If you’re reading this, you’re probably someone who already accepts that every parent has limits. Some days the to-do list is so long that there isn’t much room left to notice what’s going on inside your child, let alone inside yourself.
Maybe your 7-year-old comes home with a note from school about their behavior. You feel embarrassed, and your stress climbs fast. Instead of slowing down and calming yourself first, you launch into a lecture about behaving at school and start pressing for a play-by-play of exactly what happened.
Or maybe your preteen or teenager talks back, yells, and slams the bedroom door. In the heat of the moment, it’s easy to forget that the adolescent brain is still under construction. The emotional centers are running at full volume while the parts responsible for impulse control and planning are still catching up. So you yell back and take away privileges on the spot. Your teen, already overwhelmed and feeling misunderstood, shuts down even further.
Both of these are ruptures, moments when the parent-child relationship gets strained. They’re uncomfortable, but they also hold useful information for us.
If your child is in play therapy and you’ve been involved in the process, you’ve probably heard your child’s therapist talk about what kids need at different stages of development. For our purposes here, the most important piece is this: children learn emotional regulation largely by watching how the adults around them handle their own big feelings.
This isn’t a new idea, and it isn’t unique to people. Ducklings imprint on their caregiver almost as soon as they hatch and rely on that caregiver to make sense of themselves and the world around them. Children do something similar over a much longer stretch of time. From early childhood through adolescence, they’re paying attention to how their parents respond when things get hard. Coping with adversity is a learned skill, and we’re a big part of where they learn it.
So what can we do differently in those two scenarios?
Dr. Garry Landreth, whose work is foundational to Child-Centered Play Therapy, puts it this way: “What is most important is not what you do, but what you do after what you have done.”
This idea invites parents to accept their own limitations and use those moments to show their child what repair looks like. When you come back after losing your temper and admit where you went wrong, you’re putting your relationship with your child ahead of correcting their behavior. You’re meeting them where they are and loving them in the middle of a hard moment.
Repair doesn’t mean dropping the boundary or acting like the conflict never happened. The behavior still matters, and you can still talk about it. You just own your part first. With your younger child, that might sound like, “I was really upset when I heard about school today, and I started lecturing you before I even asked what happened. I’m sorry. When you’re ready, I’d like to hear your side.” With your teen, it might be, “I yelled back when you slammed the door, and that’s not how I want to handle things. We still need to talk about what happened, but let’s do it once we’ve both cooled off.”
Blowups are going to happen, on your side and on your child’s. The story doesn’t have to end there. Once you’ve calmed your heart and let some of the tension go, returning to your child to reconnect sends a powerful message: your love for them doesn’t come with conditions.
When your child watches you apologize and take ownership of a mistake, they’re learning how to take responsibility for their own. Your child doesn’t need a perfect parent, and a perfect parent wouldn’t actually help them much. What helps is a parent who is willing to come back.
If your family is stuck in a cycle of blowups and you’d like support, that’s a big part of what we do at Lily Pad Child & Adolescent Counseling. Our child therapists in Frisco use Child-Centered Play Therapy with kids and Child-Parent Relationship Therapy (CPRT) with parents, so you’re learning alongside your child instead of watching from the waiting room. We work with families in Frisco and nearby communities like Prosper, Plano, and Little Elm, and we’d be glad to talk with you about whether play therapy or parent coaching is a good fit.
A place where children are loved exactly as they are.
Thank you for reading,
Gabrielle Cardenas, M.S., LPC-A
