Emotional Regulation in Motherhood: What I Wish I Had Understood Earlier
When I became a mum, I knew that parenting would be hard. I wasn’t prepared for how difficult it could sometimes be to manage my own emotions while also trying to support my children with theirs.
I became a mother relatively young and didn’t have much family support around me. I was also living with ADHD, although I didn’t know that at the time. Looking back, I can see how this affected things such as feeling overwhelmed, managing my attention, dealing with sensory overload and regulating my emotions when I was already tired or under pressure.
I had studied psychology and later trained as a teacher, so I understood child development and knew a lot about positive approaches to children’s behaviour. But knowing the theory and being able to use it when you’re exhausted, overwhelmed or dealing with a distressed child are very different things. I loved my children deeply, but there were still times when I found my own reactions difficult to manage. Sometimes something quite small could lead to a much stronger response in me than I expected, and for a long time I thought I just needed to be more patient. I understand those reactions differently now.
Parenting can bring up experiences from our own childhood
Over time, I became more interested in how our own childhood experiences can affect us as parents. The term ‘inner child’ is sometimes used to describe this, although I tend to think about it more broadly as the patterns, beliefs and responses we develop from our earlier experiences and carry with us into adulthood.
We all bring our own history into parenting. The way adults responded to our emotions when we were children, what happened when we made mistakes, how conflict was handled and whether we felt heard can all affect the way we respond to our own children. Often, we don’t realise this is happening.
A child refusing to put their shoes on is a fairly ordinary parenting situation. But if being ignored or feeling out of control is especially difficult for us, our reaction may be much stronger than we would expect from the situation itself. Understanding this made a difference to my own parenting because I began to recognise that sometimes my reaction wasn’t only about what my child was doing. The situation was bringing up something in me too.
Emotional regulation is more than staying calm
Emotional regulation is often described as staying calm, but there is more to it than that. It involves being able to notice what we are feeling, cope with that feeling and give ourselves enough space to choose how we respond rather than reacting straight away. It doesn’t mean suppressing anger, frustration or anxiety. These are normal emotions and they can tell us something useful about what is happening for us.
For me, this meant becoming much more aware of my triggers. I started noticing the physical signs that I was becoming overwhelmed, as well as the situations that seemed to bring up a stronger reaction. I also started thinking more about why certain things affected me more than others. This gradually changed the way I approached parenting. Rather than focusing all of my attention on my child’s behaviour, I started paying more attention to what was happening for both of us.
Our children’s behaviour affects us too
We talk a lot about looking for the need behind a child’s behaviour, and this is an important part of understanding children. But we also need to think about what is happening for the parent. A child may be dysregulated while their parent is also tired, overstimulated, anxious or already dealing with everything else that has happened that day. When this happens, it is naturally harder to respond calmly and thoughtfully.
Some behaviours can also be especially difficult for us. Your child shouting might immediately make you feel tense, while being ignored might make you angry. Noise, mess, whining, refusal or a child becoming very emotional may affect you more than other behaviours. These responses can happen very quickly, sometimes before we have even noticed what we are feeling.
Understanding our triggers doesn’t mean that we aren’t responsible for how we respond to our children. It just helps us make sense of what is happening and gives us a better chance of responding differently.
Children develop regulation through relationships
Our own emotional regulation matters because children develop their ability to regulate through their relationships with the adults who care for them. Young children cannot consistently manage strong emotions on their own because the parts of the brain involved in emotional regulation are still developing. They need adults to help them manage feelings and states that are too much for them to manage alone. This is what we mean by co-regulation.
When a child becomes overwhelmed, being with an adult who is able to stay reasonably regulated can help them gradually become calmer. Over time, being supported in this way helps children develop their own ability to regulate their emotions.
This doesn’t mean that we need to stay calm all the time. There will be times when we become dysregulated too, respond too sharply, misunderstand what our child needs or handle something differently from the way we would have liked. We can go back to our child, acknowledge what happened, apologise when we need to and reconnect. Children learn from this too. They learn that difficult moments can happen in relationships and that we can come back together afterwards.
The emotional side of motherhood is often overlooked
Looking back, I’m struck by how little I knew about this when I first became a mother. There was plenty of information about the practical side of caring for a baby and child, but very little about what parenting might bring up for me emotionally. There was little discussion about triggers, emotional regulation, sensory overload, parental anger or how our own experiences of being parented might affect the way we respond to our children.
These were things I came to understand through my own experience of motherhood and through the learning I did later. I think they are still missing from a lot of the support we give parents. We can give parents plenty of strategies for responding to children’s behaviour, but those strategies are much harder to use when the parent is already overwhelmed or dysregulated.
This is now an important part of my work
This is one of the reasons my work with mothers doesn’t focus only on their children’s behaviour. Understanding child development is important because knowing what a child can realistically manage at different ages helps us to have more realistic expectations and understand their behaviour better. But we also need to understand what is happening for the parent.
This might mean looking at why a certain behaviour feels so difficult, noticing what happens in your body when you start to feel overwhelmed, recognising situations that often trigger a strong response and working out what helps you have more capacity to respond in the way you would like. My trauma-informed and somatic work has added another layer to this by helping me understand more about how our past experiences and nervous system responses can affect the way we react in the present.
Regulation isn’t about being a perfect parent
I still have to pay attention to my own responses and triggers, and I don’t see emotional regulation as something we learn once and then get right all the time. Our ability to regulate changes depending on what else is going on in our lives. Most of us will find it harder when we’re exhausted, stressed, unwell, overstimulated or carrying too much, which is why we also need to look at what is happening in a parent’s life rather than seeing regulation as something they should just be able to do.
There will be times when we notice ourselves becoming overwhelmed and manage to respond differently. There will also be times when we realise afterwards that we didn’t handle something as well as we would have liked. Being able to think about what happened, understand our response and repair things with our child when we need to is part of this too.
Learning about my own emotional regulation has changed the way I understand parenting. Understanding our children and their behaviour is important, but we also need to understand our own responses and where they come from. I wish I had known more about this when I first became a mother, and it is now an important part of the support I offer other mums.
