I didn’t realize how silly it sounded until I said it out loud to my therapist.
“You shouted, ‘TAKE A DEEP BREATH’ at your toddlers? And wondered why it didn’t work?” my therapist clarified.
And I nodded, laughing with her when she pointed out my toddlers could definitely tell I wasn’t calm or regulated, so why would they listen to me and calm down?
But underneath the humor, the realization settled in that I don’t actually know how to emotionally regulate either. All my life, I had suppressed any unpleasant emotions, not knowing what else to do with them. After having kids, I realized how much I didn’t know about emotional regulation. I was preaching emotional regulation to them, trying to help them work through big feelings, when I didn’t even know what I was feeling most of the time. For me, having kids made me stop performing emotions and actually FEEL.
I can’t model what I haven’t learned, and for a lot of us, our kids didn’t create our dysregulation—they just made it impossible to ignore anymore.
I Didn’t Know That I Didn’t Know
When I was in college, in the midst of loss after loss, I experienced so much grief that I couldn’t process it all. I ended up suppressing most of it and eventually learned to hide my emotions so well that I accidentally hid them from myself too. Years later, that survival instinct stayed, and I found that I wasn’t intentionally suppressing emotions anymore, but I was genuinely unaware of what was happening internally.
It was more than suppression: not feeling “allowed” to feel a certain thing. I wasn’t able to notice at all.
I went to my therapist, and she had me download an app to track my emotions throughout my day. I had to emotionally check-in three times a day. It felt silly at first; I didn’t think my emotions would fluctuate that much or that there were so many different emotions other than happy, sad, and mad (and I write fiction, too!). I noticed that I had been labeling everything as “fine” or “not fine” with nothing in between.
I literally had no idea what I was feeling. What I thought should’ve been instinctual took me sitting and really focusing my attention inward to figure out how I felt. Psalm 139:23 says, “Search me, God, and know my heart.” I had to dive inwardly and search myself to know my own heart. This verse implies an inner life worth examining. Self-awareness isn’t solely a therapeutic practice; it’s a spiritual practice.
What I Absorbed
When I was a kid, I remember staring out the window, dramatic music playing on my purple CD player, watching the raindrops splash against the glass and feeling very sorry for myself. It’s no wonder my parents would tell me to change my attitude!
But I absorbed the idea that grumpiness or frustration was a behavior problem, not an experience to be held. I know I was probably so annoying about it, because I didn’t know how to express emotions in a healthy way. I’d act out or suppress them instead of regulating.
I think a lot of millennials grew up in a culture that taught all negative emotions should be hidden. And this is a generational pattern we find more and more as millennials and other generations get older. I thought I was supposed to perform happiness or I’d get in “trouble” when I really needed my feelings validated and my behavior managed. I needed to know, “It’s okay to be grumpy, but you still need to respect your parents.” I wanted assurance that negative emotions weren’t inherently “bad” and that I was allowed to have them.
This said, my parents have three kids, and I can’t imagine how difficult it was to manage all of us in the pre-teen/teen years. I was mortal enemies with my mom when I was a teen, and I hate that I treated her that way, looking at it through the lens of being a mom myself. I 100% understand them telling me, “Shape up!” when I was moping around and being disrespectful and grumpy.
I can’t change what I absorbed. But I can change what I pass down.
What I’m Trying to Teach
I thought my head was going to explode with rage as I watched my toddler kick and scream on the floor. All because I told her to pick up her toys. I tried to stop and breathe before kneeling beside her and telling her our signature phrase.
“Listen, you’re allowed to be grumpy but you still have to be what?”
“Nice,” she muttered.
To be honest, her tantrum went on for a while longer, but she was no longer destructive towards her things. We went through a few options to help with her “frustrated”—stomping our feet, yelling into a pillow, taking deep breaths together. You know, all the things I should probably be doing too.
My husband and I are trying to teach our kids that our feelings are valid while still holding the boundary on behavior.
Feelings are information, not permission slips to act a certain way.
And it’s funny; with kids, we expect tiny people with brand new nervous systems to out-regulate adults who’ve had decades of practice and still struggle. My kids have been alive for less than five years. They have no idea what they’re doing, so why do I expect them to regulate as quickly as an adult?
I’ve shouted at my kids so many times when I’m very dysregulated and what does that accomplish? They’re still dysregulated, and now we’re all upset. It’s our job as parents to teach them, not punish them for not knowing what to do with their big feelings.
We need to remember our end goal: we want to raise kids who turn into adults who know what they feel, can name it, and have tools for it. Not adults who just perform wellness to make other people happy.
Deuteronomy 6:6-7 tells us to pass our faith down, and by extension, emotional health, to the next generation. This is an active, modeled practice, not a daily lecture. Kids learn best from modeled behavior.
And this is when I realized my strategy for these moments was wrong. I used to pray for patience until someone pointed out that God doesn’t just hand you patience when you ask for it—He gives you more opportunities to practice it (I think very carefully before praying that prayer now!).
You Can’t Yell Someone Into Peace
Think back to the Fruits of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23): love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. FRUITS of the Spirit, meaning they grow from connection to the vine, not just from willpower alone.
We treat self-control like a character trait we either have or we don’t. But Scripture frames it as something that GROWS when you stay connected to the source. We can’t white-knuckle self-regulation into existence, and we can’t yell our kids into peace. It has to come from somewhere.
The Holy Spirit is the ultimate co-regulator. John 14:26-27 says the Helper/Counselor/Comforter gives peace “not as the world gives”. It sounds abstract at first, but think about it. It’s describing a settled nervous system available to us through connection with God. “Peace beyond understanding” gets thrown around a lot, but when you’ve experienced it, you know exactly what it means. It logically makes no sense to feel peace in some moments, yet there it is.
Practically, this means staying connected to God isn’t just a spiritual discipline but the foundation your emotional regulation is built on. When that connection thins, everything gets so much harder, including parenting. Learning to regulate isn’t just good psychology, but it’s learning how to abide.
I know, I used to hear the word “abide” all the time and had no clue what it meant. In the Bible, “abide” means to stay in an active relationship (John 15). Not just believing in God from a distance, but choosing to remain at the table. To stay in the conversation. It’s not a passive practice but a deliberate choice to keep showing up to the connection rather than drifting away when life gets loud. The opposite of abiding isn’t doubting, it’s just…slowly leaving.
I know, this all sounds great in theory. But how do we go about this practically?
What Actually Helps
Some of these tools are spiritual, some are practical, and honestly most days we need both at the same time.
Abide
Not necessarily the formal, eyes-closed, hands-folded kind, though that has its place. I’m talking about the desperate, real-time kind. I plead the Blood of Jesus over my kids when I can feel something dark stirring in the atmosphere of our home. I ask God specifically for peace, clarity, and patience before I walk back into a hard moment. And sometimes it’s just “Lord, help me”—not as a throwaway phrase but as a literal, urgent request from someone who has run out of their own resources.
The Emotional Check-In
My therapist recommended the app How We Feel to me. I set it to remind me to check in three times a day. It asks you to choose one out of four options at first: High or Low Energy Pleasant and High or Low Energy Unpleasant. From there, you can choose another word out of 144 emotions (don’t worry, the four previous options narrow it down) to select how you feel, and each one will have a description next to it. It’s wild to see how many different emotions we can have even in the span of an hour. It really helped my emotion vocabulary to evolve past “fine” and “not fine”.
Name It to Tame It
This is the practice of naming how you feel out loud, which also doubles as something you can model for your kids. Sometimes, I pretend to be frustrated or sad and ask my daughter to help me with it. She repeats options back to me—yell in a pillow, snuggle, stomp my feet, “blow out the candles”—which helps to reinforce practices to healthily manage emotions.
One day, we were both grumpy. I remember lying down in bed with her that night saying, “Mommy had a grumpy day today, but sometimes that just happens. We can try again tomorrow.” Normalizing negative emotions helps relieve some of the potential guilt you can both feel on top of the emotion.
Pause…Before Responding
I could use this one more. This is just the physical act of stepping back before reacting. This can look like taking deep breaths, hiding in the bathroom for a few seconds, or even closing your eyes. My therapist recommended 4, 7, 8 breathing to me which is: breathe in for 4 seconds, hold it for 7, and breathe out for 8. You can even practice taking deep breaths along with your kids (instead of yelling at them to do it!).
Body-Based Cues
If you feel yourself starting to become dysregulated, take a moment to see if you feel emotions physically before you can name them. Maybe your hands start to shake, your shoulders tense up, or your eyes start burning. Sometimes, when I’m overstimulated, I’ll feel very antsy and fidgety.
Identifying your body’s cues can help you get ahead of the emotion and manage it before it bulldozes over you.
You’re Not Behind, You’re Just Awake
Please know this: if you’re feeling dysregulated, you don’t know how you’re feeling until you snap at your kids—you are not failing anyone. You are learning this alongside them.
In fact, there’s something valuable about a parent who shows their kids that adults have to do the work too. Think of the tenacity and growth you’re emulating for them. Showing them that we as adults don’t have it all figured out either, but we’re going to try our best anyway.
I’m still in the trenches of motherhood with two toddlers. A lot of days, I feel like yelling, “TAKE A DEEP BREATH!” and sometimes, I still do. To be completely transparent, I haven’t logged my emotions in a few days, and I already feel myself slipping to “fine” or “not fine”. This is all an ongoing practice.
Our own dysregulation doesn’t disqualify us from teaching our kids how to regulate. Our imperfect, in-progress journey IS the lesson.
If you’re just now learning how you feel and how to manage it, you are NOT behind. You’re just awake to it now, and you can finally start growing something that was always meant to be there.
The peace that passes understanding is our goal (Philippians 4:7). The grace that gets us there is imperfect, in-progress, and enough.
