Who Shows Up When Parenting Gets Hard?

When your child melts down, pushes back, or needs more from you than you feel you have to give — who shows up? Is it you, focused and present? Or is it some version of a parent you swore you’d never become?

If we’re honest, most of us have had the unsettling experience of hearing ourselves say something to our children that we remember hearing — and not liking — when we were young.

There’s a reason for that. And understanding it can open the door to doing things differently.

Parenting From Our Past — It’s Instinctive, But Is It Always Helpful?

I’ve been saying this since the earliest days of Ground Control Parenting: if you had a good childhood, you tend to parent toward it. If you had a difficult one, you parent away from it. But as I dig deeper into this idea, I’m learning that parenting toward or away from our own upbringing doesn’t necessarily mean we’re meeting our children where they actually are.

Research from psychiatrist Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps The Score, shows that our past doesn’t just live in our memories — it lives in our bodies. When our children do something that echoes our own childhood experiences, our bodies can react before our minds catch up.

A quickened pulse. A hot flash of anger. A sharper tone than we intended.

Suddenly, we’re not responding to our child in front of us. We’re reacting to something from long ago. And those harsh words coming out of our mouths? They sound uncomfortably familiar.

I’ve definitely been there.

This reaction is often unexpected and unintentional. But once we begin to recognize the pattern, we can start to interrupt it.

Interrupting the Pattern: The Four-Second Rule

Therapist Beth Tyson offers a simple but powerful tool: The next time you feel that surge of anger or sadness rising in a parenting moment, pause. Breathe for four seconds before you respond.

Just four seconds. In that space, ask yourself: Is this about my child — or my past?

That brief pause can be enough to shift you out of this instinctive reaction. It gives you a moment to choose a response that aligns with the parent you want to be.

This doesn’t excuse our reactions. But it does explain them. And that distinction matters, because understanding this helps us figure out how to do better the next time.

Of course, if you find yourself having intense or frequent reactions that feel hard to control, it’s worth seeking professional support. But for those everyday moments when you feel yourself saying things to your kids that you swore you’d never say, that four-second pause can make a real difference.

Parenting the Child in Front of You

Another Ground Control Parenting principle I come back to often is this: parent the child you have, not the one you were — or the one you wanted.

We all bring expectations, histories, and hopes into our parenting. That’s natural. But our children tell us who they are — through their temperament, their reactions, and the way they move through the world.

There’s a concept in child development called “goodness of fit.” It reminds us that children thrive when we adjust our parenting to their actual temperament, not our own.

Your highly active child may not need to be calmed down; they may need space to move. Your slow-to-warm child may not need a push; they may need time to observe and adjust at their own pace.

Our children are not extensions of us, they are their own people. Our job is to see them clearly.

Our History Plays a Role Here

For Black parents, this work may be further complicated by its deep roots.

Dr. Joy DeGruy’s research on Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome reminds us that we aren’t just breaking personal cycles — we are breaking historical ones. Some of the behaviors, defense mechanisms, and survival strategies passed down through generations reflect extraordinary resilience and strength. And some of them, if left unexamined, can get in the way of the kind of parenting we want to do.

The work, then, is to look at ourselves and our parenting behaviors with clear and compassionate eyes — keeping what serves our children and releasing what does not.

This is not easy work. But it’s some of the most important work we will ever do.

********

Season 8 production is well underway, and it’s gonna be a strong one! I’m looking forward to sharing more with you soon. Until then, please check out some of the great episodes from Seasons 1 through 7.

And please, be sure to take that four-second pause when you need it, and remember to give yourself a bit of grace.

Thanks, as always, to Paramount for their sponsorship and to the Seneca Women Podcast Network for their continued support. And thank YOU for being part of the GCP parenting community.