their child something deeply reassuring: an adult who means what they say, who stays steady under pressure, and who loves them enough to follow through even when it’s uncomfortable.

Limits, delivered with warmth, are not the enemy of connection. In the hands of an attuned parent, they are a form of connection. They carry a message that no amount of softness alone can send: I see you, I love you, and I’ve got this. You don’t have to keep testing. I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere, and the answer is still the same.

That is one of the most loving things you can offer a child.

This Week, Try…

The next time you need to hold a limit, try saying it once, calmly, warmly, at their level and then actually follow through without repeating it. Notice what it costs you not to repeat yourself (it can feel almost physically difficult, especially at first). And notice what happens with them when you do. It will feel strange. That’s okay. Strange often means something is changing.

A question to reflect on:

When you were a child, how were limits set in your home? Were they too rigid, or too absent, or somewhere in between? And how do you think that experience lives in you now, does it make it harder to be firm, or harder to be warm, when you’re trying to hold a limit with your own child?

Next week, we’ll be looking at something that comes up in almost every family I work with, and that often gets misread entirely: anxiety in children. It doesn’t always look like worry. It can look like defiance, or tummy aches, or refusal, or clinginess that seems to come from nowhere. We’ll look at what’s really happening, and what actually helps. See you then.

What do you find hardest about holding limits? Is it the repeated warnings, the lectures, the giving in, or something else entirely? I’d love to hear in the comments. This is one of those topics where it helps to know we’re all in similar territory. If this resonated with you, please share it with another parent who might need to read it today.

Dr Daire Gilmartin Consultant Counselling Psychologist and Psychotherapist Oak Tree Therapy www.oaktreetherapy.ie

Here we go again.

Afterwards, the familiar sequence. The child’s hurt face. The silence in the room. And that now-familiar wave of shame. You swore you’d never do this. You’ve read the articles. You know, theoretically, about the thinking brain and the emotional brain, about co-regulation and staying calm. But somehow, in the thick of it, none of that knowledge helped even slightly.

What is wrong with me?

It’s not that something is wrong with you, but something is happening. And if it’s a pattern (not just a one-off), that pattern is worth getting curious about. Because the goal here isn’t just to repair after you’ve lost it (we covered all of that back in Article 4, and the repair framework still stands). The goal today is to understand why this particular thing keeps happening, so you can start to change it before you’re standing in the kitchen wondering where Tuesday evening went.

It’s Not Just About the Tuesday

Here’s the first thing to understand: when you lose your temper with your child, it is almost never really about what just happened. It’s about everything underneath.

We’ve talked before about the iceberg: how children’s behaviour is only the tip of what’s really going on beneath the surface. But parents have an iceberg too. What’s visible is the reaction: the raised voice, the sharp words, the moment you lose it. But what’s underneath is much, much larger. The exhaustion that’s been building for weeks. The tension that hung around after this morning’s difficult conversation with your partner. The worry about work, about money, about your parent’s health. The fact that you haven’t slept properly since Thursday. The mental load that nobody else seems to notice, let alone share.

When we’re running on full reserves (rested, supported, with some actual space in our days) we can absorb an enormous amount. The homework meltdown, the sibling screaming, the three requests for more water at bedtime: all fine, we’ve got this. We’re not calm on those days because we’re better parents. We’re calm because we have something in the tank.

When the tank is empty, the lid comes off. And the nearest person (usually the child who needs us most) gets what we can no longer contain. That’s not a character flaw; it’s a nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems do under sustained pressure.

The Bit About Your Own History (And Why It Matters More Than You Think)

Many of us have specific triggers: particular behaviours that set us off in a way that seems out of proportion to what’s actually happening. And if you look closely at the pattern, it’s often the same type of moment that undoes you, again and again.

This is what I’ve called “shark music” in earlier articles (a concept borrowed from the wonderful Circle of Security programme). It’s the ominous internal soundtrack that starts playing before we’ve even consciously registered what’s happening. Like the music in a film that tells you something threatening is coming, even before anything has appeared on screen. Our nervous system has already decided this is dangerous and it reacts accordingly.

Here’s why this happens. Many of our strongest parenting triggers are connected to old wounds: places where something happened in our own childhood that our nervous system never quite finished processing. So when our child does something that touches one of those old places, it isn’t really our adult self that reacts. It’s our child self, that younger version of us who was left with certain feelings (fear, rejection, shame, overwhelm) and had to learn, somehow, to survive them.

Two examples, because this becomes much clearer when it’s concrete.

When your child ignores you or treats you coldly. Some children do this when they’re upset: they shut down, go still, stop responding. For some parents, this lands fine. For others, it triggers something that feels almost unbearable: a spike of hurt or rejection that doesn’t quite match the moment. If coldness or withdrawal was part of your own childhood (a parent who went quiet when they were angry, who withheld warmth as a response to behaviour, who made silence feel like punishment) then your child going quiet can activate all of that in an instant. The small child in you takes it personally. Your nervous system fires as if you’re being abandoned, because once upon a time, something very like this did feel like abandonment. And so you lose the head, not because your child has done something terrible, but because a frightened younger part of you is trying to protect itself. It happens in a split second, bypassing all the parenting knowledge you have.

When your child has big emotions. If, when you were small, your big feelings weren’t tolerated well (if you were told to stop crying, to toughen up, to go to your room until you could behave) then you learned something important and damaging: that strong emotions aren’t acceptable. They’re something to be suppressed, ashamed of, dealt with alone. You were probably left feeling quite isolated in those moments. And now, when your own child has a meltdown or loses their temper, something in you reacts from that same old place. You get annoyed, you shut it down, you recreate the very pattern you experienced yourself. Not because you want to. Because that’s what your nervous system learned emotions meant.

But here’s what changes when we catch ourselves: if we can take a breath and stay with our child’s feelings rather than shutting them down, we give them something we perhaps didn’t receive ourselves. We show them that big emotions are normal, that they’re survivable, that they don’t have to be carried alone. We help them build the emotional vocabulary and self-soothing capacity that will serve them their whole lives. That’s not a small thing. That’s emotional intelligence being built, in real time, through the relationship.

I know what some of you are thinking: isn’t this all a bit soft? (because as a younger man, I once thought this too!). Don’t children need resilience, not just validation? I hear this a lot, and I want to answer it directly. The research is clear that children whose emotional experiences are met with warmth and understanding rather than shut down or dismissed are more resilient, not less. They develop genuine self-regulation, not just the performance of holding it together. They grow up knowing that hard feelings are manageable, because they’ve experienced being helped through them. That is the foundation of real resilience. And as parents, when we do this work, we also develop. We process a little more of what we ourselves were left with. We lose the head a little less often and carry a little less shame. That’s not soft, that’s how human beings actually grow.

From reacting to responding

When shark music is playing and we react from those old places, we’re not making a conscious choice. It happens before we’ve had time to think. But awareness changes everything (not immediately, not completely, but gradually and meaningfully).

When we start to really recognise our triggers: to name them, trace where they came from, understand that what’s firing is an old protective response from our child self rather than a considered reaction from our adult self, something shifts. A gap appears between the trigger and the response. In that gap, we get a choice. We can notice the shark music and think: that’s an old soundtrack. My child is not abandoning me. They’re eight and they’re upset. I am an adult, and I can actually handle this.

That shift, from reacting to responding, isn’t built through willpower. It’s built through awareness, accumulated slowly, one moment of recognition at a time. Every time you catch the shark music, even after the fact, you’re doing the work. The noticing is where change begins.

What Doesn’t Help (But We All Do It Anyway)

Let’s be honest: the usual response to a pattern of losing your temper is to promise yourself, in the aftermath, that you won’t do it again. You feel terrible, you repair, and you resolve that next time will be different. Sometimes you white-knuckle it for a week or two, and then something happens and you’re right back where you started.

Resolution without understanding doesn’t work. You can’t think your way through a nervous system reaction in real time. When you’re in the grip of that threat response, the thinking brain is offline. No amount of knowing better changes that when you’re in a state.

What also doesn’t help: the shame spiral. The what’s wrong with me loop that takes over afterwards. The comparing yourself to parents who seem to hold it all together. That shame doesn’t protect your children from your reactions. It just depletes you further. And a depleted, shame-laden parent is a more reactive parent. It’s a cycle that shame actually helps to maintain, which is a deeply inconvenient truth.

What Actually Helps

The first thing (the most important thing) is attending to the tank.

A chronically depleted parent cannot be a consistently regulated parent. That’s just neurobiological fact. This doesn’t mean you need a spa week (though that might be nice too!!). It means asking, honestly: what is one thing that could help restore a bit more resource this week? Sleep, if you can get it. A real conversation with someone who genuinely understands. Ten minutes where you’re not needed by anyone. Movement. Time outside. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. But it has to be real.

The second thing is getting to know your triggers before they hit, rather than only after. Think back over the last few times you lost it. What was the build-up like? What specifically set it off? And what was happening in your body in the minutes before you went? Tightness in the chest? Jaw clenching? A rising heat? Those physical signals are your warning system: your nervous system’s version of a yellow traffic light before the red. If you can begin to notice them as they build, you can sometimes insert a tiny pause. Three slow breaths. Leaving the room for thirty seconds. Saying out loud: “I need a minute”, which by the way models something extraordinary for your child. It shows them that adults feel big feelings too, and that there are ways of handling them that don’t involve taking them out on someone else.

The third thing is getting genuinely curious about your shark music rather than beating yourself up about it. The question isn’t “why can’t I just stay calm?” The far more useful question is: “What is it about this particular type of moment that gets to me, and where have I felt this before?” Following that question somewhere (in a journal, with a therapist, with a trusted partner, or even just privately in your own head) opens up something that shame never could.

And yes: repair still matters every time. Every single time. The framework from Article 4 still stands. But repair alongside understanding is a much more powerful combination. Because you’re not just apologising for yesterday. You’re slowly, genuinely, changing something.

One thing I want to be clear about: repair does not mean that your child’s behaviour was fine. You can take full responsibility for how you responded and still address the behaviour that triggered it. Keeping those two things separate in your mind (rather than running them together) means both conversations can actually land. Both matter.

What one parent discovered:

“I’d been losing it over the same thing for years: my daughter going quiet and shutting me out whenever I tried to talk to her about something difficult. She’d go all still and stoney-faced and I’d just lose it: get louder, more frustrated, say things I’d regret. I thought she was being deliberately cold with me. When I started thinking about it properly, I realised that was exactly what my mum did when she was upset with me as a child. The silence was terrifying. It felt like being abandoned. When my daughter went quiet, I wasn’t really reacting to her at all. I was reacting to something from thirty-five years ago. Once I understood that, I could actually start to separate the two of them in my head. She’s not abandoning me; she’s a twelve-year-old who doesn’t yet have the words when she’s overwhelmed. That’s a completely different thing. I still find it hard. But I haven’t lost it with her over it since.”

Moving Forward

Losing your temper with your children doesn’t make you a bad parent. Doing it regularly doesn’t make you irredeemable. It makes you someone with a pattern worth understanding, because underneath almost every pattern of reactivity, there’s something that makes complete sense when you know where to look.

The shark music will keep playing until we learn to hear it for what it is: an old soundtrack, composed by a younger version of us, in circumstances that no longer apply. Getting familiar with it (naming it, tracing it, getting curious about it) is how we gradually move from reacting on autopilot to genuinely responding. Not perfection, not never losing it again. Just slowly, steadily, a bit more of your adult self available for the moment you’re actually in.

Repair is still there for you, every time. It works. But understanding the pattern, over time, means you need it a little less often. And that’s worth working towards, for your children, and for yourself.

This Week, Try…

Think back over the last time you lost your temper. Not to pick at it, but to get properly curious. What had the hour before it looked like? What specifically triggered it (the behaviour itself, or what that behaviour felt like in your body)? See if you can identify one physical warning signal that showed up before it escalated. A tight chest. A clenched jaw. A rising heat. That’s your yellow light. Getting to know it is the beginning of being able to use it.

A question to reflect on:

Is there a particular behaviour of your child’s that consistently undoes you (one that seems to get to you more than the others)? Can you trace that feeling back anywhere? What did it feel like, when you were young, to be in a version of that moment yourself?

Next week, we’ll look at something many parents find genuinely tricky: limits and connection, and why they’re not opposites. How do you say no warmly? How do you hold a boundary without it turning into a battle every time? And why are clear, consistent limits actually one of the most loving things we can offer our children? See you then.

Have you noticed a pattern in when you lose your temper? Have you ever managed to trace it back to something? I’d love to hear in the comments, this is one of those conversations that helps all of us feel a little less alone in it. And if this resonated with you, please share it with another parent who might need to read it today.

Dr Daire Gilmartin

Consultant Counselling Psychologist and Psychotherapist

Oak Tree Therapy

www.oaktreetherapy.ie

Here’s what’s going on, and honestly, once I explain it, you might find it both frustrating and reassuring in equal measure.

Being there and being with someone are two completely different things.

The Myth We’ve All Absorbed

“Quality time.” We throw the phrase around as if we all know what it means, but I’ve found in my work with families that most parents are carrying a version of it that actually makes them feel worse rather than better. The myth goes something like this: if you can just carve out enough dedicated, activity-filled time with your child, you’re ticking the connection box. A trip to the park. A pizza and a movie. A “screen-free day.” These things must count as quality time, mustn’t they?

And they can. But here’s the thing: it’s not the activity that makes the time connecting. It’s what happens between you during it.

You can spend an entire Saturday at the park while mentally composing your work emails, half-scrolling your phone between the swings, thinking about what needs doing at home. Your child is running around in front of you, calling “Look at me! Look at me!” and you’re saying “Brilliant, love!” without really seeing them at all. You were there, but you weren’t with them. They know the difference, even if they couldn’t tell you what felt missing.

This isn’t a criticism (I promise!). It’s just the reality of modern parenting. We’re mentally elsewhere even when we’re physically present, and it’s completely understandable why. The mental load doesn’t clock off because you’ve driven to the playground. The worries don’t pause because you bought everyone ice cream. We bring ourselves everywhere we go, and sometimes we are very, very full.

Our children need more than our bodies in the same space. They need our actual attention, and there’s a significant difference.

What Children Are Actually Seeking

Let me explain what’s happening in your child’s nervous system when they feel genuinely connected to you versus when they feel like you’re somewhere else in your head.

When you are truly present with your child (really looking at them, really listening, genuinely interested in what they’re saying or doing), something happens neurologically for both of you. Their stress system settles. Their body relaxes. The part of their brain that’s always quietly scanning for “Am I secure? Am I cared for? Do I matter here?” gets a clear, reassuring signal: yes, yes, and yes. This is co-regulation again, the same process we’ve talked about in previous articles, but it doesn’t require distress to be helpful. Calm, attuned attention from a parent is regulating for a child (and for us!) just in the ordinary run of a day.

When that signal is absent, when you’re there but not really there, their system stays on low-level alert. They don’t feel insecure, exactly, but they don’t feel fully settled either. Often what follows is behaviour that looks like misbehaving but is actually a form of seeking: poking the sibling, whingeing about nothing, clinging, being deliberately annoying. These are all, at some level, attempts to get a reaction from you. Because a reaction (even a frustrated one) means you’ve noticed them. You’re present for a moment. The cup gets a tiny bit filled, but not in a way that actually satisfies.

The developmental psychologist Ed Tronick’s “still face” research is worth knowing about here. In his studies, a parent interacts warmly and responsively with their baby, then is instructed to go blank (neutral face, no reaction). Within seconds, the baby tries everything to re-engage: pointing, smiling, vocalising, reaching out. When none of it works, they become distressed. The point of this isn’t to alarm anyone, it’s to illustrate how attuned to our presence children are, and what it costs them when they can feel we’re not quite there. Even partial “still face” (present in body, absent in attention) registers. Children are exquisitely sensitive to the difference between being seen and being near someone who isn’t seeing them.

What Presence Actually Looks Like (And How Little of It Is Needed)

Here’s where I want to offer you something genuinely useful rather than just more to feel guilty about!

Genuine presence doesn’t have to be long. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. It doesn’t require you to be performing enthusiasm or generating activities. Research on what makes time feel connecting to children consistently points to the same thing: it’s not the duration or the location. It’s the quality of the attention.

What that looks like in practice is simpler than you might think.

It’s putting your phone face down (not just beside you, but genuinely out of reach) for 15 minutes and playing whatever they want to play. Following their lead, not directing or teaching or correcting. Just interested, present, alongside them. Commenting on what you notice: “You’re building that really carefully.” “That character is really angry!” Children love when we genuinely observe what they are doing. It can feel a little funny initially (that’s just our adult brains…) but children lap it up!

It’s making eye contact at dinner and asking something you’re actually curious about. Not “how was school?” (which, as we’ve established, produces precisely nothing!!), but something specific: “Any laughs today?” or “Who did you sit beside at lunch?” or even just “What’s going on with that Minecraft world you’re building?” And then actually listening to the answer. Not nodding while thinking about tomorrow’s schedule, but actually following the thread, asking a follow-up question, letting them see that you find their world interesting (or are at least really trying to understand it!).

It’s the greeting at the end of the school day. This one is so underrated. The moment your child comes in the door or gets in the car: can you be fully present for those first two minutes? Not immediately asking about homework. Not launching into what’s happening next. Just: “Hey, you’re here, great to see you.” A proper look at them. Maybe a hug. Let the day land before you move on. Those two minutes set the tone for the whole evening. They communicate: you’re the first thing on my mind, not the last.

And it’s noticing things. This sounds small but it isn’t. “I saw you being really kind to your brother there.” “You seem a bit tired today. You okay?” “I loved watching your face when you were reading that book.” Being noticed, genuinely noticed, is one of the deepest forms of being loved. Children who feel seen by their parents carry something important inside them: the knowledge that they exist for someone, that they matter enough to be paid attention to. That’s not nothing. That’s enormous.

One more thing that I think is really worth naming: the car. The walk to school. The side-by-side moments where you’re not looking directly at each other. These are often where children choose to talk. Something about the lack of eye contact, the shared direction, makes it easier for them to open up. And when they do, what helps most isn’t advice or teaching or even reassurance. It’s just warm, empathic listening. “That sounds like great fun.” “That must have been really tough.” “I’d have been annoyed too.” You’re not solving anything. You’re just reflecting back that you’ve heard them, that their experience makes sense, that they don’t have to carry it alone. That’s it. That’s enough. And children learn from it that you’re a safe person to talk to - which matters more and more as they get older.

The Phone Question

I want to say something about phones gently and without any judgement at all. Because the reality is that phones are genuinely addictive by design. Seriously clever people have spent billions of dollars making them as hard to put down as possible. So when we find ourselves reaching for the phone in the middle of time with our children, that’s not a character flaw. It’s a completely understandable response to technology that’s specifically engineered to pull our attention. We’re all navigating this together and figuring it out as we go.

What I’d gently offer is this: there’s a difference between having our phone nearby and being slightly available to it, and consciously choosing a window of time where we put it in another room. Not forever. Not as a rule. Just: for this bit. The car journey home. The fifteen minutes after they get in the door. The time between dinner and bath. When the phone isn’t in reach, we’re not fighting the pull. We’re just present, more easily and naturally. And children feel the difference, even when nothing is said about it.

There’s something else worth saying here: when we do manage those moments of mindful, phone-free presence, we’re actually modelling something really valuable for our children too. We’re showing them what it looks like to be genuinely with someone, to give your attention fully, to choose connection over distraction. In a world that’s pulling at everyone’s attention all the time, that’s not a small thing to demonstrate. It’s one of the most useful things we can show them.

It Doesn’t Have to Be Long

I want to be really clear about this, because I know that many parents reading this are already exhausted and the last thing you need is another demand on your time.

You do not need hours. You do not need whole days. In fact, some of the most powerful connecting time I’ve ever heard parents describe has been seven minutes. Ten minutes. The walk from the car to the school gate where nobody said anything particularly important but they held hands and looked at the same things. The five minutes lying on the end of their bed at night just chatting nonsense before lights out. The spontaneous dance in the kitchen while waiting for the kettle. The private joke that nobody else in the family would even understand.

It’s not the length of the time that makes it connecting. It’s the texture of it. The fact that you were genuinely, warmly, interestedly there. That you saw them. That you weren’t anywhere else.

In my Filial Therapy practice, one of the most striking things I see regularly is the impact of even 15-20 minutes of child-directed, genuinely present playtime once or twice a week. The essence of it is beautifully simple: you step into their world completely. You let them lead. You follow where they go, join whatever they’re doing, let yourself be goofy and spontaneous and fully in it with them. If they want you to be the dragon, you’re the dragon. If they want to show you the same Lego creation they’ve shown you fourteen times already, you look at it like it’s the first time. You’re not directing the play, not teaching anything, not making it educational. You’re just in it with them, at their pace, in their world.

What you do as you play is reflect back what you notice: their feelings, their intentions, what’s happening in the game. “Oh no, the castle is under attack!” “You’re really concentrating on that bit.” “Your character seems really excited.” You’re not praising (good girl!) but genuinely tracking and witnessing. There’s a real difference between the two, and children feel it immediately. Praise evaluates. Reflection says: I see you. I’m interested in what you’re doing. Your world matters.

Parents are often sceptical that something this simple could make much difference. Within a few weeks, they’re telling me their child seems more settled, less clingy, more cooperative, often without anything in the day actually changing. Not because of anything elaborate. Just because their cup has been properly filled, in the way that only this kind of real togetherness can fill it.

You can fill a lot with a small amount of the right thing.

What one parent discovered: “I used to think I was giving my daughter loads of time because we were always together at weekends. But I started noticing that she’d act up most on Sunday evenings, right after what I thought had been a lovely weekend together. Then I realised: I’d been there, but I’d been half-distracted most of the time. Replying to messages here, thinking about work there. So I tried an experiment. Every day after school, I left my phone in the kitchen and just sat with her for fifteen minutes, completely present, no agenda. She was suspicious the first few days, kept looking at me like I was about to say something important! But by the end of the first week, she was chatting away differently. More relaxed. The Sunday evening meltdowns almost stopped. It turned out she hadn’t been getting too much of me at the weekends. She’d been getting almost none of the real me.”

Moving Forward

Quality time is a phrase worth rescuing. Not because the aspiration behind it is wrong, but because the version we’ve been sold (more hours, bigger activities, fuller weekends) misses what children actually need. They need us to be genuinely there when we’re there. Present in the real sense: eyes on them, mind on them, actually interested in their world for a bit. Even briefly, imperfectly, in the middle of a Tuesday that has nothing special about it.

You don’t need to redesign your weekends. You just need to find a few moments each day where you’re truly with your child rather than just near them.

This Week, Try...

Pick one moment in your day (after-school pick-up, dinner, bedtime, the car journey somewhere) and decide in advance that for the duration of that moment, you’re going to be genuinely, fully present. Phone in another room, or at least face down and silenced. Really looking and listening. Notice what’s different when you do. Notice also what it brings up for you: the pull to check something, the thoughts drifting elsewhere, the effort it takes (I know it!). That noticing is useful in itself.

A question to reflect on: When you were a child, did you have an adult who made you feel truly seen? Not just provided for, not just physically there, but genuinely interested in your world? What did that feel like? And if you didn’t have that, what do you imagine it would have meant to you if you had?

Next week, we’ll look at something that catches many parents off guard: what to do when you lose your temper. Not the first time (we covered that in Article 4!), but the pattern of it - why it keeps happening, what your own history has to do with it, and how to interrupt the cycle before it goes too far.

What does connection look like in your house right now? Are you managing to find those genuinely present moments, or has the business of daily life crowded them out? I’d love to hear in the comments. And if this resonated with you, please share it with another parent who might need to read it this week.

One more thing: a number of people have asked me about how to actually run child-centred special playtimes with their children - the step-by-step of it, what to do, what not to do, how to handle it when it doesn’t go to plan. If that would be useful to you, let me know in the comments! If there’s enough interest, I’ll put together a practical guide.

Dr Daire Gilmartin
Consultant Counselling Psychologist and Psychotherapist
Oak Tree Therapy
www.oaktreetherapy.ie

Picture this: Your eight-year-old is refusing to put their shoes on. You’ve asked three times. The tension is rising. You can feel yourself about to launch into “Right, I’ve had enough!” mode. And then, for some reason, you grab the shoes and start making them talk to each other in a ridiculous voice. “Hello there, I’m the left shoe. Have you met my friend the right shoe?” Your child looks at you, startled. And then bursts out laughing. The shoes are on three minutes later and you’re both walking out the door grinning.

What just happened there? Nothing changed about the situation. The shoes still had to go on. You still had to leave. But a tiny burst of silliness shifted everything.

This is what play does. And we massively underestimate it.

Play Isn’t a Nice Extra. It’s the Language.

When we talk about play in the context of parenting, most of us think of it as something children do when the important stuff is done. Screen-free time. Creative activities. Something to keep them occupied. And yes, of course it’s all of those things. But it’s actually much more fundamental than that.

Play is how children make sense of the world, and for many children, especially those who regulate through movement, rhythm, or sensory experience, play is how their nervous system settles. Play helps children process difficult feelings, rehearse relationships, build confidence, and communicate what’s going on inside them when they don’t have the words. If you want to know how a child is really doing, watch them play. You’ll often learn more in ten minutes of watching them with their toys than in an hour of asking “How was your day?” (which, as any parent of a school-age child knows, typically gets you “fine” and not a lot else!!).

But here’s what I really want you to take in: play isn’t just children’s entertainment. It’s the primary relationship currency between you and your child. The moments of silliness, of laughter, of rolling around on the floor together or inventing ridiculous games in the car, these aren’t the decorative bits around the edges of parenting. They’re often the bits that matter most.

I’ve been trained in Filial Therapy, which is essentially a structured parent-child play therapy approach (www.filialtherapy.org). The whole premise of it is that when parents learn to follow their child’s lead in play, something shifts profoundly in the relationship. Not because play is magic, but because it communicates something to your child at a level much deeper than words: I want to be with you. I find you interesting. I enjoy you. You are worth my full attention. For a child, that is everything.

Why It’s the First Thing to Go

Here’s the uncomfortable bit: playfulness is almost always the first casualty of a hard stretch of parenting.

When you’re exhausted, when the mental load is crushing you, when you’ve already had three ‘fallouts’ before 9am, the last thing you feel like doing is being silly or present or spontaneous. You’re in survival mode! The warmth is still there somewhere beneath the tiredness, but it’s buried under the endless tasks and the constant managing and the sheer weight of keeping everything going.

And actually, this makes complete neurological sense. When our own stress system is activated, the part of us that’s free, playful, and spontaneous goes offline. Just like we talked about with our children’s prefrontal cortex going offline under stress, the same thing happens to us. You literally cannot access your playful self when you’re dysregulated. You’re too busy keeping your head above water.

The problem is, this is often precisely when your child most needs that playful connection from you. They’re picking up on your stress, their own nervous system is activated, and the whole household can tip into a kind of low-level tension that nobody’s quite managing to name. And yet connection (real, warm, even silly connection) is the very thing that would help everyone settle.

It’s a frustrating bind. And I’m not going to pretend there’s an easy way out of it. But I do think there are small things that make a real difference.

What the Research Actually Tells Us

You might think I’m exaggerating about the power of play. Let me give you a bit of neuroscience to back it up (jargon-free, I promise!!).

When a parent and child play together and laugh together, something very specific happens in their nervous systems. Shared laughter is associated with the release of oxytocin, often called the bonding hormone, the same one involved in breastfeeding and warm physical contact. It also activates the ventral vagal system (the part of the nervous system associated with feeling safe and socially connected), which literally helps both of you settle and regulate.

In other words: laughter is co-regulation. A silly game, a shared giggle, a ridiculous voice, these aren’t just fun. They’re physiological events that help both you and your child feel safer and more connected. The research on this is really solid. Stuart Brown, one of the world’s leading researchers on play, describes play as a biological necessity, as important as sleep and nutrition for healthy development. It’s not a luxury. It shapes developing brains, builds resilience, and strengthens the very attachment relationship we’ve been talking about throughout these articles.

What It Actually Looks Like

Playfulness doesn’t have to mean elaborate games, huge energy, or hours of uninterrupted time. It can be tiny. It can be seconds long. And it can happen in the middle of ordinary everyday moments.

A daft voice when you’re asking them to tidy up. (“Right, the socks are staging a protest! Quick, rescue them!”) A spontaneous dance in the kitchen while you’re waiting for the pasta to boil. Making the car journey into a challenge: spotting red cars, counting dogs, inventing the worst possible joke. Pretending to be astonished and outwitted when they’re playing a game and winning. Letting them catch you. Tickling. A whispered secret. A silly face across the dinner table when the other parent isn’t looking.

None of these cost you anything except the willingness to be a tiny bit ridiculous. And yet each of them sends a message your child receives at a very deep level: you are the kind of person I enjoy being around. You make life feel lighter. You’re on my side.

And there’s something else worth saying here: playfulness works when everything else has stopped working. When you’ve been caught in a power struggle and you both feel stuck, introducing a bit of lightness can dissolve the tension in a way that no amount of reasoning or consequences ever could. Not because you’re avoiding the issue, but because you’ve re-established connection first. And connection, as we’ve established again and again in these articles, is what makes everything else possible.

What About Teenagers? Play Looks Different, But It’s Still There

I want to say something about teenagers here, because they get left out of conversations about play almost entirely. We talk about play with toddlers and young children, and then we seem to assume that somewhere around the age of twelve, the need for it just evaporates. It doesn’t. The need is still there. It just looks completely different.

If you try to be playful with your teenager in the way you were when they were seven, you will be met with a look of such withering contempt that you may need a few moments to recover!! The silly voices and the floor games are done. That’s fine. But what replaces them matters just as much.

Playfulness with a teenager is about meeting them in their world. Not performing enthusiasm for things you find baffling, but being genuinely curious and genuinely present in the things they actually enjoy. This might mean sitting down with them and actually watching the YouTube creator they’re obsessed with (and not just tolerating it, but asking real questions about it afterwards). It might mean learning the rules of whatever game they’re playing and asking them to show you how it works, letting them be the expert for once. It might mean getting into the banter, the in-jokes, the ridiculous back-and-forth that teenagers love with people they feel safe with.

Here’s something I’ve noticed over years of working with teenagers and their families: many teens who seem completely unreachable, who grunt at every direct question and disappear into their rooms the moment they arrive home, will often open up sideways. Not face-to-face in a serious conversation, but side-by-side doing something low-pressure together. Kicking a ball in the garden. Long car journeys where you’re both looking forward rather than at each other. Cooking something together. Watching a film they’ve chosen. Walking the dog.

The activity is almost beside the point. What matters is the side-by-sideness of it. The signal it sends: I want to be in your company. Not to manage you, not to check in on your homework, not to have a Serious Chat. Just to be with you.

Teenagers are exquisitely sensitive to being managed, monitored, or interrogated (even when we think we’re being subtle!!). But they’re equally sensitive to genuine interest. When a parent can drop the agenda, resist the urge to make every moment educational or productive, and just be present and a bit light, something shifts. They relax. They stay a bit longer than they planned to. They start to talk.

And when they do talk? This bit is really important. Resist the urge to fix, advise, or redirect it into a life lesson. Teenagers have a finely tuned radar for the moment a conversation stops being about them and becomes about what you want them to learn from it. The moment they feel that shift, the shutters come down. So when they open up, just listen. Ask a curious question or two. Reflect back what they’ve said so they know you’ve actually heard them: “That is really frustrating” or “That must have felt awful.” You don’t have to have an answer. You don’t have to solve it. The listening IS the help. Save the guidance for when they specifically ask for it (and occasionally, they will).

The other thing worth saying about teens: they still love to laugh with you. Not at you (that’s a different thing entirely, and they will absolutely do that too!), but with you. Shared humour, even terrible dad jokes that they groan at while secretly enjoying, keeps the connection alive through a period when everything else about the relationship is being renegotiated. Don’t underestimate a good laugh together. It’s doing more work than it looks like.

Being With Them, Not Just Near Them

Beyond those everyday moments, there's something more intentional worth knowing about. There’s a difference between being in the same room as your child and actually being with them.

A lot of the time, we’re physically present but mentally somewhere else. On our phones, thinking about the work email, half-listening while we unload the dishwasher. And children notice this! They know the difference between a parent who’s there and a parent who’s truly with them.

What Filial Therapy research consistently shows is that even short bursts of what we call “special time”, maybe 15 or 20 minutes where you are following your child’s lead in play, not directing, not teaching, not correcting, just being genuinely interested and present, can make a remarkable difference to a child’s security and behaviour. Not because it’s a magic fix, but because it fills something that’s been running low.

You don’t have to do it every day. You don’t have to do it perfectly. But even a few genuine, phone-down, really-with-them moments a week can shift things in ways that are hard to predict until you try.

What one parent discovered: “My daughter and I had got into such a rut. Everything was a battle. I was managing her constantly. One evening I just got on the floor with her and played what she wanted to play, letting her be completely in charge. I didn’t redirect it, didn’t try to make it educational, didn’t check my phone. Twenty minutes. The next day she was a different child with me. She kept wanting to sit near me, kept initiating little games between us. I realised she’d been trying to get that connection all week through behaviour. Once she had it through play, she didn’t need to fight for my attention anymore.”

When Silliness Feels Impossible

I know some of you are reading this and thinking: I don’t feel playful. I don’t feel light. I’m barely keeping it together. How am I supposed to be silly when I’m running on empty?

This is genuinely valid. And I’m not suggesting you perform cheerfulness you don’t feel, that kind of false lightness children see straight through. But sometimes the silliness comes first and the feeling follows. Sometimes you make the daft voice because you’ve nothing left and it actually makes you laugh too. Sometimes you let yourself be pulled into their game for five minutes and you find, to your own surprise, that something in you exhales.

It’s also okay to say: “I’m really tired today, I’m not great craic (not great fun!). But I’m here. What do you want to do?” Being honest about your state while staying present is still connection. It’s real. Children can handle us being tired and human. What’s harder for them is when we’re gone even when we’re there.

Moving Forward

Play is not a reward for when the serious stuff is done. It is the serious stuff. It’s the language of connection, the tool that regulates nervous systems, the thing that says to your child: I see you, I enjoy you, and I want to be in your world for a bit.

You don’t need a plan or a toy or any energy at all, really. You just need to be willing to be a bit ridiculous sometimes.

This Week, Try...

Once this week, let your child lead. Whatever they’re doing, join in without redirecting it. No phones. No multitasking. No agenda. Just follow where they go for ten or fifteen minutes and see what happens. If they want you to be the monster, be the monster. If they want you to watch them do tricks on the trampoline for the forty-seventh time, watch like it’s the first. Be genuinely there.

And if playfulness has completely vanished from your house lately, notice that. It might be telling you something about how depleted you are. That’s worth paying attention to too.

A question to reflect on: Do you remember a time when you were a child that an adult connected with you through play, giving you their full, delighted attention? What was that like? And what might your child be feeling when you do that for them?

Next week, we’ll be looking at something that comes up constantly in my work: what to do when parenting brings up your own stuff. When your child’s behaviour triggers something much older in you, something from your own childhood and history that you hadn’t expected to meet in the middle of a Tuesday morning. We’ll talk about why it happens, what it means, and what to do with it.

What does play look like in your house right now? I’d love to hear in the comments. Are you managing to find moments of silliness, or has it gone a bit missing? No judgement either way, honestly!! Would you like further in-depth guidance about having focused child-centred playtimes with your children? Let me know and I can put it in the mix for future articles.

If this resonated with you, please share it with another parent who might need to read it this week.

Dr Daire Gilmartin, Consultant Counselling Psychologist & Psychotherapist

Oak Tree Therapy

www.oaktreetherapy.ie

From the sitting room: “I didn’t even DO anything! He’s LYING!”

And you’re standing there, potato peeler in hand, trying to figure out what just happened, who started it, whose fault it is, what the right consequence is, and why on earth you can’t get five minutes of peace in your own home.

If this sounds familiar (and I’m guessing it does!), welcome to one of the most exhausting, relentless features of family life with more than one child: sibling conflict. It comes up constantly in my work with families, and it’s one of those things that can make an otherwise manageable day feel completely unbearable. So let’s look at what’s actually going on, and more importantly, what actually helps.

Why They Fight: What’s Really Happening

Sibling conflict is completely normal. In fact, in many ways it’s developmentally necessary. That doesn’t make it easier to live with, but understanding why it happens can really shift how we respond.

Siblings are in constant, close proximity with each other. They share space, they share parents, they share resources. And they’re doing all of this at different developmental stages, with different emotional regulation capacities, different needs, and different temperaments. Of course they clash! It would be strange if they didn’t.

They’re competing for you. This is the big one, and it’s worth sitting with. Beneath a lot of sibling conflict is a fear, often unconscious, that there isn’t enough parental love and attention to go around. When your younger child gets a cuddle, your older child picks a fight. When your older child gets praise, your younger one suddenly “needs” something urgently. The behaviour at the surface (the grabbing, the name-calling, the winding up) is often the tip of a much more vulnerable, insecure iceberg underneath. What they can’t say is: “Am I still loved as much? Do I still matter as much to you? Do you love him more? Am I enough?”

One child’s dysregulation affects everyone. When one child is tired, hungry, overwhelmed, or anxious, their threshold for frustration drops dramatically. And in the closed ecosystem of a family home, that dysregulation is contagious. One child in a bad state will often provoke, irritate, or escalate the others, sometimes without even meaning to. The siblings fight, but the root cause was one child already struggling before the first word was exchanged.

Developmental clashes are real. A five-year-old and a nine-year-old don’t just have different interests, they have fundamentally different brains. The younger child isn’t developmentally able to take turns the way the older child expects. The older child has more sophisticated language and will always “win” a verbal argument, which infuriates the younger one. The mismatch in capacity is built in, and it creates friction.

Sometimes they’re genuinely just winding each other up. Let’s be honest: children also fight because it’s stimulating, because they’ve learned it gets a reaction, because they’re bored, and because pushing a sibling’s buttons is sometimes just more fun than whatever else is on offer. This is normal too! It doesn’t mean they’re bad children or that you’ve failed. It means they’re children.

What’s Really Underneath

If you zoom out and think of sibling conflict as communication (the way we’ve been doing with all behaviour in these articles), the question to ask is: what is this telling me?

Often, the fighting is telling you that one or both children need more of you. Not all of the same thing, and not necessarily more time, but more of the right kind of attention: one-to-one, focused, unhurried. When individual connection needs are being met, sibling conflict often reduces. It doesn’t disappear (let’s be realistic!), but reduces.

The fighting is also sometimes telling you that something else is going on. A child who suddenly starts fighting much more with their sibling might be struggling socially at school, or feeling anxious about something, or going through a developmental leap that’s taking up all their resources. The sibling becomes the nearest, safest target for feelings that have nowhere else to go. We need to look at the whole picture, not just the behaviour in the room.

What Doesn’t Help

When sibling conflict is at its height, most of us do the completely understandable thing: we try to figure out who started it, we pick a side, we hand out consequences, we threaten (“if you two can’t get along, we’re turning off the telly!”), and we demand they sort it out and be nice to each other right now.

None of this is wrong or terrible! But it almost never works, and it often makes things worse. When you focus on who started it, you position yourself as judge and jury in their conflict, which means both children put their energy into convincing you that the other one is to blame. You’ve now got two dysregulated children AND an adversarial (he said, she said) dynamic. Nobody’s nervous system is settling. And “be nice to each other” tells them nothing about how to actually do that.

The other thing many parents do (and I completely understand why, given how exhausting it all is!) is simply tune it out. Leave them to it. Hope it resolves itself. And sometimes that’s fine, as we’ll come to. But when ignoring becomes the default response, it sends a message children can’t unhear: that what’s happening between them doesn’t matter enough to warrant your attention. That it’s okay to be cruel to someone when you’re frustrated or need to let off steam. That relationships work like that. Children who grow up without anyone helping them navigate conflict can carry that into their friendships, their school life, their adult relationships. They might feel bad about themselves without quite knowing why, or struggle to understand why their relationships feel difficult. None of this needs to be dramatic or alarming, but it’s worth naming: your presence in these moments, even imperfect presence, matters more than you might think.

What Actually Helps

Stay regulated yourself, and watch your shark music. (I know, I keep coming back to this! But it really is the foundation.) Sibling conflict has a way of hitting our own nervous systems hard. Maybe it brings up memories of your own sibling relationships. Maybe you were the one who was always blamed, or the one who felt invisible, or the one who was frightened by conflict at home. That old shark music will play every time your children clash, and it can pull you towards reacting in ways that aren’t really about what’s happening right now. Notice when your reaction feels bigger than the situation warrants. That’s a signal worth attending to.

Step back before you step in, if everyone is safe. Not every conflict needs immediate adult intervention. When we rush in every time, we rob our children of the chance to figure it out themselves. If nobody’s going to get hurt, give them a moment. Watch what happens. You might be surprised. But when things escalate: step in calmly, not as judge, but as the person who holds both children’s perspectives.

Some things are non-negotiable. Before anything else, be clear (with yourself and with them) about what the absolute limits are. Hitting, kicking, name-calling that’s genuinely cruel, things that humiliate or hurt: these are not okay, and they need to be named as such without ambiguity. You can be warm and firm about this at the same time. “I can see you’re both really angry with each other right now, and that’s okay. But we don’t hit in this family. Full stop.” You’re not shaming them. You’re holding the limit. That’s your job, and it’s actually reassuring to children when adults are clear and steady about this. The rule exists not because they’re bad, but because they matter to each other and they need to learn to keep each other safe.

Help them regulate their bodies first. When children are really dysregulated, reasoning with them is pointless (remember the three R’s: regulate, relate, then reason). Before any conversation can happen, bodies need to settle. Sometimes separation helps. Sometimes what’s actually needed is something physical first: a jump on the trampoline, a run around the garden, a few minutes kicking a ball. Sensory and physical activity is one of the fastest ways to help a child’s nervous system settle. If you can, signpost them to this before you try to talk. “Go and do five big jumps on the trampoline. I’ll be here when you get back.” It sounds too simple, but it works!

Narrate without taking sides. Once they’re a bit calmer, try: “I can see everyone is really upset right now. Something went wrong between you two. Let’s take a breath together.” You’re not assigning blame. You’re not taking sides. You’re just naming what you see and bringing some steadiness into the room. You’re holding both of them, equally, at the same time. This is the authoritative part of parenting: not harsh, not permissive, but clear and present. Both children need to feel that you’re on their side, even while you’re not taking either side.

Help them hear each other. This is where your role as facilitator really matters. When everyone’s calmer, help each child put their experience into words, and then make sure the other one actually hears it. Not just waits for their turn to talk, but genuinely hears it. “Okay, let’s try something. I want you each to tell me what happened, and I want the other one to listen without interrupting. Can we try that?” Then reflect back what each child said, so both of them feel heard. “So you felt like she never lets you use it, even though you asked. And you felt like he grabbed it without warning and it scared you. I can hear that was really annoying and upsetting for both of you.”

When children feel genuinely heard in a conflict (not just told they were right), something shifts. They become slightly less combative. They don’t need to fight as hard to make their point when someone has already made it for them. And crucially, they start to hear each other. That’s the beginning of empathy between siblings, and it’s worth nurturing every time you can.

Then help them repair with each other. This is the reasoning step, and it comes last, after the regulating and relating. “Now that we’ve heard each other, what could you both do differently next time? And is there anything you want to say to each other now?” Don’t force an apology, a forced sorry means nothing and children know it. But create the space for one. Sometimes they’ll surprise you. And when they do manage a genuine repair between themselves, name it: “That was a really grown-up thing you both just did. That’s how people who care about each other sort things out.”

Come back to it when everyone is calm. If the conflict was significant, a proper family conversation later (not immediately, when everyone’s still raw) can be really valuable. “You two clashed badly earlier. I’ve been thinking about it. What was going on for each of you? What could we do differently next time things get hot between you?” This is a conversation, not a lecture. You’re curious, not annoyed. And you’re teaching them something that will genuinely serve them for life: that conflict doesn’t have to mean the end of a relationship, that you can fall out badly and still come back to each other, and that talking about hard things (even when it’s uncomfortable) is how people who love each other stay close. These are not small lessons. They’re the ones that shape how your children will manage every important relationship they ever have.

Address connection needs, not just the conflict. After things have settled, have a quiet one-to-one with each child separately. Not to debrief the conflict, but just to connect. “That was tough earlier. How are you doing now?” Even five minutes of that individual attention does something important. It reminds each child that they have their own relationship with you, separate from the sibling dynamic. That alone reduces the competition.

The “Fair vs Equal” Question

One thing that drives sibling conflict (and parental guilt!) is the idea that everything has to be fair. It doesn’t. Equal and fair are not the same thing. A six-year-old and an eleven-year-old don’t need the same bedtime, the same amount of supervision, or the same rules. What children need is to feel that their individual needs are being seen and met. “I know this feels unfair. Your sister gets to stay up later because she’s older. When you’re her age, you’ll have the same bedtime.” Matter of fact, warm, no drama. That’s not unfair. That’s good parenting.

What one parent discovered: “I used to think my boys just hated each other. The fighting was constant and I was at my wit’s end. A colleague suggested that I try giving each of them 15 minutes alone with me every day, no phones, no multitasking, just them. Within two weeks, the fighting dropped significantly. Not gone, but so much less. My younger one told me one evening: ‘I don’t hate him, Mam. I just feel like you like him more.’ That stopped me in my tracks. He’d been fighting with his brother because he was scared there wasn’t enough of me to go around and felt insecure with me. He didn’t need me to fix the sibling relationship. He needed me to really hear him and spend quality time with him on his own. This showed him just how much he matters to me.”

Moving Forward

Sibling conflict won’t disappear. It’s part of growing up together, part of learning to navigate relationships, and part of what makes family life both maddening and rich. The goal isn’t silence and perfect harmony! The goal is children who feel secure enough in your love to work through conflict, who are gradually developing the skills to manage disagreements, and who know that even when things get messy between them, the family holds. The sibling relationship, when it’s supported well, is one of the most important and enduring relationships of their lives. How they learn to treat each other now (to hear each other, to repair with each other, to disagree without being cruel) will shape how they move through the world. That’s worth investing in, even when it’s exhausting.

You’re not failing when they fight. You’re raising humans who are learning how to be in relationship with each other. That’s difficult, important work.

This Week, Try...

Pick just one thing from this article to experiment with. Maybe it’s stepping back for thirty seconds before you intervene in the next conflict (as long as everyone’s safe). Maybe it’s trying to narrate without taking sides: “I can see you’re both really upset right now.” Maybe it’s signposting them to the trampoline or the garden before you try to talk. Or maybe it’s building in five minutes of one-to-one time with each child this week, separate and focused.

And notice what comes up in your own body when they fight. What does it trigger? That’s worth reflecting on too.

A question to reflect on: What was your sibling relationship like growing up? Was there a lot of conflict, or very little? Did you feel your parents handled it fairly? How might your own experience of being a sibling be influencing how you feel and respond when your children fight?

Next week, we’ll be looking at something your children need more than almost anything else, and that you’re probably doing without even realising it: play. Why playfulness matters so much more than we give it credit for, why it’s the first thing to go when we’re exhausted, and how even a tiny bit of silliness can completely shift the dynamic between you and your child.

What does sibling conflict look like in your house? I’d love to hear in the comments. The more specific the better, because the more you share, the more I can tailor future articles to what you’re actually living with!

If this resonated with you, please share it with another parent who might need to read it this week.

Dr Daire Gilmartin Consultant Counselling Psychologist and Psychotherapist Oak Tree Therapy www.oaktreetherapy.ie

Is this your house? Your seven-year-old comes home from school and announces, with complete conviction, that their best friend “hates them now.” You look up from what you’re doing, a little taken aback, because everything seemed fine yesterday. You try to reassure them. “I’m sure she doesn’t hate you! What happened?” And the floodgates open. Big tears, a very dramatic retelling of something that happened at lunch, and suddenly you’re in the middle of an emotional storm that feels totally out of proportion to the actual event.

Or maybe this version sounds more familiar: your child, who was perfectly happy at the weekend, comes out of school on Monday looking quietly flattened. They won’t tell you what’s wrong. They shrug a lot. They’re short with their younger sibling, they pick at their dinner, they seem really distant. You can’t get anything out of them. And that night at bedtime, just when you think they’ve gone quiet, they suddenly start talking. About a boy at school who said their drawing was rubbish. About not knowing where to sit at lunch. About the feeling that everyone else has a best friend and they’re the only one who doesn’t.

If any of this sounds familiar, welcome to seven. And also to eight. And honestly, some of nine.

Something shifts around this age, and if you’re not expecting it, it can catch you completely off guard. Your child, who used to bounce through the door chattering about their day, is suddenly harder to read. More private. More easily wounded. More worried about what other people think. And their feelings, when they do surface? They can feel enormous.

So what’s actually going on? And what does your seven-year-old actually need from you right now?

What’s Happening in the Seven-Year-Old Brain

First, let me reassure you: this shift is completely normal. More than that, it’s developmentally right on cue. Your child’s brain is doing something really significant around this age, and it explains a lot.

Up until about six or seven, children are relatively unaware of how others perceive them. They’re a bit like toddlers in that sense (just taller and better at arguing!). They exist mostly in their own world, doing their thing, without too much concern for how they look to others.

But around seven, something changes. Cognitive development takes a leap forward, and with it comes a new, uncomfortable superpower: the ability to see themselves through other people’s eyes. To wonder: what do they think of me? Do I fit in? Am I good enough?

This is huge. It’s also exhausting for them. And it’s why seven-year-olds can seem so much more sensitive than they were a year ago. They’re not being dramatic. They’re navigating something genuinely new and genuinely difficult.

At the same time, the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain that helps with emotional regulation, perspective-taking, and managing disappointment) is still very much under construction. So they’re developing the social awareness to feel deeply self-conscious and socially anxious, without yet having the emotional tools to manage those feelings well. No wonder they sometimes come home in bits!

Friendships Are Everything Now (And That’s Completely New)

Here’s one of the biggest changes at this age: peer relationships become central in a way they simply weren’t before.

When children are three or four, you are the most important person in their world. Full stop. Friends are fun, but you’re the centre. By seven, this is shifting. Their peer relationships are beginning to matter enormously. Their sense of themselves, whether they’re likeable, capable, funny, good to have around, is increasingly being shaped by how their friendships go.

This is healthy and necessary! This is how children develop social skills, learn to navigate relationships, and build the kind of confidence that comes from figuring out their place in the world outside the family. But it also means that what happens in the playground carries enormous weight for them now. The friend who didn’t want to play. The group that moved away when they came over. The remark that was probably throwaway but landed like a brick. These things matter to seven-year-olds in a way that can feel completely overwhelming.

And because they’re also at the age where they’re becoming more private (more aware of being seen, more aware of being judged), they often don’t bring it home straight away. They carry it. Sometimes for days. Until it comes out sideways: in irritability, in tears over something unrelated, in suddenly not wanting to go to school.

The Sibling Dynamic Shifts Too

Something worth mentioning: around this age, the way your seven-year-old relates to their siblings often changes too, and not always in ways that make life easier!

They’re more aware of fairness now, acutely aware. “She got more than me.” “He always gets to go first.” “That’s not FAIR.” This isn’t just complaining for the sake of it. Their developing brain is genuinely tuned in to hierarchy and comparison right now, both with peers and at home. It can make sibling relationships feel more combustible.

They’re also increasingly aware of their own identity and where they fit in the family. The older sibling who used to find the younger one cute might suddenly find them deeply irritating. The younger sibling who used to look up to them adoringly might start challenging them instead. The family ecology is shifting, and your seven-year-old is trying to figure out where they belong within it.

What helps here is mostly what we’ll come back to throughout this article: individual connection time, feeling genuinely seen by you, and knowing that you understand their perspective even when you’re not taking their side.

What They Need From You (Even If They Don’t Know How to Ask)

So, given all of this, what does your seven-year-old actually need? It might surprise you.

They need you to listen without immediately fixing. When your child comes home upset about a friendship difficulty, the instinct is to solve it. To reassure them it’s fine, or to jump into advice about what they should say tomorrow. But what they actually need first is to feel heard. Really heard.

Try something like: “That sounds really hard. Tell me what happened.” And then just listen. Without interrupting. Without minimising. Without immediately pointing out the silver lining. You might follow up with: “How did that feel?” or “What was the worst part of it?” Let them talk. Let them feel the feeling. Your presence in that moment is the help. The problem-solving can come later, if they even want it.

They need to know their feelings make sense. Seven-year-olds can feel ashamed of their sensitivity. They might say “I know it’s stupid” or “I know I’m being silly” while they’re crying. That’s worth paying attention to! Where did they learn that their feelings are stupid or silly? Maybe from peers. Maybe from older siblings. Maybe from us, when we said things like “it’s not that bad” or “don’t be so sensitive” without meaning any harm.

When you respond to their upset with genuine curiosity and warmth (“I don’t think that’s silly at all, of course that hurt”), you’re teaching them something really important: that their inner world makes sense, that feelings aren’t something to be embarrassed about, and that you’re a safe person to bring the messy stuff to. That lesson matters hugely. Not just now, but right through adolescence.

They need help making sense of social situations. Seven-year-olds are navigating genuinely complex social dynamics but with very underdeveloped social understanding. They read situations in black and white (she’s not playing with me, therefore she hates me; he laughed, therefore everyone was laughing at me). They need you to gently help them hold more nuance, but only after they’ve felt heard!

So first: listen and validate. Then, when the feelings have settled a bit: “I wonder what was going on for her? Do you think she might have been having a hard day too?” You’re not dismissing their experience. You’re helping them develop the capacity to consider other perspectives, which is one of the most important social skills they’ll ever develop.

Sometimes a brief, warm explanation can be genuinely helpful here, when they’re calm enough to hear it. Something like: “You know, at your age, everyone is still figuring out who they are and who they want to spend time with. Sometimes kids aren’t being mean on purpose, they’re just working it out as they go, just like you are. It doesn’t always mean something is wrong with the friendship.” Or: “Friendships at seven can feel a bit all over the place, because everyone’s changing and discovering what they like. It’s normal for things to feel wobbly sometimes.” Short, matter of fact, no lecture. Just a little window into the bigger picture that helps them feel less alone in it, and less like everything means something terrible.

They need you not to panic. I know this is easier said than done!! When your child is distressed about friendships, it’s really easy for us to get caught up in it too. To start catastrophising about whether they have friends, whether they’re being excluded, whether there’s bullying. And sometimes those are legitimate concerns! But more often, seven-year-olds are navigating the normal, bumpy, confusing terrain of early friendship, and what they need is a calm, steady parent who takes it seriously without amplifying it.

Your regulated response is regulating for them. If you meet their “she hates me” with quiet curiosity and warmth instead of alarm or dismissal, you’re helping them learn that difficult social situations are manageable, not catastrophic. That’s an incredibly valuable thing to teach.

They need individual time with you. This might be the most consistently useful thing I can say for this age group: one-to-one time, unhurried and focused, makes a profound difference to how seven-year-olds cope with everything else.

It doesn’t need to be much. Even fifteen or twenty minutes a few times a week, where it’s just the two of you doing something they’ve chosen. Not with the telly on. Not while you’re also on your phone. Just genuinely present, doing whatever they want to do. Reading together. Kicking a ball. Playing a board game. Sitting on their bed chatting about nothing in particular.

This fills their cup in a way that general family time doesn’t quite manage. It says: you matter enough to have my full attention. And children who have that tend to be more settled, more resilient, better able to cope with the hard stuff at school. It also tends to be when they talk. Not when you sit them down and ask how school is going. But quietly, in the middle of doing something else together: “Oh, actually, something happened today...”

What If I’m Worried About More Than Normal Sensitivity?

It’s worth naming this. Most of the social sensitivity at seven is completely developmental and passes as children build their social skills and their brains develop. But sometimes, for some children, the anxiety around friendships and social situations goes beyond typical. If your child is regularly refusing school, is consistently isolated rather than having normal ups and downs with peers, seems persistently sad or withdrawn, or the distress is really impacting on daily life, it’s worth talking to their teacher, to your GP, or to a child psychologist.

Worth naming something else too: our own shark music can get very loud when our child is hurting socially. When they come home telling you someone was cruel to them, or left them out, something in us can flare up fast. The urge to march up to the school, to ring another parent, to feel angry at a seven-year-old on behalf of our own. Sometimes that reaction is about our child. But sometimes it’s about us, about our own memories of being excluded or humiliated, about wounds that never quite healed. If you notice your reaction feels bigger than the situation probably warrants, that’s worth pausing on before you act. Your child needs your steadiness in that moment, not your anger, however understandable it might be.

Trust your gut. You know your child. Normal developmental sensitivity and something more significant can look similar, but the intensity and persistence tend to be different. If something is telling you this is more than the usual bumps, take that seriously.

The Hard Bit For Us

This stage of parenting can feel surprisingly lonely.

When they were toddlers, their needs were constant but clear. You were needed, obviously and physically, most of the time. But now? Your seven-year-old needs you in a different, less visible way. They might push you away sometimes. They might shrug at your questions. They might prefer to spend their time in their room rather than with the family.

And yet underneath all of that, they need you more than ever. They need your steadiness. Your reliability. The fact that you’re still there, still curious about them, still interested, even when they’re not making it easy.

This can feel thankless, and sometimes it really is! But it matters enormously. The parent who keeps showing up, keeps asking (without making it into a big deal), keeps the door open even when their child keeps closing it, is the parent their child will eventually come back to. Keep the door open. They’ll walk through it, usually when you’re least expecting it.

What one parent discovered: “My daughter had always been sunny and easy going and then she turned seven and suddenly she was crying about things I didn’t even know had happened, or being really off and not able to tell me why. I thought I’d done something wrong, or something was badly wrong with her. But when I started just sitting with her in the evenings, not trying to fix anything, just asking about her day and really listening, she started talking. Properly talking. Turns out she was finding the social dynamics in her class really hard and hadn’t known how to bring it home. She said once, ‘You’re not as worried as I thought you’d be.’ And I realised: my calm had made her feel safe enough to actually tell me the truth.”

This Week, Try...

Pick one thing from this article to focus on this week. Maybe it’s that fifteen minutes of one-to-one time, properly focused, no phone. Maybe it’s the next time your child comes home upset about a friendship, you try listening without problem-solving first: “That sounds really hard. Tell me what happened.”

Or maybe it’s something simpler: notice when your child says “I know it’s silly, but...” and respond to that bit first. “It’s not silly. Of course that mattered. Tell me more.”

And notice what happens when you do. What opens up.

A question to reflect on: What was it like for you at seven or eight, socially? Did you have an easy time making and keeping friends, or was it rocky? Was there an adult who understood what you were going through? What would have helped you that you didn’t get? And how might your own experience of this age be shaping how you respond to your child’s social struggles now?

Next week, we’ll be diving into one of the most exhausting, relentless features of family life with more than one child: sibling conflict. What’s really happening between them, why it’s actually developmentally necessary (even though it doesn’t feel like it!), and what actually helps when it feels like there’s a war zone in your living room.

What’s your biggest challenge with your seven or eight-year-old right now? I’d love to hear in the comments. And if you know another parent going through this phase, please pass it on. They’ll thank you for it!

Dr Daire Gilmartin Consultant Counselling Psychologist and Psychotherapist Oak Tree Therapy www.oaktreetherapy.ie

It’s 8:15am. You need to leave the house in ten minutes. Your six-year-old is still in their pyjamas, eating cereal at the pace of a very unhurried snail. Their school bag is somewhere (you’re not entirely sure where). You’ve asked them three times to get dressed. The first time was fifteen minutes ago. Your stress is rising, your voice is getting louder, and finally you hear yourself shout: “WE ARE GOING TO BE LATE. GET DRESSED. NOW. I AM NOT TELLING YOU AGAIN.”

And then, of course, they burst into tears. Or they freeze. Or they look up at you with enormous eyes and say “Why are you being so mean to me?” And now you’re feeling guilty AND you’re still going to be late AND the day has barely started.

Sound familiar? Welcome to one of the most universally dreaded parenting experiences: the morning chaos. We have to do it every day (or at least five days a week, which honestly feels like every day when you’re in the thick of it!). By the time many families arrive at school or childcare, everyone is stressed, someone has probably cried, and the day already feels like a battle before it’s even begun.

So what’s actually going on? And more importantly, what helps?

Why Mornings Are So Hard

Let’s start with what we’re actually dealing with. Because mornings aren’t hard because your child is deliberately winding you up. There are real, neurological, developmental reasons why this time of day is so difficult.

Children wake up in a very different brain state than adults, especially younger children. When we’re up and moving, we assume everyone else is too. But younger children can take much longer to feel properly alert than we realise. They’re not being slow on purpose. Their brain is literally still coming online. Their bodies may still be adjusting too, especially if they’re sensitive to light, noise, temperature changes, or transitions. Asking them to execute a six-step sequence of tasks before that’s happened is setting everyone up for a hard time.

Mornings involve one of the biggest transitions of the day. Leaving the warmth and safety of home for the demands of school or childcare is a significant shift, even for children who generally like school. Transitions take time for developing brains, and mornings stack several of them on top of each other in rapid succession. No wonder things get tricky!

Time pressure means absolutely nothing to them. “We need to leave in five minutes” has no emotional weight for a four-year-old, or even a seven-year-old. The future doesn’t feel urgent or real to them the way it does to us. The glacial cereal eating isn’t defiance. It’s just... breakfast. This is hard to hold onto when you’re watching the clock, but it really matters.

Connection needs show up at the worst possible moment. Your child has been asleep and separated from you all night. Now you’re about to separate again for the whole school day. Some children (especially those who are more anxious, or who are going through a clingy phase) will unconsciously slow everything down because they’re not quite ready to let go yet. The dragging of heels can be a language. It’s saying “I need a little more of you before I go.”

And you might already be dysregulated before anything goes wrong. You’ve been mentally juggling since the alarm went off. Your own work day is looming. The to-do list is already running. By the time you’re trying to get everyone out the door, your own stress levels are already elevated, and children pick up on this more than we realise. A dysregulated parent makes for a harder morning, even before anyone’s done anything wrong.

What Doesn’t Help

When we’re stressed and running late, we reach for the obvious things: repeating instructions louder and louder until someone listens, threatening consequences (“no screen time if you’re not ready in two minutes!”), taking over in a furious rush and doing everything ourselves, or descending into catastrophe thinking (“this happens every single day, I cannot do this anymore”).

None of these are terrible or shameful things to do. They’re what stressed humans do under pressure! But they don’t address what’s actually making mornings hard, and they don’t make the next morning easier either. Mostly they just leave everyone feeling worse.

What Actually Helps

In most families I work with, the morning battle is mostly won or lost the night before. If there’s one thing to take from this article, this is probably it. When families come to me struggling with mornings, the first question I ask is always: what does the evening before look like? Because most of the 8am chaos is rooted in what didn’t happen at 8pm.

Good evening prep: bags packed and by the door, clothes chosen and laid out (better yet, chosen by your child so there’s no argument in the morning), PE gear sorted, permission slips signed, shoes by the door. The more decisions and tasks you can move out of the frantic morning window, the calmer that window becomes. And crucially, bring your child in on this! Make it a team thing at bedtime. “Let’s do our morning prep together - you pick what you want to wear, I’ll sort the lunches.” Children who are part of preparing for their own day feel more ownership of it. They’re more likely to cooperate with a plan they helped make.

Talk about it when nobody’s stressed. This is something I come back to again and again with families, because it works so well and yet we rarely think to do it. Find a calm moment, not on a Monday morning when you’re already late, but maybe at the weekend over lunch, or on a walk, or during a quiet moment in the evening. And have a proper conversation about it.

Something like: “You know how mornings have been a bit mad lately? I’ve been thinking about it and I’d love to hear what you think would help. What’s the hardest bit for you?” Then really listen. Their answer might surprise you! Maybe they find it impossible to eat breakfast while you’re rushing around. They definitely don’t like you being stressed or shouting! Maybe they hate having to choose their clothes while they’re still half asleep. Maybe they just want five quiet minutes before anyone asks anything of them.

And when they tell you, reflect it back. Show them you’ve really heard it. Not just a quick “yeah, okay” but something that lets them feel genuinely understood:

• “So getting dressed straight away feels really hard when you’ve just woken up. That makes sense actually.”

• “You want a few minutes to just... be? Before everything starts. I get that.”

• “Ah, so it’s the rushing that gets you. You feel like you can never catch up.”

• “So you don’t mind the getting ready bit, it’s leaving the house that’s hard. I hear you, that is hard.”

These don’t need to be long or clever. They just need to show your child: I’m really trying to understand what this is like for you. That alone can shift something. Children are much more willing to work with us when they feel genuinely heard first.

Then share your own perspective too. “For me, the really hard part is when it gets to 8:15 and we’re not ready. I start to panic and then I end up snapping, which isn’t good for either of us.” And then, together: “So what could we do differently? What would help?” Let them have ideas. Add some of your own. See what you can both agree on.

Think of it as a dance: you’re weaving together empathy (really hearing what’s hard for them), structure (being clear about what needs to happen and setting them up to succeed), playfulness (keeping it light where you can), and firm limits where they’re needed (yes, we do have to leave the house!). None of these on their own is enough. It’s the combination that works.

The agreement you land on doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to be something you’ve both had a hand in making. Children are far more willing to cooperate with a plan they helped create than one that was handed down to them.

And then, when they do manage a smoother morning? Name it! “Hey you, that went really well this morning. You got yourself dressed before breakfast. I saw that. Well done.” Positive reinforcement doesn’t need to be over the top, just genuine and specific. Children need to hear what they’re doing right just as much as they need to know what needs to change.

If it doesn’t go so well? You go back to the same calm conversation and adjust together. “We tried our new morning plan this week. Some bits worked well, and some bits were still tricky. What do you think happened? What could we try differently?” Not as a telling-off. Just as a warm, curious review. This kind of collaborative problem-solving, done when everyone is calm and not in the thick of it, is something you can use for any recurring struggle in family life: bedtime, screen time, sibling arguments. It’s not a one-off fix. It’s a way of working together that builds trust over time.

Create a predictable sequence that does the thinking for everyone. The less decision-making required in the morning, the better, for everyone involved. A visual routine chart works brilliantly for younger children: pictures showing the order of things. Pyjamas off, wash face, get dressed, eat breakfast, brush teeth, shoes on, bag on, go. Your child can check what comes next themselves instead of waiting to be told. Make it together at the weekend and let them draw the pictures. They’ll feel real pride in having their own chart to follow!

Two minutes of connection before getting-ready begins. I know, I know! You’re already rushed! But hear me out. If your child is dragging their heels because they need more of you before they can let you go, pushing harder doesn’t solve it. Giving them a brief moment of genuine closeness does. Even two minutes of sitting together, chatting about nothing in particular, maybe having a laugh, can fill their cup just enough to unlock everything else. “Morning! How did you sleep? I had the weirdest dream...” Those two minutes often save ten minutes of struggle. I’ve seen it work so many times it’s worth trying even when it feels counterintuitive.

Concrete anchors work far better than time warnings. Instead of “five minutes!” try “when this song is over, it’s shoes on.” Or “after you finish that piece of toast.” Or a visual timer they can actually see ticking down. These things land on a developing brain in a way that abstract time simply doesn’t.

Build in buffer time if you possibly can. This is something I found really helpful when my lot were younger. Even ten extra minutes changes the emotional temperature of the whole morning. When you’re not already running late before anything goes wrong, you have so much more capacity for patience when something inevitably does!

You Might Be Noticing a Pattern Here...

If you’ve been reading these articles, you might be thinking: “Hold on, this is starting to sound familiar.” And you’d be right! What helps in a supermarket meltdown, what helps at bedtime, what helps with big emotions, what helps on a chaotic morning... the underlying approach is actually the same. Connect before you direct. Prepare rather than react. Stay as regulated as you can so your child has a chance to settle too. Address what’s happening underneath rather than just managing the surface behaviour. And if you have a hard morning, talk it through later when everyone is calm and do the repair.

This isn’t an accident. These tools work across parenting challenges because they’re working with how children’s brains actually develop and function over time. Once you start to see the pattern, it becomes less about remembering dozens of different strategies for dozens of different situations, and more about internalising one consistent way of thinking. That, I think, is what makes parenting gradually feel less chaotic.

When Something More Might Be Going On

Worth naming this: if mornings are consistently and intensely distressing for your child, day after day, not just hard but really awful, it’s worth wondering whether something deeper is happening. Are they anxious about school? Struggling socially? Finding something in the learning environment really hard? The morning resistance is sometimes the most visible part of a bigger struggle. Trust your gut. Talk to your child when things are calm, chat with their teacher, and seek support if you need it.

What one parent discovered: “Our mornings were carnage. Every single day. I was shouting, my daughter was crying, and we’d both arrive at school and work in bits. I did the planning with her and then started trying the ‘connection first’ thing before I even mentioned getting dressed. Just two minutes of sitting with her, asking about something she was looking forward to, having a bit of a laugh. I was so resistant because we were already rushing! But the first morning I tried it, she got dressed faster than she ever had. She said, ‘Okay Mam, let’s go!’ I couldn’t believe it. Turns out she needed me before she could let me go.”

Moving Forward

Morning chaos is genuinely hard. You’re asking a lot of small people (and adults too!) who are still half-asleep, and doing it when you’re already facing your own pressures. It makes complete sense that it’s difficult.

Mornings usually get better with structure, preparation, and a bit of connection woven in. Not perfect. Not always smooth. But better. And on the days it falls apart completely despite your best efforts? You can always repair on the way out the door: “That was rough, wasn’t it? I got stressed. I’m sorry, let’s talk later. I love you. Have a good day.”

It’s never too late to reset.

This Week, Try...

Pick just one thing to experiment with this week. Maybe it’s moving one task to the night before (just one to start: bags packed, or clothes chosen, or shoes by the door). Maybe it’s making a picture routine chart together this weekend. Maybe it’s those two minutes of connection before the getting-ready begins. Or maybe it’s simply setting your alarm ten minutes earlier so there’s a tiny bit of buffer when things don’t go to plan.

Try it for a week. Notice what shifts, even slightly.

A question to reflect on: What were mornings like for you as a child? Was it calm and organised or chaotic and stressful? Was there pressure, rushing, conflict? How might your own morning experiences be showing up in how you feel when mornings with your children go wrong?

Next week, we're looking at something that catches a lot of parents off guard: why your seven or eight-year-old has suddenly become so much more sensitive, so much more private, and so much more worried about what other people think. It's a significant developmental shift, and understanding what's actually happening for them makes a real difference to how you respond. If your child has recently started coming home from school in bits over friendship stuff, or has gone quieter and harder to read, this one's for you.

What does your morning chaos look like? I’d love to hear in the comments - the more specific the better, because the more you share, the more I can tailor future articles to what you’re actually dealing with.

If this resonated with you, please share it with another parent who might need to read it this week.

Dr Daire Gilmartin
Consultant Counselling Psychologist and Psychotherapist
Oak Tree Therapy
www.oaktreetherapy.ie

When You’re Always ON and Running on Empty

Does this ring a bell? You’re sitting down for the first time all day. The children are finally in bed (after the usual battles). You close your eyes for a moment, and immediately your brain starts: Did I sign the permission slip? What’s for dinner tomorrow? Do they have clean uniforms? When was that dentist appointment? Should I be worried about how quiet they were today?

You’re exhausted. Bone tired. But you haven’t really stopped moving or thinking all day. From the moment you woke up to right now, your brain has been running non-stop. Even when you were physically still, your mind was juggling a hundred different things.

And then to add to it: you feel guilty about being tired. Because you “should” be able to manage this, shouldn’t you? Everyone else seems to cope and to cope better! What’s wrong with you that you find this so hard?

Let’s stop right there. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the non-stop demands of parenting, you’re not doing it wrong. You’re experiencing something that’s genuinely difficult. And the exhaustion is real, even if nobody else can see it. Parenting is one of the most challenging roles we ever take on!

The Feeling That You’re Always ON

So what makes parenting so exhausting? You’re never really off duty. Even when you’re not actively doing childcare, your brain is still quietly managing the entire family.

It’s hundreds of tiny things, all the time: remembering non-uniform day, knowing they need their PE gear on Wednesdays, tracking birthday party invitations, noticing they’re growing out of their shoes, signing permission slips, coordinating pickups/drop-offs, managing the emotional temperature of the house, noticing when they seem off and wondering what’s wrong.

And if you’re working (outside of the home!) as well? You’re doing all of this while also trying to meet deadlines and be present at work. The mental and emotional load is relentless.

And for many parents, there’s even more on top of this. You might be caring for ageing parents, worrying about their health, coordinating their appointments, supporting them through difficult times. You might be coaching your child’s sports team, volunteering at school, managing community commitments. You might be dealing with financial pressures, health challenges, relationship struggles, or any of the other multiple demands that life throws at us. The parenting load doesn’t exist in isolation, it sits alongside everything else you’re managing.

There’s no clocking off or annual leave from parenting. Did I mention it is relentless?!!

The Guilt and Shame We Carry

And then there’s the guilt! Most parents I meet carry some version of this. We feel guilty for being tired, for being short-tempered, for not enjoying every minute, for ordering takeaway again, for needing them to have screen time.

Underneath the guilt? Shame. The awful, heavy feeling that we’re not good enough. That other parents are managing better. That we’re failing at the most important job we’ll ever do.

This comes from unrealistic expectations (we should do it all perfectly!) and from comparing our messy reality to everyone else’s social media highlights. When you’re working, the guilt multiplies. You’re never fully present anywhere. At work, you’re thinking about the children. With the children, you’re thinking about work.

Sometimes there’s also “shark music” playing (remember we talked about this in Article 1?). Those old messages from our own childhoods about what good parents should be, or fears that we’re repeating patterns from our past, or worries that we’re damaging our children. When your child is struggling and you feel that familiar wave of panic or inadequacy, that’s often shark music. It’s not just about what’s happening now, it’s triggering something deeper from your own history.

But we need to remember, feeling overwhelmed doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It means you’re doing something genuinely difficult while trying to meet impossible standards. The struggle isn’t a sign of failure. It’s a sign you’re human.

What This Does to Your Parenting

When you’re this exhausted and overwhelmed, you simply don’t have the capacity to be the parent you want to be.

Remember all those things we’ve talked about in previous articles? Being curious about what’s beneath your child’s behaviour? Staying regulated when they’re having a meltdown? Co-regulating their big feelings? Repairing after you’ve lost your cool? Setting limits with warmth?

All of that requires capacity. Mental and emotional resources. And when you’re running on empty, when your brain is already maxed out with everything else, you just don’t have anything left to give.

This is when we snap over small things. When we can’t be curious because we’re too exhausted. When we react instead of respond. When we give in because we simply cannot face another battle.

It’s not that you don’t know better. It’s not that you don’t want to do better. It’s that you’re trying to parent well while carrying an impossible load. Something always has to give.

And what usually gives? Our presence. Our patience. Our ability to connect. The very things our children need most from us.

When you’re this depleted, those moments of real connection and playfulness with your children (the things that help everyone regulate) are often the first to go. We’ll talk much more about how to prioritise connection time even when you’re exhausted in a future article. For now, just know: even brief moments of focused presence matter. But first, you need to be able to function.

Looking After Yourself (The Oxygen Mask Principle)

You need to recharge too. You’ve heard the aeroplane safety announcement, right? Put your own oxygen mask on first before helping others. It’s not selfish. It’s necessary!

If you’re running on empty, you simply can’t be the parent you want to be. All those things we’ve been talking about (being curious, staying regulated, co-regulating, repairing, setting limits with warmth) require capacity. And when you’re completely depleted, you don’t have anything left to give.

The prominent psychiatrist, Dan Siegel, talks about the “Healthy Mind Platter”, the different kinds of activities our brains need: physical time, focus time, connecting time, play time, down time, time in (reflecting), and sleep. Most parents are getting maybe one or two of these! We’re focused on tasks all day, connecting with our children if we can, and maybe getting some sleep. But the rest? Play, down time, physical movement, time to reflect? Not so much...

So what can you do? You need to make time for yourself. Not leftover time. Actual, protected time to recharge. I know this can seem alien to people who are giving all the time. You may believe it is all about the kids and that it’s selfish to take your own time. But it’s not selfish. It’s essential for everyone’s well-being.

This might look like getting up 20 minutes earlier for quiet tea (I know, I know, you’re already exhausted! But bear with me...), a lunchtime walk (even 10 minutes), an evening class once a week, protecting your bedtime, saying no to things that drain you, meeting a friend for coffee, reading for 15 minutes before bed, or doing exercise you enjoy.

If you have a partner, support each other in getting this time. “You take Saturday morning, I’ll take Sunday morning.” Both need to recharge.

For single parents, this is even harder. You’re carrying all of it alone, and the exhaustion can feel unbearable. Can family help? Friends? A childminder for a couple of hours? It’s not selfish to arrange this. It really is essential.

Parents who take care of themselves can take better care of their children. It’s not one or the other. It’s both. Your well-being and your child’s well-being are connected.

When you’re rested, you’re more patient. When you’ve had some downtime, it’s easier to be present. Even small things like moving your body can help you feel more regulated. All of this makes you a better parent.

And something else that’s really important: when your children see you looking after yourself, they learn that self-care matters. You’re giving them a powerful example for their future. When they see you exercise, they learn that moving your body is valuable. When they see you take time to rest, they learn that down time isn’t lazy, it’s necessary. When they see you set boundaries and say no to things that drain you, they learn that it’s okay to protect your energy.

We’re not just looking after ourselves for us. We’re teaching our children that well-being matters, that you can’t pour from an empty cup, that taking care of yourself is part of being a healthy, functioning person. That’s a gift that will serve them for their whole lives.

It’s the oxygen mask principle. You can’t help others if you’ve passed out from lack of oxygen yourself.

What one parent discovered: “I was so burnt out I could barely function. A friend suggested I get up 30 minutes earlier, before the kids, just to have time to myself. I thought she was mad! I was already exhausted! But I tried it. Those 30 minutes (with a cup of tea, reading or just sitting in silence) changed everything. I started the day feeling like I’d had a moment to myself, rather than being immediately overwhelmed. It sounds so small, but it made such a difference to my capacity to cope with everything else.”

Moving Forward

Feeling overwhelmed and exhausted doesn’t mean you’re failing. It means you’re doing something genuinely difficult while also trying to meet impossible standards.

Your children need you to be present and regulated more than they need you to be perfect. They need you to have enough capacity to respond to them with curiosity and warmth. And that means you need to take care of yourself.

So yes, the demands are relentless. Yes, you’re going to feel overwhelmed sometimes. Yes, you’ll feel like you’re failing. But struggling doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It means you’re human, doing one of the hardest and most important jobs there is.

Be gentle with yourself. Lower those impossible standards. And please, please make time to recharge. Your wellbeing isn’t a luxury, it’s essential.

This Week, Try...

Pick just ONE thing:

For awareness: Notice the mental load this week. Pay attention to all the invisible thinking, planning, and remembering you’re doing. Write it down if that helps. Validate for yourself: “This IS a lot. I’m not imagining how hard this is.”

For lowering expectations: Pick one area where you’re holding yourself to an impossible standard and deliberately lower it for a week. Maybe it’s accepting beans on toast for dinner twice this week (a personal favourite!). Maybe it’s not tidying up after bedtime. Maybe it’s saying no to something you’d usually feel obliged to do. Notice what happens when you let that pressure go.

For recharging yourself: Find one small pocket of time this week that’s just for you to recharge. Even 15 minutes. Maybe it’s getting up a bit earlier, maybe it’s a lunchtime walk, maybe it’s reading before bed. Protect that time like you’d protect an important appointment. Because it is that important.

You don’t have to fix everything at once. Just try one small shift and see what happens.

A question to reflect on: What would need to change for you to feel less overwhelmed? What one thing, if you could let go of it or change it, would give you back some capacity?

Next week, we’ll tackle one of the most stressful parts of parenting: the morning chaos. Why getting out the door feels like herding cats, what’s really happening beneath the surface when everyone’s running late and tempers are fraying, and what actually helps make mornings less of a battle. If you’ve ever found yourself shouting “WE’RE LEAVING, NOW!” while your child is still in their pyjamas, this one’s for you!

What feels hardest for you right now - the mental load, the guilt, or the constant feeling of being “on”? I’d love to hear in the comments.

If this resonated with you, please share it with another parent who might need to hear it.

Dr Daire Gilmartin
Consultant Counselling Psychologist and Psychotherapist
Oak Tree Therapy
www.oaktreetherapy.ie

It’s 7:30pm and you’ve done everything right, the full bedtime routine. Bath, pyjamas, teeth, story, cuddles. You’re thinking “Grand, they’ll be asleep in 10 minutes.”

But then it starts. “I’m thirsty!” “I need a wee!” “My covers are too tight.” “I’m scared of the dark.” By 9pm you’ve been up and down the stairs six times, and you’re torn between fury and worry. You snap “That’s IT. You NEED to go to sleep!” Of course, that doesn’t work. They’re more wound up, you’re more wound up, and everyone’s miserable.

If this sounds familiar, you’re not doing it wrong; it can be very hard (I’ve been there!!). Your child isn’t being difficult on purpose. Understanding what’s really happening can completely change how you approach bedtime battles.

What’s Really Happening at Bedtime

Bedtime asks a lot of children. We’re asking them to separate from us, lie alone in the dark, let go of control and fall asleep on their own. When put like that, it sounds quite intense, doesn’t it?!

Separation feels hard. For young children, bedtime means separating from you. If they’re going through a phase where separation anxiety is heightened (common around 18 months, 2-3 years, and 6-7 years), this can feel genuinely distressing. It’s their built-in need for closeness saying “I need you near me.” “I’m scared.”

The dark can be frightening. Darkness removes visual information and a child’s imagination is brilliant at filling in the gaps. These fears are absolutely real to them.

Sleep means loss of control. For children who are figuring out independence, being told to stop and drift into sleep can feel threatening.

Transitions are genuinely difficult. Anyone who has tried to stop a deeply engrossed five-year-old in the middle of an important Lego build knows this! They have to wind down their nervous system, shift from active to restful, from connected to alone. That’s a lot for a developing brain!

Sometimes they’re genuinely not tired yet. We all have different sleep needs. When we’re trying to put a child to bed who isn’t actually tired, of course they’re going to resist!

What Makes This So Hard

Before we get to what helps, let’s look at why bedtime battles are so difficult for us as parents.

By bedtime, we’re running on empty. We desperately need them to go to sleep so we can have a break. When they won’t settle, it can feel unbearable. And bedtime resistance can trigger our own stuff, maybe difficult memories of our own bedtimes, or worries that we’re creating bad habits by responding too much. This is shark music at play.

Bedtime can be really hard for everyone involved. And that’s really important to name.

What Doesn’t Help

When we’re stressed and exhausted, we fall back on what we think should work: getting firmer and louder, threatening consequences, trying to reason with an anxious child, or giving in and then feeling resentful. None of these are wrong, they’re what stressed humans do! But they’re not addressing what’s actually happening beneath the surface.

What Actually Helps

Okay, so what does help when bedtime is a nightly battle? Let’s break it down into before bedtime, during bedtime, and when they’re calling you (again and again!) to come back.

Before bedtime even starts:

Get realistic about timing. Is your child actually tired at 7:30pm? Some children genuinely need less sleep than others, or their body clock runs later. If you’re battling every single night, it might be worth experimenting with a slightly later bedtime. I know that feels counterintuitive when you’re desperate for your own evening time! But a child who goes to bed when they’re actually tired will settle much faster than one who’s being put to bed before they’re ready.

Build in proper wind-down time. The transition from busy day to sleep needs time and structure. This might mean starting the wind-down at 6:30pm for a 7:30pm bedtime. Dimming lights, turning off screens at least an hour before bed, quieter activities like colouring or reading. You’re helping their nervous system shift gears gradually.

Make connection a priority. This is huge! Many children fight bedtime because their connection cup isn’t full. They’ve been at school or childcare all day, you’ve both been busy through the evening with homework and dinner and bath, and they haven’t had proper, focused time with you. Building in 15-20 minutes of real connection before bed (not while you’re multitasking, but proper focused time) can make all the difference. This might be reading together, chatting about their day, playing a quick game, or just lying together and being silly. When children feel connected to us, they can separate more easily.

Make a plan together (when everyone’s calm). Here’s something that can make a real difference: talk about bedtime during the day, when everyone’s relaxed and no one’s stressed about actually going to bed. This could be at breakfast, or during a car journey, or while you’re colouring together at the weekend.

You might start with curiosity: “You know how bedtime has been tricky lately? I’ve been wondering what makes it so hard for you. What do you think?” Then really listen to their answer. They might tell you they’re scared of the dark, or they don’t like being alone, or they just want more time with you, or they’re not even tired yet. Whatever they say, that’s valuable information!

Here’s the really important bit: show them you’ve heard them. Reflect back what they’ve said in your own words. “So the dark feels scary and you worry about being on your own up there. That makes sense.” Or “Ah, so by bedtime you’re not actually feeling tired yet, and then you’re just lying there wide awake. I get it.” This empathic reflection does something powerful; it shows your child that you’ve truly understood them, that their feelings and experiences matter, and that you’re taking them seriously. Children are far more willing to work with you on solutions when they feel genuinely heard and understood first.

Then you can work on it together: “Okay, so what could we do to make bedtime feel easier? What would help?” Let them have input! They might have brilliant ideas you’d never have thought of. You can sprinkle the conversation with your ideas too and then see what makes most sense to both of you. Maybe they want a special nightlight they get to choose. Maybe they want you to check under the bed before you leave (yes, even if you think it’s silly, it’s not silly to them!). Maybe they want to set a timer so they know exactly how long you’ll stay.

You could even draw a picture together of what the new bedtime routine might look like. For younger children especially, this makes it concrete and gives them something to refer back to. “Remember our bedtime plan we drew? First bath, then pyjamas, then two stories, then lights out with your special nightlight on.”

The brilliant thing about this approach is that it gives your child agency. They’re not just having bedtime done to them, they’re part of figuring out how to make it work. And when children feel heard and involved, they’re far more likely to cooperate.

Of course, it won’t always go perfectly! The first night you try your new plan, they might still resist or call you back repeatedly. That’s okay! The next day, when everyone’s calm again, you can have another chat: “We tried our new bedtime plan last night. Some bits worked well, I noticed you liked having the nightlight. But you still kept calling me back. What was happening there? What was making it so hard?” Keep refining the plan together.

This collaborative approach works for so many things beyond bedtime including: morning routines, leaving the playground, sibling conflicts, screen time. When we involve children in problem-solving at calm times, we’re teaching them that their feelings matter, that challenges can be worked through together, and that they have agency. And we’re connecting with them in the process.

Create predictable structure. Children feel safer when they know what’s coming. A clear, consistent bedtime routine (bath, pyjamas, teeth, story, chat, cuddles, lights out) gives them a sense of control and predictability. It signals to their brain “This is the sequence that leads to sleep.” You don’t need to be rigid about timing, but the order staying the same really helps. And if you’ve made this plan together (like we talked about above), they’re even more invested in following it!

Address worries before they’re alone with them. If your child tends to get anxious at bedtime, make space to talk about worries before lights go out. “Is there anything on your mind about tomorrow?” Give them the chance to unload while you’re still there, rather than lying alone with their worries swirling.

During the actual bedtime routine:

Stay calm and present, your regulated nervous system helps settle theirs. Validate their feelings without fixing them: “The dark can feel a bit scary, can’t it? I’m right here and Teddy is here too.” Offer comfort AND hold the boundary: “I know you want me to stay longer, and I get that. I’m going to stay for two more minutes, then I’m going downstairs.” You’re acknowledging the feeling and holding the limit with warmth.

If darkness is frightening, use a nightlight or leave the landing light on. These aren’t crutches, they’re supports that help your child feel safe enough to sleep.

When they call you back (again and again):

Pause and tune in: what does your child need right now?

If it’s genuine need (fear, worry): Go to them, validate the feeling, offer brief comfort, then leave. “I’m just downstairs. You’re safe, all is good.”

If it’s more about habit: Respond with firmer boundaries. Maybe go to the doorway rather than their bedside. “I’ve already brought you water. It’s sleep time now.” When they call again, maybe just call back from downstairs: “You’re okay. It’s sleep time.”

You can be empathic about how hard this is AND hold the boundary that it’s bedtime. “I know you want me to stay, and that’s hard. It’s sleep time now though.”

Of course, sometimes you’ll lose your temper. Come back later and repair: “I got really frustrated at bedtime and I shouted. I’m sorry. Let’s try again tonight and figure out how we can do it better.”

When Connection Needs Trump the Schedule

Sometimes the “right” thing is to prioritise connection over the schedule. If your child has had a really hard day, or you’ve been away, or you just sense they really need you close, it’s okay to stay with them longer. This doesn’t mean you’re creating bad habits. It means you’re responding to a genuine need in that moment. Trust your instincts.

And remember: nightly bedtime battles are exhausting. If you have a partner, take turns. Lower your expectations on hard days. Talk to other parents, you’ll find lots of them are struggling too. And if bedtime has become a huge source of stress for you, there’s no shame in seeking support.

What one parent discovered: “We’d been battling bedtime for months. I was exhausted and resentful. Then I realised my son had barely seen me all day. I’d been working, then we’d rushed through dinner and bath, and I was trying to put him to bed by 7:30pm. Of course he was fighting it! He needed connection time with me. So we started doing 20 minutes of proper together time before bed; sometimes reading, sometimes just chatting, sometimes playing a quick game. It meant bedtime was later, which I’d been resisting, but actually he settled SO much faster. The whole battle just... stopped. I discovered he wasn’t being difficult, he was just trying to get his connection needs met the only way he knew.”

Moving Forward

Bedtime battles can feel never-ending, but they do pass! You’re not failing if bedtime is hard, you’re dealing with a genuinely difficult transition. The goal isn’t perfect bedtimes every night. It’s figuring out what your child needs and responding as best you can with the resources you have.

This Week, Try...

Pick one thing from this article to experiment with this week:

Maybe it’s building in 15 minutes of focused connection before the bedtime routine starts. Maybe it’s addressing worries before lights go out. Maybe it’s adjusting bedtime to match when your child actually seems tired, rather than when you think they should be tired.

Or maybe it’s having a calm, collaborative conversation with your child during the day about what makes bedtime hard and what might help. “Bedtime’s been tricky lately, hasn’t it? What do you think would make it easier?” You could even draw a picture together of your new bedtime plan. Then try it that night and see what happens. The next day (when everyone’s calm!), chat about how it went and what you might need to adjust.

Or maybe it’s just noticing what feelings come up for you during the bedtime battle. When do you feel most frustrated? Most anxious? What does that tell you about what you need?

You don’t have to fix everything at once. Just try one small thing and see what shifts.

A question to reflect on: What was bedtime like for you as a child? Were you put to bed early and left to manage on your own? Did you have a parent who stayed with you? Were you scared but told not to be? How might those experiences be influencing how you handle bedtime with your own children now?

Why You’re So Exhausted (And What Actually Helps)

When You’re Always ON and Running on Empty

Does this ring a bell? You’re sitting down for the first time all day. The children are finally in bed (after the usual battles). You close your eyes for a moment, and immediately your brain starts: Did I sign the permission slip? What’s for dinner tomorrow? Do they have clean uniforms? When was that dentist appointment? Should I be worried about how quiet they were today?

You’re exhausted. Bone tired. But you haven’t really stopped moving or thinking all day. From the moment you woke up to right now, your brain has been running non-stop. Even when you were physically still, your mind was juggling a hundred different things.

And then to add to it: you feel guilty about being tired. Because you “should” be able to manage this, shouldn’t you? Everyone else seems to cope and to cope better! What’s wrong with you that you find this so hard?

Let’s stop right there. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the non-stop demands of parenting, you’re not doing it wrong. You’re experiencing something that’s genuinely difficult. And the exhaustion is real, even if nobody else can see it. Parenting, I believe, is one of the most challenging roles we ever take on!

The Feeling That You’re Always ON

So what makes parenting so exhausting? You’re never really off duty. Even when you’re not actively doing childcare, your brain is still quietly managing the entire family.

It’s hundreds of tiny things, all the time: remembering non-uniform day, knowing they need their PE gear on Wednesdays, tracking birthday party invitations, noticing they’re growing out of their shoes, signing permission slips, coordinating pickups/drop-offs, managing the emotional temperature of the house, noticing when they seem off and wondering what’s wrong.

And if you’re working (outside of the home!) as well? You’re doing all of this while also trying to meet deadlines and be present at work. The mental and emotional load is relentless.

There’s no clocking off or annual leave from parenting.

The Guilt and Shame We Carry

And then there’s the guilt! Most parents I meet carry some version of this. We feel guilty for being tired, for being short-tempered, for not enjoying every minute, for ordering takeaway again, for needing them to have screen time.

Underneath the guilt? Shame. The awful, heavy feeling that we’re not good enough. That other parents are managing better. That we’re failing at the most important job we’ll ever do.

This comes from unrealistic expectations (we should do it all perfectly!) and from comparing our messy reality to everyone else’s social media highlights. When you’re working, the guilt multiplies. You’re never fully present anywhere. At work, you’re thinking about the children. With the children, you’re thinking about work.

Sometimes there’s also “shark music” playing (remember we talked about this in Article 1?). Those old messages from our own childhoods about what good parents should be, or fears that we’re repeating patterns from our past, or worries that we’re damaging our children. When your child is struggling and you feel that familiar wave of panic or inadequacy, that’s often shark music. It’s not just about what’s happening now, it’s triggering something deeper from your own history.

But we need to remember, feeling overwhelmed doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It means you’re doing something genuinely difficult while trying to meet impossible standards. The struggle isn’t a sign of failure. It’s a sign you’re human.

The Balance That’s So Hard to Find

Then there’s this constant tension: how much do we step in and smooth the path for our children, and how much do we step back and let them struggle and learn?

We want to protect our children from difficulty. But we also know that children need to experience challenge, to solve problems themselves, to learn from mistakes. So where’s the line? Do you step in when they’re struggling with homework, or let them figure it out? Intervene in friendship drama, or let them work through it? The worry is constant, and we often second-guess ourselves.

What do children actually need? They need us to be their secure base. The safe place they can always come back to. They need us to guide and support them when they need it, but they also need the freedom to explore, to try things, to make mistakes, and to learn.

When we do everything for them, we rob them of the chance to develop resilience, problem-solving skills, and confidence. They need to experience appropriate challenge. They need to learn they can cope with disappointment, solve problems, and bounce back from setbacks.

But (and this is important!) they need to do this knowing we’re there. When they venture out and things go well, they come back to us for celebration. When things don’t go well, they come back for comfort and help with figuring out what to do differently.

This means we have to tolerate watching them struggle sometimes. That can be really hard! It goes against our very well-developed protective instincts. But it’s how they learn and develop the internal strength they’ll need.

The key is being available without being intrusive. Present without being controlling. There to guide and support, but not to do it all for them.

So what does this actually look like when your child comes to you with friendship struggles or school worries? Well, first (and this is hard I know!) resist jumping in to fix it. Just listen. Really listen. “Tell me what happened... ah that sounds really tricky, I get why you’re upset.”

Then, when they’re ready, you can help them explore: “What do you think might work? What are the options?” Wonder together about what might happen if they tried different things. The worst case? The best case? And offer possibilities (“Sometimes it can help to...”) but let them decide what feels right for them. “So what do you think you’ll do? You know what might be best.”

Of course, if there’s a safety issue or something really important, we step in and set the boundary. But for friendship drama, school worries, minor disappointments? We can help them think it through without solving it for them. This builds their confidence that they can figure things out, that their ideas are valuable, that we trust their judgement.

And when they try something and it doesn’t work? We’re there to support them through it and help them think about what to try next. That is real learning and growth.

Making Time for Connection (Even When You’re Exhausted)

With all this pressure and exhaustion, there’s something that often gets lost: actual connection time with our children. Not time in the same room while multitasking, but real, focused, present time together.

I know what you’re thinking: “What?! When?! I barely have time to breathe!”

But connection time has to be prioritised, not fitted in when everything else is done. Because everything else is never done! If you wait until you’ve finished everything else, you’ll never get there. Connection time has to be non-negotiable, protected time. Even if it’s just 15-20 minutes a day.

What might this look like? Maybe 15 minutes after you get home from work, just sitting and chatting about their day. No phone. Just listening. Maybe reading together before bed, properly engaged. Maybe one meal together most days with phones away, actually talking. Maybe a Saturday morning ritual.

And playfulness! This is such an important one. When we bring playfulness into connection time (being silly, wrestling, games, tickling, music and dancing, joking around), it helps both children and us. Laughter regulates everyone’s nervous system. Playfulness lifts the mood for the whole family. When you’re playing together, you’re not thinking about the to-do list. You’re just present. Both of you benefit from this.

When children get regular, quality connection time (especially playful connection!), something shifts. They feel more settled in themselves, more secure in their relationship with you. And when they feel that security, they can manage better when you need to be busy with other things.

A note about teenagers: Connection looks different with teens, but it’s just as important! They need space and independence, absolutely. But they also need to know you’re available. This can be exhausting in a different way because you’re waiting for them to open up, being available at odd hours when they finally want to talk, respecting their need for privacy while also staying connected.

Connection time with teens might be driving them places (captive audience, no eye contact, surprisingly good for conversations!), watching something together they’re interested in, late-night kitchen chats when they wander down for a snack, asking genuine questions about their world without interrogating them, or just being around without pressuring them to engage. You’re showing up, being present, letting them know you’re there when they need you. It’s less about scheduled time and more about being emotionally available when they reach for connection.

We have to prioritise it though. We have to protect that time even when we’re exhausted. The connection is what matters most. Everything else can wait for 15 minutes.

Looking After Yourself (The Oxygen Mask Principle)

Now something we don’t talk about enough: you need to recharge too. You’ve heard the aeroplane safety announcement, right? Put your own oxygen mask on first before helping others. It’s not selfish. It’s necessary!

If you’re running on empty, you simply can’t be the parent you want to be. All those things we’ve talked about in previous articles (being curious, staying regulated, co-regulating, repairing, setting limits with warmth) require capacity. And when you’re completely depleted, you don’t have anything left to give.

The prominent psychiatrist, Dan Siegel, talks about the “Healthy Mind Platter”, the different kinds of activities our brains need: physical time, focus time, connecting time, play time, down time, time in (reflecting), and sleep. Most parents are getting maybe one or two of these! We’re focused on tasks all day, connecting with our children if we can, and maybe getting some sleep. But the rest? Play, down time, physical movement, time to reflect? Not so much...

So what can you do? You need to make time for yourself. Not leftover time. Actual, protected time to recharge.

This might look like getting up 20 minutes earlier for quiet tea (I know, I know, you’re already exhausted! But bear with me...), a lunchtime walk (even 10 minutes), an evening class once a week, protecting your bedtime, saying no to things that drain you, meeting a friend for coffee, reading for 15 minutes before bed, or doing exercise you enjoy.

If you have a partner, support each other in getting this time. “You take Saturday morning, I’ll take Sunday morning.” Both need to recharge.

For single parents, this is even harder. You’re carrying all of it alone, and the exhaustion can feel unbearable. Can family help? Friends? A childminder for a couple of hours? It’s not selfish to arrange this. It really is essential.

Parents who take care of themselves can take better care of their children. It’s not one or the other. It’s both. Your well-being and your child’s well-being are connected.

When you’re rested, you have more patience. When you’ve had down time, you can be more present. When you’ve moved your body, you’re more regulated. All of this makes you a better parent.

And something else that’s really important: when your children see you looking after yourself, they learn that self-care matters. You’re giving them a powerful example for their future. When they see you exercise, they learn that moving your body is valuable. When they see you take time to rest, they learn that down time isn’t lazy, it’s necessary. When they see you set boundaries and say no to things that drain you, they learn that it’s okay to protect your energy.

We’re not just looking after ourselves for us. We’re teaching our children that well-being matters, that you can’t pour from an empty cup, that taking care of yourself is part of being a healthy, functioning person. That’s a gift that will serve them for their whole lives.

It’s the oxygen mask principle. You can’t help others if you’ve passed out from lack of oxygen yourself.

What one parent discovered: “I was so burnt out I could barely function. A friend suggested I get up 30 minutes earlier, before the kids, just to have time to myself. I thought she was mad! I was already exhausted! But I tried it. Those 30 minutes (with a cup of tea, reading or just sitting in silence) changed everything. I started the day feeling like I’d had a moment to myself, rather than being immediately overwhelmed. It sounds so small, but it made such a difference to my capacity to cope with everything else.”

Moving Forward

Feeling overwhelmed and exhausted doesn’t mean you’re failing. It means you’re doing something genuinely difficult while also trying to meet impossible standards.

Your children don’t need you to do everything for them. They need you to guide them, support them, and give them space to learn and grow. They need you to be their secure base, not their problem-solver-in-chief!

They need quality connection time with you, even if it’s brief. Those moments of real presence and playfulness matter more than hours of distracted time together.

And they need you to take care of yourself. Not because it’s selfish, but because when you’re depleted there’s simply nothing left to give. Your wellbeing matters, not just for you, but for your ability to be the parent you want to be.

So yes, the demands are relentless. Yes, you’re going to feel overwhelmed sometimes. Yes, you’ll feel like you’re failing. But struggling doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It means you’re human, doing one of the hardest and most important jobs there is.

Be gentle with yourself. Lower those impossible standards. Prioritise connection. And please, please make time to recharge.

This Week, Try...

Pick just ONE thing:

For connection time: Choose one small window in your day (even just 15 minutes!) and protect it for real, focused time with your child. No multitasking, no phones, just being together. Make it regular. Try adding some playfulness, be silly, play a quick game, tickle, joke around. Notice how it helps both of you!

For letting them learn: Pick one area where you usually step in, and this week, step back. Let them struggle a bit, explore the options with them, let them figure it out and let them experience the natural consequence. Then be there to support them through whatever happens, celebration or comfort.

For recharging yourself: Find one small pocket of time this week that’s just for you to recharge. Even 15 minutes. Maybe it’s getting up a bit earlier, maybe it’s a lunchtime walk, maybe it’s reading before bed. Protect that time like you’d protect an important appointment. Because it is that important.

You don’t have to fix everything at once. Just try one small shift and see what happens.

A question to reflect on: What would need to change for you to feel less overwhelmed? What one thing, if you could let go of it or change it, would give you back some capacity?

Next week, we’ll tackle one of the most stressful parts of parenting: the morning chaos. Why getting out the door feels like herding cats, what’s really happening beneath the surface when everyone’s running late and tempers are fraying, and what actually helps make mornings less of a battle. If you’ve ever found yourself shouting “WE’RE LEAVING, NOW!” while your child is still in their pyjamas, this one’s for you!

What aspect of parenting exhaustion feels hardest for you right now? I’d love to hear in the comments.

If this resonated with you, please share it with another parent who might need to hear it.

Dr Daire Gilmartin
Consultant Counselling Psychologist and Psychotherapist
Oak Tree Therapy
www.oaktreetherapy.ie

What’s your biggest bedtime challenge? I’d love to hear what you’re dealing with - you’re definitely not alone in this!

If you know another parent who might need to hear this today, please share it with them.

Dr Daire Gilmartin
Consultant Counselling Psychologist and Psychotherapist
Oak Tree Therapy
www.oaktreetherapy.ie

Sound familiar? Your child comes home from school and within minutes, they’re in floods of tears because their friend said they couldn’t play at breaktime. Or they’re absolutely raging because you’ve said they can’t have a biscuit before dinner. Or they’re melting down because their sibling looked at them the wrong way. The feeling isn’t just big - it’s MASSIVE. And it’s taking up all the space in your kitchen, your afternoon, your entire nervous system.

You try to help. “It’s okay, calm down.” But they’re not calming down. “It’s not that bad, you’ll see your friend tomorrow.” They’re crying harder now. “For God’s sake, it’s just a biscuit!” And now they’re inconsolable, and you’re standing there thinking: Why is this so hard? What am I supposed to do with this?

If you’ve been in this moment (what parent hasn’t?!), I want to talk about what’s really happening here, why it feels so overwhelming for both of you, and what actually helps when emotions get this big.

Why Children’s Big Emotions Can Feel So Hard For Us

Before we even get to what to do with our children’s feelings, we need to talk about what happens to us when they’re in the middle of an emotional storm.

Here’s the thing: when your child is overwhelmed by emotion, it activates your own nervous system. Their distress triggers something in you. Maybe it’s a desire to fix it and make it stop, maybe it’s anxiety about whether they’re okay, maybe it makes you feel like you’re failing them, maybe it’s frustration that they’re “overreacting” to something that seems small to you. Or maybe (and this is really common) their big feelings bring up your own difficult emotions from childhood that you’ve never fully processed.

Some of us grew up in homes where big feelings weren’t okay. Where we learnt to push emotions down, to be quiet, to “stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.” If that was your experience, your child’s emotional intensity might feel threatening or wrong, even if you rationally know it’s normal. This is your shark music playing, those old messages about feelings being dangerous or shameful.

Others of us are highly sensitive to our children’s distress. We feel it in our own bodies as if it’s happening to us. This can make it really hard to stay regulated when they’re dysregulated, because we’re essentially absorbing their emotional state.

And sometimes we’re just exhausted. We’ve been managing our own stress all day, and we really don’t have the capacity to hold space for another person’s overwhelming feelings. That’s not a failure, that’s being human!!

The first step in helping our children with their big emotions is recognising what’s happening in our own bodies and minds when they’re struggling. Because here’s the crucial bit: we cannot help our children regulate if we’re not regulated ourselves (this will be a common theme throughout Grounded Parenting!).

The Foundation: Co-Regulation Before Self-Regulation

You might have heard people talk about teaching children to “self-regulate”; to manage their own emotions. And yes, that’s the goal eventually! But here’s what we often miss: children learn to self-regulate through thousands of experiences of being co-regulated by a caring adult.

Put simply, co-regulation is your calm nervous system helping to steady theirs. It’s you being the anchor when they’re in the storm. Over time, through repeated experiences of you helping them calm down, they begin to take this in, do it for themselves and develop their own capacity to manage big feelings.

But (and this is important!) they can’t skip straight to self-regulation. A three-year-old, a six-year-old, even a ten-year-old doesn't have a fully developed prefrontal cortex. These parts of the brain responsible for impulse control and emotional regulation are still very much under construction. Children literally cannot “just calm down” on their own, especially when they’re really upset. They need us to lend them our regulation until theirs develops.

This is why telling a dysregulated child to “calm down” or “stop crying” doesn’t work. Their thinking brain is offline. They can’t access the part of their brain that would help them regulate. They need your regulated presence first.

Regulate, Relate, Then Reason: The Order Matters

Remember Bruce Perry’s three R’s that we talked about in the supermarket article? This is where they become absolutely essential.

First: Regulate. Before anything else can happen, both you and your child need to get back to a state where your thinking brains can come online. For you, this might mean taking three deep breaths, softening your shoulders, consciously slowing down your speech and lowering your tone of voice. For your child, it means your calm presence helping to settle their nervous system.

Second: Relate. Once there’s a bit more calm (even just a tiny bit!), this is where connection comes in. You’re communicating through your tone, your body language, your words: “I’m here. You’re not alone in this. These feelings are okay.”

Third: Reason. Only after regulation and connection can we start to help them make sense of what happened, talk about it, or problem solve. If we jump straight to reasoning (“You’ll see your friend tomorrow, it’ll be grand!”), we miss the two steps that actually help their brain settle enough to hear us.

The order really matters. Logic doesn’t work on a dysregulated brain. Connection does.

What Emotion Coaching Actually Looks Like

So what does it look like in practice to help a child through overwhelming emotions? Let me walk you through it with a real example.

Your eight-year-old comes home from school devastated because they weren’t picked for the football team during break time. They’re crying, saying everyone hates them, that they’re useless at everything, that they’re never going to school again.

What doesn’t help (but we all do it sometimes!):

• “Don’t be silly, of course they don’t hate you.”

• “It’s just a game, it doesn’t matter…”

• “Stop crying, it’ll be fine…”

• “Well maybe if you practiced more...”

Why don’t these help? Because they’re all trying to fix, minimise or explain away the feeling. We are trying to convince the child they don’t feel this way (often because it is uncomfortable for us). But this feeling is real and huge for your child right now. When we dismiss it, they learn that their emotions aren’t valid, or that we can’t be trusted with their difficult feelings.

What does help:

Get yourself regulated first. Take a breath. Your child needs you to be steady right now, even if their feelings are activating something in you.

Get physically close (if they’ll let you). Sit beside them, get down to their level. Your calm presence is already starting to help regulate their nervous system, even before you say anything.

Name what you see, without judgement. “Aw, you’re really disappointed, that’s so hard…It feels so unfair” You’re not fixing it, you’re witnessing it. And that witnessing? That’s powerful.

Validate the feeling, not necessarily the thought. “That must have felt really horrible, being left out like that. Of course you’re upset.” You’re acknowledging that the feeling is real and makes sense, even if the catastrophic thought (“everyone hates me”) isn’t accurate. We’ll get to that later, once they’re calmer.

Stay present. You don’t need to have the perfect words. Just being there, steady and accepting, while they ride the wave of the feeling. Maybe you put a gentle hand on their back. Maybe you just sit quietly beside them. Your regulated nervous system is helping to calm theirs, even in silence.

You don’t need to fix the feeling for it to pass.

Help them feel the feeling without being consumed by it. “This is really hard, I get it. I’d be gutted too.” As you notice them begin to calm, maybe add: “These big feelings won’t last forever, even though right now they are huge.”

Then, when everyone’s calmer, comes the reasoning part. Maybe 20 minutes later, maybe that evening. This is when you can help them make sense of what happened and think about it differently. Going back to our football example, this might sound like:

“You were so upset earlier about not being picked. That felt really horrible, didn’t it? I wonder what was going on there. Do you think maybe they were just picking based on who was closest, rather than who they like best? Because I know Sarah is your friend, you were playing together on Friday.”

You’re gently helping them see other possibilities, but only now that their thinking brain is back online. You might also problem solve together: “What could you do tomorrow if this happens again? Maybe you could say ‘Can I play next game?’ or find someone else to play with?”

The reasoning part is important! But it only works after the regulate and relate steps have done their job.

Being With Feelings AND Holding Boundaries

Here’s something really important: being with your child’s feelings doesn’t mean removing boundaries. It means helping them tolerate the feelings that come with those boundaries.

Let’s go back to that biscuit scenario from the beginning. Your child is raging because you’ve said no to a biscuit before dinner. You can validate the feeling while still holding the limit:

“I know, you really wanted that biscuit! You’re really disappointed… It’s hard when you can’t have what you want.” (That’s the relating, the validation.)

And then, staying calm and firm: “we’re still not having biscuits now. Dinner will be ready in 10 minutes. We can have one afterwards, okay.” (That’s the boundary, held with warmth.)

You’re not backing down. You’re not giving in to stop the feeling. You’re just acknowledging that the feeling is real and hard, while the limit stays in place. This teaches your child something crucial: that they can survive disappointment, that their feelings won’t destroy them, and that you can be trusted to hold steady even when they’re upset with you.

The Language of Empathy: What To Say

The words we use matter, but it’s not about having a perfect script. It’s about communicating genuine understanding. Here are some phrases that can help:

• “That sounds really hard.”

• “I can see how upset you are.”

• “That must have felt awful.”

• “Of course you’re angry/sad/scared. That makes complete sense.”

• “You really wanted that to be different.”

• “I’m here. I’m with you.”

• “These feelings are really big, but we can get through them together.”

Notice what these phrases have in common? They’re naming, validating, and staying present. They’re not trying to fix or explain away. They’re just... being with.

What To Do When You’re Overwhelmed Too

Of course, sometimes your child’s big emotions are too much for you. You’re already depleted, and you simply cannot hold space for their feelings right now without losing it yourself.

This is important to acknowledge because if we pretend we can always be the calm, regulated parent, we set ourselves up for failure and shame. Sometimes we can’t. And that’s okay.

When you’re too overwhelmed to help them regulate:

Be honest (age-appropriately). “I can see you’re really upset, and I want to help, I just need a minute to ground myself first.” For younger children, you might just say: “Mam needs to take some deep breaths for a minute.” Sometimes, if it feels right, you can do this together.

Make sure they’re safe, then create a tiny bit of space. This doesn’t mean abandoning them! But you might step into the next room while keeping them in sight, or turn away for a moment to take three deep breaths.

Come back when you’ve found even a small amount of regulation. It might only take 30 seconds. It might take five minutes. But even a tiny shift in your own state can help you re-engage without making things worse.

Lower your expectations temporarily. When you’re depleted, the goal isn’t perfect emotion coaching. The goal is just to not cause harm. To survive the moment. You can always repair and reconnect later when everyone’s calmer.

And here’s something we don’t talk about enough: if you’re regularly finding your child’s emotions completely overwhelming, that might be a sign you need support too. Parenting is incredibly demanding, and many of us are carrying our own unprocessed emotions from childhood that get triggered by our children’s feelings. There’s no shame in getting help to work through this (More on looking after yourself in future articles!).

Building Emotional Literacy Together

Over time, as you help your child through their big feelings again and again, you’re doing something really important: you’re teaching them about emotions.

When you name what they’re feeling (“You’re disappointed,” “You’re frustrated,” “You’re anxious about tomorrow”), you’re helping them build a vocabulary for their inner world. They’re learning that feelings have names, that they’re normal, that other people have them too.

When you stay calm in the face of their big emotions, you’re teaching them that feelings aren’t dangerous. That they can survive disappointment, anger, sadness. That these feelings will pass.

When you help them notice where feelings show up in their body (“Your heart is beating really fast, isn’t it?” “Your tummy feels tight”), you’re helping them develop the self-awareness that will eventually help them recognise and manage their own emotional states.

This is how self-regulation develops, not through being told to calm down, but through thousands of small moments of being helped to calm down by someone who loves them.

What one parent discovered: “My daughter would get so worked up at bedtime, crying about school the next day, worrying about everything. I used to try to talk her out of it, to reason with her about why there was nothing to worry about. It never worked, she just cried more. Then I started just sitting with her, saying things like ‘You’re feeling really worried right now’ and ‘That’s a lot for your brain to keep managing’ without trying to fix it. The first time I did this, she looked at me in surprise and said ‘You’re not telling me to stop?’ After about five minutes of me just being with her in it, she calmed down completely on her own. Now when the worries come, she’ll sometimes even say ‘Mam, I just need you to sit with me for a bit.’ She’s learning that she can handle her feelings when someone’s there with her.”

Moving Forward

Learning to be with our children’s big emotions without trying to fix, minimise or control them is one of the hardest parts of parenting. It asks us to tolerate discomfort, to trust the process, to believe that feelings won’t destroy them (or us).

But when we can do this, even imperfectly, even just sometimes, we give our children an incredible gift. We show them that all of their feelings are acceptable, that they don’t have to hide or suppress parts of themselves to be loved, that they can trust us with their whole selves.

And gradually, through these thousands of moments of co-regulation, they develop the capacity to manage their own emotions. Not by pushing them down or pretending they don’t exist, but by feeling them, understanding them, and moving through them.

That’s the goal. Not children who never have big feelings (that’s impossible and not even desirable!), but children who’ve learned that big feelings are manageable, that they’re not alone in them, and that they have the inner resources to cope.

This Week, Try...

The next time your child has a big emotional reaction to something, pause before you respond. Take a breath. Notice what’s happening in your own body. Are you feeling activated? Overwhelmed? Frustrated?

Then, before you try to fix or explain, just try to be with them in it for a minute. Get close if they’ll let you. Name what you see: “You’re really upset about this.” Or “This is feeling really big right now, isn’t it?”

You don’t need to have all the answers. You don’t need to make the feeling go away. Just try staying present with them while they feel it.

Notice what happens when you do this. Notice what it feels like for you. And notice what shift (if any) you see in your child.

A question to reflect on: When you had big feelings as a child, how did the adults around you respond? Were your emotions welcomed and validated, or were you expected to keep them under control? How might those early experiences be influencing how you respond to your child’s emotions now?

Next week, we’ll look at a specific scenario that brings up huge emotions for many children (and their parents!): the bedtime battle. We’ll explore why bedtime can be so hard, what’s really going on beneath the resistance, and what actually helps when your child is fighting sleep night after night.

What’s your biggest struggle when your child has overwhelming emotions? I’d love to hear in the comments - and I promise, you’re not alone in finding this hard!

If you know another parent who might need to hear this today, please share it with them.

Dr Daire Gilmartin