That sentence can feel empowering. It can also feel like one more impossible standard.
If my child’s nervous system is affected by mine, does that mean every meltdown is my fault? Do I have to sound like a meditation app while someone is screaming two feet from my face?
No.
Children develop regulation in relationships. Parents help by maintaining, or returning to, a steadier state while supporting the child’s regulation. Research on parenting describes this as a two-person process: adults regulate their own emotions while helping children with theirs (1).
But co-regulation is not emotional perfection. It is not the absence of anger, fear or overwhelm. It is the practice of noticing what is happening in you so your reaction does not unknowingly pour fuel on the fire.
Sometimes “going first” looks like walking into another room and drinking a cold glass of water. Moving your nervous system away from theirs. Sometimes it looks like squeezing your hands as hard as you can and then releasing them with an exhale. Sometimes it’s saying “I’m super frustrated, I’m going to jump up and down to see if it will calm me down.”
This part of the work was humbling for me. I wanted the right script. What I often needed first was to notice the urgency in my own body, the tight jaw, racing thoughts and desperate feeling that I had to make the behavior stop immediately.
Our state changes what we can see. When I feel threatened, I am more likely to see defiance. When I have even a little more space, I may see a child whose capacity has run out.
The smallest pause counts. Feel your feet. Unclench your hands. Exhale longer than you inhale. Move your body farther from the noise if safety allows. Say one sentence instead of twelve.
You will not always go first. Sometimes your child’s nervous system will settle before yours. Sometimes neither of you will find calm until much later. The work is not to perform serenity. It is to keep building a path back.
Try this: Identify your earliest sign of escalation, not the explosion, but the first signal. What is one action you can take at that point?
