The Morning Meltdown: When Parenting Anger Takes Over
It’s 7:30 AM. Two kids are in the car in their car seats and one child has just thrown off their shoes and socks and ran away from me. My body fills with rage and anger. I feel the pressure of the clock ticking. I need to get my kids to preschool. Get them dropped off and then get to work before my first clients arrive.
Mornings are never easy but this morning has taken a turn for the worse. I storm around the house, unsure what to do with myself or how to get my child into the car. I feel so much irritation towards them. I want them to just get their shoes on and get them in the car. It doesn’t seem like anything I do from a place of anger is going to go well but I feel trapped because I’m the only one there to manage the situation.
Mornings like these were not uncommon with three kids under the age of four. I’m going to go back in time and give myself and you the tools that I didn’t have then. It may seem counterintuitive, but I needed to give myself space to allow myself to be angry and overwhelmed.
When we allow our emotions to be present, we can turn towards our emotions. This gives us the opportunity to better understand our emotions, where they are coming from, and be responsive to ourselves in these difficult trying moments with our kids.
The Power of Allow: Making Space for Your Emotions
Allow comes from the acronym RAIN.
RAIN is an acronym I use to help me remember Recognize, Allow, Interconnected* and Need. (This is my spin on the self-compassion teachings of psychologist Tara Brach.) Today, we are just going to focus on the benefits of allow.
Let’s go back to this morning when you’re trying to get out the door and one of your kids is having a difficult morning and throws their shoes and socks off. I would venture to guess that 99% of parents would feel some mix of anger, frustration, and overwhelm in situations like this. As we parents know, these are very common in day-to-day life with kids.
As soon as we begin to feel anger, frustration, and overwhelmed when we are in a difficult moment with our children, a very common next response is to judge ourselves. We might think to ourselves,
What’s wrong with me that I get so upset?
Why can’t I keep my s*#@ together to help my kids get ready in the morning?
Why can’t I respond calmer? Why can’t I be calmer?
Why can’t I be more like … (fill in the blank parent who would never yell, get upset, or lose their patience with their kids)?
Essentially, we are kicking ourselves when we are down. Not surprisingly our internal response of self-criticism just makes us feel worse. The more down on ourselves we get the more difficult it is to find our calm and get unstuck.
Self-Criticism: Why Judging Yourself Makes It Worse
This is why the simple suggestion allow has the potential to be so powerful in moments like these. Let’s take a closer look at how we can change our internal response to be more supportive and help us shift out of a difficult state of mind more quickly. Take yourself back to the moment you’re sitting at the door helping your child finish putting on their shoes and socks while your other two kids are in the car waiting and your child decides to throw their socks and shoes off and run away. Again, anger fills your body. You feel tense and hot all over or you feel overwhelmed, heavy, and defeated.
Can you allow your difficult emotions to be present? You might say as meditation teacher Jeff Warren offers, “Welcome to the party anger.” Or “Welcome to the party overwhelm.” I love this statement because it truly embodies the idea of welcoming difficult emotions into our experience and awareness versus trying to push them away or judging them.
Transforming Your Anger: The “Welcome to the Party” Mindset
I like to take this a step further. When you say to yourself, “Welcome to the party anger” you can picture yourself outside around a campfire. I chose this scene because I love going camping with my family. I love being outdoors. Being outside around a campfire feels peaceful and calm.
Your image might be some place different but feel free to borrow mine for now. When you picture saying, “Welcome” to your anger, imagine an overdramatized angry version of yourself. You might picture yourself with a scowl on your face, stomping around, arms crossed, not wanting to talk to anybody angry, angry, angry. And you say to this angry part of you, “Welcome.” You might offer this angry part a cup of tea and a blanket to put around them. Maybe they angrily sit down, arms crossed near the campfire or maybe they stomp around the campfire.
Either way is fine because anger is just an emotion. It doesn’t have to control us. It just is. We can allow our anger to be present; after all, it’s very reasonable to be angry in this frustrating situation, while another part of us is calm and welcoming.
From Reactivity to Calm: Creating Space to Respond
A shorter version of this might sound like,
It’s normal to be angry. Lots of parents would be angry in this situation. It’s reasonable for me to be angry right now.
Allow, allow, allow. From this space, you can take a breath. This internal response not only shifts us out of self-criticism or shutting down but also creates space. Responding to ourselves in this welcoming, gentle manner slows down our reactivity and gives us time to regain our calm.
Now that we’ve taken a breath we can check in with our little one who ran away. We might have even created a little space to be silly with them or find the calm inside to set a loving limit. Either way, we are far more likely to respond to our little one in a way that we feel good about versus in a way that we will regret later.
Thought for the Day: Parenting Tools for Tough Moments
Responding to our kids calmly in our toughest parenting moments can be extraordinarily challenging. For myself and most parents I’ve talked to when there is the pressure of time the intensity of the situation is magnified. It is important that we give ourselves every tool at our disposal so that we can regain or maintain our calm, no matter what our children throw at us. Allow is especially important because it helps us stay out of self-criticism. Parenting is hard enough as it is without us also beating ourselves up for every perceived mistake we make.
Quick Win: Your Reminder to Stay Compassionate
Write yourself a note and keep it somewhere that you can easily see. If moments like these are common in your household, you might keep your note in the car or on the door headed outside. On the note, write Welcome to the party, anger. “It’s normal to be angry. Lots of parents would be angry in this situation. It’s reasonable for me to be angry right now.”
If you need more help download my free Guided Pause audio to use in moments like these. In this guided pause I will walk you through calming your own brain to shift out of reactivity and into a grounded response. I also have an entire guided meditation on Welcome to the Campfire included in my Guided Meditations for Parents.
You can do this and we are all in it together.
A reminder: This content is intended for educational purposes only and should not be used as a replacement for private psychotherapy services. Compassionate Heart Mindful Life does not provide psychotherapy services in any capacity.
I am a therapist but I am not your therapist and this is not therapy and should not be a substitute for mental health treatment. If you need mental health treatment please find a qualified professional in your area.
Thank you so much for listening. Be Well!
*My variation changes Brach’s original “I for Investigate” and uses “Interconnected” to remind us of our common humanity.