I broke my rule today and ventured into Recrafted Self’s for you page. Predictably, my ADHD brain sent me down a rabbit hole, and I spent the bulk of my morning laughing at relatable parenting reels and spamming my group chat.
One video in particular stuck with me, but it wasn’t funny as much as it was enlightening.
A mother stands at the front door telling her children that it’s time to leave. As she stands there waiting for them to get their shoes on, she relaxes her body as she tells herself, “It’s not an emergency.”
The reel continues with a montage of daily activities with her young children. When she finds herself walking at a hurried pace with her daughter leisurely strolling behind her, she once again reminds herself, “It’s not an emergency,” and chooses to wait kindly instead of nagging.
I couldn’t help but think of myself last week. I was standing by the front door exasperated waiting for my seven-year-old to locate his sneakers.
“I don’t have time for this! Why are they allergic to putting their shoes in the bins by the front door,” I lamented to myself.
Where was I in such a hurry to go?
My front yard to do my daily 5-minute weed pulling session.
In my defense, I had muffins in the oven, and I didn’t want to shortchange the kids on their time in the front yard.
Ok, fine…I still have a long way to go in this whole patience thing.
Given the amount of engagement on that Instagram reel, though, I’d venture to say I’m in good company.
Were you warned about the time suck that is waiting for kids to put on their shoes? Because I certainly wasn’t, and it’s incredibly effective at making my patience evaporate in ten seconds or less.
Of all the qualities we’ve explored so far, patience is the quality most likely to run short when dealing with the waiting, noise, messes, and general chaos that children inject into our daily routine.
Still, it just might be the most vital since it makes parenting with love, joy, and kindness exponentially easier.
In today’s post, we’ll explore how patient parenting starts from the inside out.
Patience With Yourself
Having a baby is an all-around joyful experience for most of us, but that joy is often dimmed fairly early by parental guilt.
I didn’t breastfeed my baby long enough.
My baby spends more time at daycare than at home with me.
I know I should be enjoying every moment of them being so little—but I’m not.
These concerns might seem minor on the surface, but they grow more and more complex as children become more independent.
For instance, another moment that stood out to me during my rogue Instagram scrolling session was a comment left by a mother of 1-year-old twins on a video about yelling. Her husband told her that she was being negative and yelling at her toddlers all the time, and he was worried about the environment they were being raised in.
She expressed how hurtful his comments were to her. She knows it isn’t right to yell, but she feels really overwhelmed chasing around two toddlers all day.
A new source of guilt has entered the chat: losing patience with our little bundles of joy.
I don’t know about you, but every time I went in for the initial ultrasound of my babies I was TERRIFIED of finding out I was expecting multiples.
It’s hard enough chasing after a single 1-year-old. I can’t imagine how much anxiety people experience with TWO. Are we really surprised this poor woman is having a hard time maintaining her cool?
Yes, in a perfect world, we would NEVER yell at our children, but we don’t live in that world.
There is not a single parent on this earth who can say they’ve never made a mistake. At some point, we all get so stressed out that the part of our brain that acts like the adult in the room tags in the amygdala.
The nervous system has enough smoke for anyone or anything that threatens its sense of safety, and it really doesn’t care if the threat is less than 3-feet-tall.
Is this license for us to unleash our wrath on our children any time we get the urge?
Absolutely not, but it is permission to let go of disproportionate guilt and shame that arises when we let our emotions get the best of us.
Many of us are unlearning parenting practices that were normalized in our own upbringing, and that takes time.
If we beat ourselves up for every moment we’re less than gentle, we can become defeated and convince ourselves that we’re just a bad parent.
As I said in last week’s post, we never really fail until we stop trying to improve ourselves.
If we want to succeed in positive parenting, we not only need to practice patience with our children, but ourselves as well.
You had a bad moment. Does that negate all the other positive moments of the past, and what’s stopping you from moving forward on a high note?
One of my favorite TED Talks that I link every chance I get is by Dr. Becky Kennedy. According to her, the single most important parenting strategy is repair—not gentle parenting perfection.
When we inevitably lose patience with our children and let our amygdala run wild, the best thing we can do is offer a humble apology and create a moment of connection.
Taking accountability for our dysregulated responses sets an excellent example, but even more important is the message it conveys about a child’s worth.
It teaches them that our emotional wellness journey never really ends. We’re still learning to self-regulate right alongside them because life isn’t easy. There are going to be times when we struggle to adapt to a particular set of circumstances, but we can always take responsibility for our actions and turn those moments into lessons that help us make better choices.
Listen to this when you worry that you can’t come back from a hard moment.
Patience With the Chaos (And the Kids Who Create It)
Being patient with ourselves is one thing, but patience when it comes to our children is a totally different scenario.
While our nervous system can cause our brain to go rogue at times, we ultimately have control over our thoughts and actions and can choose to make a constructive choice—though it isn’t always the easiest thing in the world.
The same cannot be said for a child. As much as we want them to be little mini-me’s at times, the reality is that they have the same amount of free will that we do.
We can guide them to positive behaviors, but we ultimately have zero control over what they choose to do in the end.
We’ve also taken many more trips around the sun than they have, so we know how we should conduct ourselves in society.
Our mistakes tend to be greatest hits that have a measure of relatability, but where do we even begin when it comes to the ill-advised decisions that children make?
Perhaps it’s just me, but my kids make decisions so chaotic and perplexing that a new ick or anxiety seems to unlock daily for me and my husband.
Though, my brother—a father of three boys—reports the same phenomena on his end, so maybe I’m not so unique after all.
Still, one thing I try to remind him and myself when we have our commiseration sessions is that our kids don’t have very many rodeos under their belt yet. How are they supposed to know the hazards of half the stuff they do if we haven’t told them?
Not because we’re too lazy to teach them—some of this stuff we just did not fathom having to explain to someone else.
However, if we time travel to our own childhood, I’m sure there is something we did that wasn’t on our parents’ bingo card.
For my mother and father, it was their oldest child using an old key from the junk drawer and an electrical socket to take her siblings on an epic cross-country road trip.
Was I trying to give them—and myself for that matter—a heart attack?
No. I just wanted to imitate something I saw them do numerous times. My Kindergarten teacher just hadn’t gotten around to teaching us the science of electrical currents and conductors yet.
Sometimes it really can feel like our children are going out of their way to shave years off our lives, and that can be alarming to the part of our brain that was designed to keep those years intact.
When we feel ourselves gearing up for a meltdown over something nonsensical, we need to soothe our nervous system with a reminder that these little humans are still learning. Most of the time they aren’t trying to make our lives more difficult. They simply do not know any better, and how can we fault them for that?
They don’t know what they don’t know, and difficult moments are opportunities for us to teach.
In a warped way, we should be thankful they got to learn the lesson from us and not someone else—or the laws of physics.
It also helps for us to find the humor in these situations when possible. Very rarely are any of them an actual emergency. They’re often minor annoyances in the grand schemes of things.
Keeping this in mind can help us redirect them in ways that are productive and proportionate.
How to Discipline Kids Without Yelling or Spanking
Being patient with our children doesn’t mean taking our hands off the wheel when it comes to discipline. The goal is to guide their behavior with intention and respect instead of reacting impulsively.
Whenever the topic of yelling or spanking comes up, you will see at least one person comment, “My parents disciplined me that way, and I turned out fine.”
Truth be told, I used to be one of those people, but that was before my mental health issues became impossible to ignore.
The negative consequences aren’t just anecdotal. A study published in 2022 concluded that harsh disciplinary methods such as spanking and yelling “may have detrimental effects on children’s mental health but also that children presenting with behavioral issues may place additional strain on maternal parenting behaviors.”
These parenting methods that were normalized during our childhood create a cycle of negativity. The child misbehaves, the parent reacts harshly, the child goes into fight-or-flight and escalates, the parent also escalates, and what started out as a moment of redirection devolves into a tumultuous power struggle.
The best way to break this pattern of behavior is to learn how to regulate our own emotions first.
In previous posts, I’ve discussed the importance of understanding our physical responses to our emotions and specific ways to reassure our nervous system that we aren’t in real danger.
Honestly, there’s no better time to put those strategies into practice than the moment an act of defiance or mischief puts our patience to the test.
Self-regulation doesn’t just keep our prefrontal cortex in the driver seat. It also models healthy coping techniques for the child. The more we show them how to remain calm when provoked, the more likely they are to do it themselves over time.
This requires patience, though, because the change won’t happen overnight.
As you know very well as a parent, every developmental stage is different and certain ones are more challenging than others.
Unfortunately, a toddler is going to have a harder time following our lead than a 10-year-old who’s a little further along in brain development.
Still, we need to view every moment we choose self-regulation and patience as an investment that compounds.
Imagine the emotional intelligence of a person who grows up in a home where inner calm was the norm—not conflict.
They know how to communicate boundaries in a clear, non-confrontational manner and navigate conflict without hostility.
They feel safe being honest about their feelings and experiences because their parents approached them with curiosity instead of judgment.
They’re confident in taking up space because they were always dignified as individuals with agency.
That’s what motivated most of us to walk a path so vastly different from the generations before us. We didn’t bring children into this world to burden them with anxiety and self-doubt.
The good news is we don’t need to rely on our example alone to correct a child’s behavior. Natural and logical consequences can also be effective teaching tools.
For example, right now we are making over our weekly meal plan to reflect a more 80/20 lifestyle—with the majority of our food choices being nutritionally dense while the others are more dopamine dense.
Admittedly, my 7-year-old isn’t the biggest fan. Last night, I made beef and broccoli, and he refused to eat it.
“Well, bud, if you don’t eat this now, you’re going to be really hungry later,” my husband pointed out matter-of-factly.
My son couldn’t have chosen a worse time to turn his nose up at a hot meal.
T’was the night before payday,
And not in the house
Were cookies—not even some chips,
Nor a crumb for a mouse.
He did, in fact, wake up hungry and had to wait for me to buy things for breakfast.
Could we have shielded him from this outcome by bullying him to eat every bite?
Sure, but his stomach managed to get the point across in a way that was impossible to ignore.
Do we think this problem is solved? Not yet, but it will be if we’re consistent.
If we give in and hand him a bag of potato chips or crackers as sustenance, he’ll only learn to wait things out until we get antsy and bend to his will.
Ask me how I know.
Positive discipline, like most worthwhile endeavors, takes time. If we want to succeed, we need to stay the course and trust the process.
That said, there are times when an adjustment is necessary.
However, before we toss certain strategies out of our toolbag, we want to make sure we’ve been using them effectively and given them enough time to work.
Next Steps for Your Self-Discovery Journey
If you’d like to join me in making patience a daily practice this month, here are some resources to help you get started.
Subscribe to receive your free Patience Readiness Toolkit, designed to help you explore this month’s theme at your own pace.
Gentle Ways to Apply This:
- Create moments of connection after hard moments with your child. This free Parent Repair script card takes the guesswork out of it.
- Pause before you react to your child’s behavior. Use this free Parent’s Reality-Check Card, as a gentle guide.
- Model healthy self-regulation skills and let natural or logical consequences do the teaching when appropriate. This free Positive Discipline Response Cheat Sheet printable gives you a ready-to-use calm response and a natural or logical consequence for ten of the most common triggering parenting scenarios.
Patience Is the Backbone
Patience is the backbone of positive parenting. It helps us persevere in unlearning harsh disciplinary tactics—despite our nervous system’s preference for fight or flight.
It gives us the insight to view a child’s misstep as a product of inexperience—not a personal challenge.
It moves us to use constructive forms of discipline consistently without expecting a total transformation overnight.
When we practice patience with our children, they learn that they don’t need to be perfect to be loved unconditionally.
If this post resonates with you, please share it with anyone who needs a reminder that no parent is perfect.
What are your parenting pain points, and what strategies have you tried to address them?
Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. If you’d like to receive an email notification when the next post goes live, you can subscribe using the form below. Next week we’ll explore how patience helps us maintain healthy relationships with our partners, friends, colleagues, and family members.
Keep it kind, respectful, and focused on self-love and growth—let’s make this a safe, uplifting space. 🌿