I have only been a parent for a little over five years.  Which makes me a novice, at best.  I fully acknowledge that there are so many people in the world with more experience, knowledge, and probably better parenting tools than I have.  I also know what I see.  I know what I hear from others.  And I know what it feels like to try to do your best while leaving as little pain, trauma, and damage behind you as you go, for all involved.

Parenting is a trip.  The most beautiful, exhausting, amazing, brutal trip of my whole life.  One of the hardest parts of parenting isn’t sleep deprivation or figuring out how to manage adding extra little humans into a life that was already really full and really busy. It isn’t the tantrums or the chaos or the never-ending negotiation over socks being on the wrong feet (that really happened) or food they loved yesterday being gross today or the “why do I have to do everything and you don’t do anything” arguments over chores (like, kid, if you only knew). Those things are hard, but they’re expected. We should have seen those things coming.

What nobody fully prepares you for is other grownups.

Other parents. Other caregivers. Teachers. Coaches. Relatives. Well-meaning strangers at the grocery store who have opinions about how your kid is behaving. The grown-ups in your child’s world who are, whether they know it or not, leaving an imprint on your child’s nervous system every single time they interact.

This is the part that can take your breath away if you’re paying attention.  This is the part that leads me to ruminate when I should be sleeping (a long-standing anxiety habit that I work on consistently), trying to figure out how to prepare my kiddo for the world while somehow simultaneously protecting them from the grown-ups who maybe aren’t overly prepared themselves and thus pass some, if not all, of those patterns onto their kiddos.

We Are All Walking Around With a History

Being human.  Am I right?  Sounds like the start of a bad comedy bit.  But we don’t come to parenting as blank slates. We come with decades of our own wiring, our own attachment histories, our own unprocessed grief, fear, shame, and survival strategies that got us through childhood but may not be serving us, or our children, particularly well now. 

Attachment theory, first developed by John Bowlby and expanded significantly by Mary Ainsworth, tells us that the patterns of connection we form with our earliest caregivers create an internal working model or blueprint for how we expect relationships to function for the rest of our lives.1 Secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized attachment are more than scientific categories.  They are body states and nervous system defaults. And they show up, whether we invite them or not, whether we are aware of them or not, in how we parent.

Research published in BMC Psychology found that a parent’s own adult attachment style directly relates to the quality of the bond they form with their infant and that this relationship is often mediated by parenting stress.2 Translation: how you were attached to your own caregivers affects how regulated you are under pressure, which affects how you show up for your kiddo(s). Not because you’re a bad parent, but because nervous systems are not theoretical. They are deeply, stubbornly, and beautifully biological. 

A parent who grew up with inconsistent, dismissive, or frightening caregiving may find those same situations, like a child’s big emotion, a conflict with another grown-up, or a moment of perceived failure, activating in ways that feel disproportionate and confusing. And it’s not just one flavor of hard childhood that creates this. The parent who grew up enmeshed, which is where a caregiver’s emotional world and the child’s were never allowed to be separate, may struggle to let their child have feelings that are different from theirs, or feel a quiet panic when their child pulls away for independence that is completely age-appropriate. The parent who was parentified, who became the emotional caretaker for the grown-ups around them before they ever had the chance to just be a kid, may find themselves unable to receive care, chronically over-functioning, or deeply uncomfortable when their kiddo needs something they can’t immediately fix. The parent who grew up in a volatile home, where the emotional temperature could shift without warning, may be hypervigilant in ways that read as controlling, or may shut down entirely when conflict enters the room because their nervous system learned long ago that conflict means danger. The parent who experienced neglect or absence may find closeness unfamiliar and may pull away from their child’s need for connection, not because they don’t love them, but because being truly needed by another human being brings up something in their body that they may not have the tools to feel and experience in a way that is safe to them.

And all of these might feel big and overwhelming and maybe even weak or out of control.  And the reality is, none of these are character flaws, but rather, the nervous system is doing exactly what the nervous system learned to do.

The trouble is that most of us were never told any of this.  Nor given the tools to identify, feel, heal, and provide new experiences for our kiddos.

What Happens When We Don’t Do the Work

I want to be careful here, because I’m not here to parent-shame anyone. Every single person who shows up for a child deserves compassion. They deserve to have their humanity recognized and the experiences that built them empathized with.

But I also believe that if we don’t confront issues and educate people, the patterns remain and repeat.  Unhealed wounds don’t stay contained. They get passed on. They find new homes in little bodies.  Without awareness and intention, they tend to land on the people closest to us.

Research on intergenerational trauma has documented this transmission clearly. Parental adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are associated with child ACEs. A parent’s difficulty regulating their own emotions has been shown to statistically predict their child’s difficulty with emotion regulation.3 This isn’t fate or an unavoidable verdict, but it is a pattern that we must identify and address.

What does this look like in real life?

It looks like the parent who cannot tolerate their kiddo’s distress. They don’t do this because they don’t care, but because their own distress was never tolerated, and that child’s crying is hitting something raw and old and pre-verbal in their body.

It looks like the adult who shuts a conversation down the moment it gets uncomfortable, not understanding that they’re teaching a child that discomfort is dangerous.

It looks like the grown-up who responds to a kiddo’s mistake, a normal, developmentally appropriate, completely human mistake, with shame or punishment, because that’s what happened to them, and that’s the only map they have. 

It looks like the grown-up who cannot let their kiddo be wrong. Who steps in front of every consequence, rewrites every story so their kid is always the victim, always the one who was treated unfairly, always the one who didn’t deserve what happened. Not because they’re trying to raise someone incapable of accountability, but because somewhere deep in their own history, being wrong meant something catastrophic, or shame, or punishment, or losing love. So they protect their child from that feeling with everything they have, without realizing that what they’re actually doing is protecting themselves. And in the process, they raise a child who never learns that they can be the problem sometimes. That they can hurt people. That they can be wrong and still be loved. That other kids have nervous systems too, with needs and limits and feelings that matter just as much. The world will eventually reflect that back, and it will be a much harder lesson learned from a stranger than it ever would have been at home, with someone safe.

Communication styles follow the same path. The way we learned to express, or not express, needs, disappointment, and love, becomes the default we model for every child we come in contact with. Passive aggression learned at the dinner table shows up in how we talk to other parents. Emotional flooding learned in a chaotic home shows up in how we handle disagreements at school pickup.  Avoidance of shame or pain shows up in how we respond to another child who had a conflict with ours. These things don’t stay behind the front door.

The Humanity of Children (That We Keep Forgetting)

We seem to have developed a collective blind spot about the actual humanity of children, and their developmental stages.  They have little people brains, not grown-up brains.  They have little people nervous systems, not grown-up nervous systems.  They have the right to be wrong, to make mistakes, to be in process, to be a person who is still figuring out how to be a person. They have the right to have bad days, get frustrated over something that is seemingly small but probably is a build up of many things, to dislike foods or clothes or colors.  We as grown-ups do all the time. 

Children are not small adults. Their brains are not finished. Their prefrontal cortex, which is the part responsible for impulse control, consequence-weighing, and rational decision-making, isn’t fully developed until the mid-twenties.4 Read that again.  The mid-twenties.  They are not being defiant when they can’t regulate. They are not being manipulative when they melt down. They are not being mean when they respond to attack with attack.  They are doing the only thing that young, overwhelmed, still-developing nervous systems know how to do, which is to survive. 

And yet, we hold children to emotional and behavioral standards that many adults around them can’t even meet. We demand that they manage feelings, resolve conflict gracefully, accept correction without defensiveness, evaluate an experience in a snap and make the correct choice in response, and try again with a good attitude.  These are all things that require a regulated nervous system and a reasonably secure attachment. Things that require modeling from the adults around them.  Things that most adults stink at, if I am being frank.

When we shame a child for getting something wrong, we don’t teach them to do better. We teach them that making mistakes is dangerous, that being seen in imperfection is intolerable, and that their worth is conditional on performance.  When we silence a child for saying the wrong thing, or having the wrong feeling, or asking the wrong question, we don’t teach them to communicate better. We teach them that their inner world is a problem, that what lives inside them is too much, or not enough, or embarrassing. That the safest thing they can do is go quiet and make themselves small. And a child who learns to avoid mistakes or to go quiet doesn’t stop having the feelings. They just stop feeling safe with their grown-ups and with their experiences. That becomes part of the nervous system blueprint. That becomes an adult who cannot tolerate their own child’s or another child’s mistakes someday, because something about it feels unbearable in a way they can’t quite name.

You can see the cycle.

And Then We Added Technology

If unhealed attachment wounds and lack of nervous system awareness were the only challenge, that would be enough. But we have also handed our children something genuinely unprecedented: constant, immersive, neurologically stimulating screens from some of the earliest years of their lives, with very little consensus on what we’re actually doing to their developing systems.

The research on this is not subtle. A decade-spanning review of peer-reviewed studies found that young children’s screen time has consistent negative associations with sleep, socio-emotional skills, and physical health, while the links with cognitive and language outcomes range from neutral to concerning, depending on age and type of use.5 A longitudinal study following 422 children found that greater screen exposure at age four predicted significantly higher emotion dysregulation and lower academic achievement by age eight.6

Emotion dysregulation. That phrase has become a bit of a hype phrase and is used constantly in product marketing, which is a shame because what it describes is anything but. A child who cannot regulate their emotions is a child whose nervous system is struggling. And a child whose nervous system is struggling is going to need more co-regulation (attuned, calm, responsive) from the adults around them, right at the moment when many of those adults are also staring at their phones.

I’m not here to make anyone feel guilty about screen time. The world we’re living in is complicated and exhausting, and screens are sometimes a genuine lifeline. But I think we owe it to our kids to be honest about what the research says, and to ask ourselves whether the trade-off is always worth it.

Children with persistent self-regulation problems in infancy have been shown to spend more time in front of screens by age two, and to continue spending more time there.7 The direction of causality in that relationship is complicated. But what isn’t complicated is this: a screen cannot co-regulate a child. It cannot attune to them. It cannot read their nervous system and respond. It cannot be the safe, present, regulated adult that every child needs to learn to self-regulate.

Only we can do that. Which means we have to be available to do it. And that means we have to look at our own nervous systems first.

Helicopter Blades and Enabling: When Helping Hurts

Here is one of the great paradoxes of parenting in this era: the more anxious we are, the more we over-parent, and the more we over-parent, the more anxious our children become.

A systematic review of 38 studies published in Frontiers in Psychology found that overprotective and controlling parenting, which some call helicopter parenting, is consistently associated with symptoms of anxiety and depression in children.8 Another study tracking children longitudinally found that higher helicopter parenting specifically impeded the natural decline of anxiety and depression over time.9

When we won’t let our children fail, struggle, feel the natural discomfort of a hard moment, or solve problems we could easily solve for them, we are not protecting them. We are depriving them of the exact experiences their nervous systems need to build resilience, and we are telling their bodies, in the most primal non-verbal language possible: you cannot handle this. You need me to handle it for you.

That message is the opposite of what builds a regulated, confident, capable human being.

Autonomy support, giving children just enough help to succeed while guiding them to correct their own mistakes, is one of the most robust predictors of healthy self-regulation development we have in the research.10 It is also one of the hardest things to practice when our own nervous systems are dysregulated. When we’re scared, we rescue. When we feel out of control, we control. It makes sense from a nervous system perspective, but it doesn’t serve our kids.

Enabling works the same way. When we buffer children from every consequence, negotiate every boundary away, and smooth every rough edge of their experience, we are trying to protect them from discomfort that is, developmentally speaking, supposed to be there. Discomfort is information. It’s a nervous system signal that leads to learning. A child who is never allowed to feel it never learns what to do with it.

So What Do We Actually Do?

I don’t want to give you a listicle, but I do want to leave you with some anchors to come back to.

Anchors for the Adults in the Room

  • Start with your own nervous system. You cannot pour from a dysregulated system. Somatic awareness, breathwork, coaching, therapy, and body-based practices are not self-indulgence. They are the work. Your regulation is your child’s first co-regulation tool.
  • Get curious about your attachment history. Not to assign blame, but to interrupt patterns. Understanding your own blueprint is how you stop passing it on unconsciously. This might mean coaching, therapy, somatic work, or a deep, honest conversation with yourself. It isn’t easy, but it’s worth it.
  • Let children be wrong. Mistakes aren’t emergencies. They’re the curriculum. When you can stay regulated and curious in the face of a child’s error without shame, or rescuing, or catastrophizing, you are teaching them the most important thing: that being human and imperfect is survivable. More than survivable, actually. It’s just life.
  • Name what’s happening in the room. When things get big, name it. “I notice things feel tense right now.” “I can see you’re really frustrated.” “I’m feeling very overwhelmed.” This is co-regulation. It tells a child’s nervous system that what they’re feeling is real, nameable, and not going to destroy anyone and that grown-ups experience things like that too.
  • Look at how you talk about other adults in front of your kids. Other parents. Teachers. Anyone your child respects or depends on. Your nervous system’s response to those people is a live lesson about safety, trust, and belonging. Children are watching and recording everything, even if it doesn’t seem like they are.
  • Be honest about screens, including your own. Not from a place of guilt. From a place of: what does our family actually need? Where can we create more space for presence? That might look different for every family. But the question is worth asking out loud and discussing as a group.
  • Give children problems to solve. Resist the urge to fix everything. Ask them what they think. Let them sit with a hard question for a minute. Let them discover they’re more capable than either of you realized. The experience of “I did it” is one of the most regulating things in the world for a young nervous system.
  • Extend yourself the same grace you want to extend your child. You are also a nervous system doing its best. You are also allowed to be imperfect, in process, and figuring it out. The energy you bring to your own healing is the energy that radiates outward.

The Hardest Truth and the Most Hopeful One

The hardest part of parenting isn’t other grown-ups. Not really, even though it sure feels like it sometimes. It’s the mirror they hold up. The moments when someone else’s dysregulation activates something in us, and we have to decide whether to look at what just got activated, or look away.

The most hopeful truth I know is that nervous systems can change. Attachment patterns can shift. Cycles that have run for generations can be interrupted by one person who decides to do things differently. The research on neuroplasticity backs this up completely. What was wired in can be rewired, slowly, with intention and support and enough safe relationship to practice in.11

Our kiddos don’t need perfect parents. They need present ones. Regulated-enough ones. Adults who are willing to look at their own stuff, do the work, and stay curious about the small humans in their care.

That’s the most important thing we can pass down. Not perfect behavior or a managed, controlled, conflict-free childhood, but proof that healing is possible. That mistakes are survivable. That adults can be wrong and come back. That nervous systems can settle. That love doesn’t require perfection.

Research & Sources

  1. Bowlby J. A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. Basic Books, 1988.
  2. Nordahl D et al. Adult attachment style and maternal-infant bonding: the indirect path of parenting stress. BMC Psychology. 2020;8:58. PMC7278048
  3. Freeman SE et al. Parent emotion regulation difficulties statistically mediate the association between parental ACEs and child emotion regulation. Frontiers in Global Women’s Health. 2025;6:1587786. PMC12698609
  4. Casey BJ, Getz S, & Galván A. The adolescent brain. Developmental Review. 2008;28(1):62–77
  5. Swider-Cios E et al. Screen on = development off? A systematic scoping review. Frontiers in Developmental Psychology. 2024. frontiersin.org
  6. Cerniglia L et al. Journal of Early Childhood Research, 2021;19(2):145–160.
  7. Panjeti-Madan VN and Ranganathan P. Impact of Screen Time on Children’s Development. MDPI Multimodal Technologies and Interaction. 2023;7(5):52. mdpi.com
  8. Vigdal JS and Brønnick KK. A Systematic Review of Helicopter Parenting and Its Relationship with Anxiety and Depression. Frontiers in Psychology. 2022;13:872981. PMC9176408
  9. Zhang R and Wang Z. Effects of Helicopter Parenting, Tiger Parenting and Inhibitory Control on the Development of Children’s Anxiety and Depressive Symptoms. PubMed. 2024. PMID 38401004
  10. Meuwissen AS and Carlson SM. An experimental study of the effects of autonomy support on preschoolers’ self-regulation. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology. 2019;60:11–23. ScienceDirect
  11. Siegel DJ. The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. 3rd ed. Guilford Press, 2020.