Your Child’s Big Feelings – Why They Trigger You and What to Do
- Mar 20
- 10 min read
Constance Lewis is a Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner, Certified Fertility & Postpartum Coach, Pediatric Sleep Consultant, and children’s book author. Her passion is educating, supporting, and empowering women and families from fertility to parenthood. She provides holistic care, emotional support, and personalized coaching.
Let me paint you a picture. Your child has just melted down in the middle of a grocery store or at the dinner table, or in the car, or really anywhere that is not convenient, which is to say, everywhere. They are crying. Wailing, maybe. Perhaps dramatically draped across the floor. And something inside you tightens. Your jaw clenches. Your heart rate spikes. You feel an almost uncontrollable urge to fix it, stop it, or if you are being really honest with yourself, make it go away.
That discomfort you feel? It is not a character flaw. It is not proof that you are a bad parent. It is biology. It is your own nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do, protect you from perceived threat. The problem is, your child's emotions are not a threat. They just feel like one.
I have been there. I have sat across from a sobbing child thinking, 'What do I do? How do I fix this?' And I have had to do the uncomfortable work of realizing that the question itself was the problem. Feelings do not need to be fixed. They need to be felt and witnessed. But first, we need to understand why we resist that so deeply.
The uncomfortable truth about your discomfort
When our children become emotionally dysregulated, crying, raging, shutting down, our brains interpret their distress as a signal that something is wrong and that we are responsible for fixing it. This is especially true for mothers.
Neuroscience gives us a fascinating window into this. Research on parental brain responses shows that mothers and fathers actually respond differently to their children's emotional cues and both responses, while well-intentioned, can get in the way of true emotional attunement.
In mothers, the brain's threat-response system, particularly the amygdala, tends to activate strongly when a child is in distress. The caregiving circuitry lights up alongside it, creating an almost urgent pull toward action. This is why so many mothers describe the feeling of their child's tears as physically painful. It is not metaphor, the same neural networks involved in our own pain experience are partially activated when we witness the suffering of someone we love. Mothers are wired, in many ways, to feel their children's pain as their own.
Fathers, meanwhile, often show a stronger activation in regions associated with problem-solving and goal-directed behavior when their children are upset. Where a mother's nervous system screams 'fix the feeling,' a father's may say 'fix the situation.' Neither approach automatically creates the space a dysregulated child actually needs, which is presence, not solutions.
The instinct to fix is rooted in love. But it is also rooted in our own discomfort. When we rush to soothe, distract, or correct our child's emotional experience, we are often and if we are being honest, trying to regulate ourselves. A child who is crying makes us feel helpless. And helplessness is one of the hardest feelings for capable, loving parents to tolerate.
The fixer's trap
I remember a moment when my child came in from playing outside with the neighborhood kids absolutely devastated about an argument that ended in screaming. She is 5 years old. Before they had even finished the sentence, my mind was already three steps ahead and planning how I could talk to the other kid, offering scripts they could use to resolve the situation, even dramatically thinking of suggesting that maybe she stay away from this kid in the neighborhood from now on. I was in full fix-it mode.
My child looked at me and said, 'Mom, I still want to play with this friend, you're not listening.' She was right. I was not listening. I was managing my anxiety, my need to feel useful, my discomfort at seeing them in pain.
The fixer's trap is seductive because it looks like good parenting from the outside. We look engaged, proactive, and loving. But underneath it, the message our children receive is, 'Your feelings are a problem to be solved,' or worse, 'Your feelings make me uncomfortable, so let's make them stop.'
Over time, children who are chronically 'fixed' learn to hide their big emotions not because they no longer have them, but because they have learned those feelings are unwelcome. They stop bringing their pain to the people who love them most. This is perhaps the most heartbreaking unintended consequence of our discomfort.
5 steps to move from reactive to receptive
The good news is that the nervous system is not fixed. It is plastic, trainable, and responsive. You can learn at any age, at any stage of parenting to meet your child's emotions from a calmer, more regulated place. Here is how:
Step 1: Notice your own body first
Before you can be present for your child, you need to know where you are. When your child becomes dysregulated, pause even for three seconds and do a quick internal scan. This is the hardest part, even picking up that you are feeling uncomfortable. Where is the tension in your body? Is your chest tight? Are your shoulders up near your ears? Is your breath shallow?
This is not navel-gazing. This is neuroscience. The body is the first place the stress response lands, and if you do not catch it there, it will show up in your words, your tone, and your facial expression, all of which your child is reading constantly. Children are exquisitely attuned to their caregivers' nervous systems, far more than we realize.
Place your fingertips on one side of your neck as if you were checking your pulse. Count the rate in your head, or out loud. Then take a few slow deep breaths. This activates the vagus nerve the body's built-in brake pedal and begins to shift you out of fight-or-flight and into a state where connection is possible. And counting out loud allows time for your brain to catch up your body.
Step 2: Ask yourself, is this personal?
This is one of the most powerful questions you can ask yourself in the heat of a parenting moment, Is what my child is feeling actually about me?
Usually, the answer is no. A child who is screaming that they hate you is not conducting a performance review. A child who collapses in a heap because you gave them the wrong color cup is not being manipulative. They are overwhelmed. Their regulating part of the brain has gone offline, and they are being run entirely by their limbic system. They are, neurologically speaking, not capable of logic or reason in that moment.
When we take our children's emotional outbursts personally, we join them in dysregulation and then two nervous systems are in chaos. When we remind ourselves it is not personal, we create just enough emotional distance to stay steady.
Ask yourself, What does my child need right now? Not what do they deserve, not what should they learn, not what I am going to say about this later, just what do they need in this moment? Almost always, the answer is to feel less alone.
Step 3: Mirror the feeling, not the chaos
There is a difference between matching your child's emotional intensity and acknowledging it. Matching it is raising your voice, escalating your own anxiety, expressing frustration and that pours fuel on the fire. Acknowledging it extinguishes some of the heat.
Try reflecting back what you observe, simply and without judgment, 'You seem really frustrated right now.' 'That really hurt your feelings.' 'You're so disappointed.' You do not need to solve anything. You do not need to explain, defend, redirect, or teach. You just need to name what they are feeling in a calm voice, and let them know you see them.
This works because the brain calms down faster when it feels understood. Naming an emotion activates the prefrontal cortex and begins to bring the limbic system back into balance. You are not just being kind. You are doing neuroscience.
Naming emotions alone, however, is not the final task. You will need to mirror the feelings. This part can feel silly or not adultlike to you when you first start. But trust me when I say, it must live in your body too. You are not just speaking the feeling back to them, you are modeling it physically, so they can see their inner world reflected in someone they trust. That reflection is what tells the nervous system, I am not alone in this. Someone gets it.
In practice, this looks different depending on what your child is feeling. If they are really mad, stomping and seething and shaking with frustration. Try stopping your whole body like an earthquake has just hit. You are not mimicking them or being theatrical. You are communicating, wordlessly, that their anger has landed with you. That it has not scared you away.
If they are sad, crumpled, quiet, or sobbing into the carpet, try reaching for a stuffed animal and holding it close, or wrapping yourself up, or curling your own body slightly inward. Sadness asks to be held, and when a child is too dysregulated to accept a hug from you directly, watching you offer that tenderness to something soft tells them the same thing, gentleness is available here. You are safe to fall apart a little.
And if the feeling is big and pressurized, the kind that needs to go somewhere, grab a pillow and scream into it. Yes, really. Do it in front of them. Let them see that big feelings have an outlet, that grown-ups have them too, and that expressing them does not break anything. You are not making a scene. You are giving them a map for what to do with emotion that has nowhere to go. Children learn emotional regulation the same way they learn everything else, by watching someone they love do it first. Your body is the lesson plan.
Step 4: Resist the fix, offer presence instead
This is often the hardest step, because doing less feels like failing. But here is the reframe, staying present without fixing is not passive. It is one of the most active, disciplined things a parent can do. When your child is in the depths of a feeling, they do not need a solution. They need a safe person to ride it out with them, a regulated, steady presence that communicates through body language and tone that this feeling is survivable. That you are not scared of it. That you are not going anywhere.
Once you are regulated yourself and have mirrored and molded their emotions, let it ride. Try sitting near them, not hovering, but close. Lower your body to their level if you can. Soften your face. Breathe slowly and audibly. These are not small gestures. They are co-regulation in action, and they work because the human nervous system is designed to borrow calm from the nervous systems around it.
Save the lesson, the boundary, the conversation for after the storm has passed. When the little brain is back online when they are calm and you are calm. This is when learning happens. Not in the middle of the flood.
Step 5: Do your own work
Here is the part no one wants to talk about, our children's emotions are often so uncomfortable because they trigger something unresolved in us. The child who cries about a lost toy may be activating your own memories of grief that was never witnessed. The child who rages may be tapping into your own unexpressed anger. The child who shuts down may be mirroring the way you learned to cope.
I have found that my children’s emotions that trigger me the most come from something painful inside. This is how intergenerational patterns work, they are not conscious choices, they are nervous system defaults, passed down through the way we were parented and the way their parents were parented before them.
The most profound parenting work I have ever done has not been in the moments with my children but it has been in the quiet work of asking myself, what emotions were not welcome in my childhood? Whose feelings did I learn to manage? What did I come to believe big emotions meant about me?
Every time I have been triggered by my childe’s big emotions, I journal about it. This helps me get a true understanding of why. Also having an honest conversation with someone who has a neutral opinion about my child’s emotions helps as well. Because you cannot give your child what you were never given, until you begin to give it to yourself first.
Receptive over reactive – A daily practice
Moving from reactive to receptive is not a destination, it is a practice. There will be days you nail it, when you sit calmly next to a weeping child and feel genuinely present and unrattled. And there will be days when you lose it, when you snap or shut down or escape into your phone because you simply cannot hold one more big feeling.
Both are part of being human. The goal is not perfection, it is repair. The ability to come back after a hard moment, to say 'I got overwhelmed, and I am sorry,' is one of the greatest gifts you can give a child. It shows them that relationships can survive conflict, that adults make mistakes too, and that love does not have to be earned by being emotionally tidy.
The nervous system learns through repetition. Every time you pause before reacting, every time you choose presence over fixing, every time you breathe through your own discomfort instead of outsourcing the management of it onto your child, you are literally rewiring your brain. You are building new neural pathways. And your child's nervous system, which is still being shaped in real time, is learning from yours.
You are not just helping them through the hard feelings. You are teaching them what feelings are for, what to do with them, and whether they are safe to have. That lesson will live in their bodies long after they have forgotten the specific meltdown, the argument, or the Tuesday afternoon that felt impossible.
Your discomfort with their feelings does not make you a bad parent. It makes you a human one. The only question is whether you are willing to get curious about it and do something different.
Want to go deeper?
Visit Colorful Feelings Books to explore more resources, tools, and support for navigating the full rainbow of emotions for yourself or the little ones in your life.
Interested in bringing this message to your school, organization, or event? I'd love to speak with your community! Reach out through the website to inquire about speaking engagements.
Read more from Constance Lewis
Constance Lewis, Children's Book Author, Fertility Coach
Constance Lewis is a leader in women’s health, fertility, and children's emotional wellness. After a six-year infertility journey marked by miscarriages and IVF, she developed a holistic method to help women heal their bodies, regulate their hormones, and restore self-trust. She is the founder of the Empowered Women’s Health & Fertility Coaching programs and a Certified Pediatric Sleep Consultant. Constance is also the co-author of Miles and the Colorful Capes of Feelings, inspired by her son’s seizure disorder and brain surgery at age six. Her mission: to empower women and families to heal, connect, and thrive—from fertility to parenthood and beyond.
