Let’s start with an obvious statement: parenting is hard. Everyone knows that. But what too many people fail to ask are these extremely important questions: what is hard about parenting for me – and where do my parenting triggers come from?

Of course, parenting is hard: you become responsible for the emotional, physical, social, mental and spiritual well-being of a newborn (or child) who has an immature brain and nervous system and is completely dependent on you.

What sounds easy about that? Nothing.

Many parenting books and advice begin by focusing on a child where they are developmentally and how to support the child and/or family unit, which is very useful.

However, this should be the second or third important step in a sequence of steps taken on the long road of parenting, during which we learn how to create harmony, understanding and connection with our children.

The first crucial step is self-reflection.

I believe the two most important questions every parent needs to ask themselves are: “What is hard about this situation for me?” and: “Where do I need to grow as a parent?” (to make parenting less triggering and more enjoyable).

Why these questions? Because the parent is the one with the significantly more advanced and capable brain, fully formed nervous system, and history (possibly decades) of life experience that has shaped and molded them to be the person they are today.

The parent is ultimately the captain of the ship. Come calm seas or stormy waters (which will inevitably arise), the captain must know their strengths and vulnerabilities (aka, parenting triggers) to be the best prepared captain to sail them smoothly.

Parenting becomes far less triggering – and far more enjoyable, even during those stormy times – when you recognize what your parenting triggers are, understand where they came from, and feel supported in your journey to managing them.

I can personally attest to this, with all my shortcomings and foibles.

Understanding my own parenting triggers has been incredibly helpful and has allowed me (and continues to, as this growth doesn’t end) to become more like the parent I want to be.

Keep reading to learn:

1. What does it mean to be triggered in parenting?
2. Why can parenting be so triggering?
3. How understanding your past will help you grow as a parent
4. What is the most important question about your kid’s behaviour?
5. Why parenting is like gardening: a useful framework.
6. HOW to start changing your triggers and mental pathways (practical tips)

What does it mean to be triggered in parenting?

First, let’s define a trigger. The word “trigger” has been diluted in recent years due to it’s ubiquitous use describing any content that may bring up negative or unpleasant emotions.

More accurately, the word “trigger” is meant to warn a potential reader, listener, or conversation partner that what they were about to engage in could remind them of past trauma.

Literally, a trigger is defined as is a tiny mechanism or lever that is released to cause something to happen – in the case of emotions and for the purposes of this blog, a trigger is something (a noise, a word, a situation) that causes a deep and intense emotion to be released inside you.

When you are “triggered” by something, it means that your emotional response to certain things causes a stronger and more negative reaction in you than what is warranted by the situation.

Parenting triggers are deeply personal and tied to our own life experiences, beginning in infancy.

Our child’s behavior (e.g., hitting others), words (e.g., “I hate you” or “I don’t love you”), emotions (e.g., persistent crying or intense anger), or situations we find ourselves in with them can elicit strong responses – and the intensity with which we experience those responses can surprise us as parents.

Different stages of your children’s lives can bring out different triggers in you as a parent that were otherwise dormant.

Why is parenting so triggering?

Parenting can be really hard for all kinds of reasons. Not enough sleep, not enough support, not enough moments of peace or calmness… the list goes on.

Lacking sleep and support or feeling overstimulated and taxed can exacerbate our response to certain situations or behaviors, making us more susceptible to being triggered by them.

This is understandable.

Though parenting triggers are deeply personal and unique to each parent, in my clinical and personal experience, I have found common themes that underlie these triggers.

I’ll begin with a personal example I am not proud of, where I was triggered into fury.

Parenting is so hard sometimes: let me share an example

I took my son (3 y/o) and daughter (7 y/o) shopping because my other son needed pants; the majority of his pants had big holes in the knees (again). My little one, a seasoned runner, kept running away from me while I was looking for clothes. 

Given his track-record of attempting to leave places, after trying to explain to him that it wasn’t safe (for the umpteenth time) it left me no option but to either leave the store or carry him, since I didn’t bring a stroller. I chose to carry him, which he did not like, so in anger he attempted multiple times to pull my hair and scratch my face. 

It was earlier in the day, so though it was draining, I was regulated and therefore able to be direct and kind about what behaviour was okay / not okay. 

As I remained on the search for pants, my daughter also found some clothes she wanted to try on. My arms were getting tired so I would occasionally put my son down to see if he would stay close, but everytime he tried to run around the store and/or knock toys off the shelves – so I had to keep picking him up. 

I was becoming increasingly tired and drained. 

Fast forward to going home. My three-year old scratches his sister out of anger related to a different incident and leaves her in pain with marks on her body. My patience is dwindling but I keep trucking on.

Shortly after, I check my oldest son’s room, which he was supposed to clean, but he is angry and frustrated with me after I tell him it needs another do-over. He angrily snaps at me, “You should just go take a nap because you are being grumpy to everyone!”  

I am feeling very annoyed at this point, because the truth stings; I don’t want to be grumpy, I don’t want to be tired or constantly break-up fights.  

Then I walk into the kitchen and my three year old is calling his sister to do something I had told him she wasn’t allowed to do. 

And alas, the straw breaks the camel’s back; my tipping point of becoming furious. 

I pick up my son and storm to our bedroom, put him on our bed and yell at him about how his behaviour is not okay. 

He doesn’t look at me because my anger scares him.

And even in that moment, though I know I am in the wrong yelling, I am so mad and part of me feels entirely justified. 

Fortunately, in my fury, I know I need to take some physical space to calm down to get a handle on things. I storm into the nearby hallway, cover my face with my hands, and take some massive deep breaths. 

The shame washes over me and I feel like a terrible mother. 

I start to unwind and calm down. 

My perspective starts to clear again. I can now see how in the wrong I was; he is three years old and I am over three decades older than him. 

Let’s debrief this experience. This situation illustrates how cumulative stressors can lead to a trigger response

What happens after a parent meltdown?

I am not proud of these interactions. 

I apologized and repaired with my son after acknowledging and empathizing with how I scared him and what I had done was wrong. He let me hold as I told him how sorry I was and that he was a good kid, who had just made some bad choices that I reacted to poorly, and I needed to find a way to help him better. 

Though we repaired, the shame hung onto me for days, with my inner critic whispering, 

• “How could you do that to your precious son?” 
• “What type of mother are you?” 
• “You should know better, what is wrong with you?” 

I know I am not alone in these stories. And if you have been there yourself, you are not alone either. 

As parents, we all have our moments of sub-par parenting where we become tired, or worn down, triggered or feel disrespected, or diminished as people and we react instead of respond.

I fleshed out my story above to illustrate what happened at the end-point; me yelling at my son had roots that tied back to a beginning that started way earlier in the day and continued to build throughout the day. 

I had needed a time-out earlier in the day: I should have taken 5 minutes to stand outside with the wind or rain in my face to ground myself and put life into perspective.

I start replaying everything I could have done differently, sooner. I could have left the store earlier instead of just pushing through getting more annoyed and tired at my 3-year old and come back another day with a stroller.

I needed to be reminded that kids (especially 3 year olds) act like this because they don’t care about my agenda of “to-dos”. 

Kids are kids, not adults – they’re not supposed to care about to-do lists. 

The list could go on about the things I should have done differently, with the point being that I needed to be curious about what was going on for me and what I needed to learn from this experience. 

Be curious about the story you are telling yourself in the hard moments

If we don’t take the time to self-reflect we will stay stuck in loops of reacting (and over-reacting), parenting in ways that we actually don’t want to and make us feel even more guilty, tired and stressed, instead of responding in a way that aligns with our deeper values (like patient, guiding, or connecting with our kids, etc).

What I have learned through self-reflection is that I can be task-oriented to a fault, where I get a lot of things accomplished but it can come at the cost of me being relational to others.

Why?

Getting things done makes me feel accomplished, and I can conflate this feeling with having self-worth.

How does this play out as a mother?

My to-do list can be unrealistically long, my kids’ needs can feel like a hindrance to me “accomplishing” things I want to get done, and it can cause division between my kids (and others) and I because I end up having a shorter tolerance.

And this is so against my deeper value of being a present, attuned parent with a good relationship to my children because I truly feel and believe it is such a privilege to be a mother and I love my kids with all my heart.

To say this another way: our reactions often come out in behaviour that is out of alignment with our deeper values of the type of parent we want to be. 

However, when we reflect about where we need to grow as parents, we can prepare ourselves for future situations so that when we find ourselves in them, we know of alternative ways to respond that make us feel good about our parenting and align with our deeper values and beliefs. 

In other words – we need to learn and grow to add more skills, strategies and techniques to our parenting tool-kits, so we know better ways to respond to tricky situations!

Pro Tip: Always remember to be kind to yourself, and show compassion for areas you’re struggling in. You can’t do better if you make yourself feel worse. Speak to yourself, the way you would speak to a dear friend. 

Doing the work to change our triggers as a parent can be hard, AND it’s worth it

This is significant and meaningful work because it ultimately leads to deeper connection with our children (and others when we use this framework in all relationships) and congruence with our own behaviour and belief systems. 

Yet, knowing that we want to be different and actually making changes can feel overwhelming and impossible – IF you don’t know where to start. 

When it comes to discovering, understanding, and ultimately changing your parenting triggers, it all starts at the beginning. That is to say: your own childhood experiences. 

Let’s talk about how our pasts influence who we are as adults – and parents – in the present day. 

How your past influences your parenting

When I start talking with clients about their upbringing to explore their childhood and the relationships and circumstances that shaped them, I like to make one thing abundantly clear:

I believe that most parents are doing the best they can with the tools they have. 

Many of us have had parents or grandparents who endured tremendously hard things, such as fleeing or being caught in war, domestic violence, poverty, abuse etc. 

In this world, suffering is inevitable, sometimes a tremendous amount of it – and when the hard times come, our brain goes into a more primitive state to help us cope and survive. 

When our brain is in fight, flight or freeze mode, it can be really hard to think – and parent – calmly and patiently. 

If you had many adverse childhood experiences growing up,  it is important to be aware of how difficult it can be to parent the way you’d like and to provide experiences for your children (e.g. attunement, presence, connection) if you never received such experiences yourself. 

Again, I want to reiterate, I believe most parents are doing the best they can with the knowledge, tools and capacity they have – and a better understanding of your own experiences can improve your knowledge of yourself, help you add more tools, and increase your capacity to manage challenging moments in parenting.

Why is it important to explore your childhood when growing as a parent?

It’s always important to explore your past because at one time, you were a developing child with an immature nervous system who was greatly influenced by your primary attachment figures (eg: your mom, your dad, your grandparents – whoever raised you). 

Your earliest experiences laid a foundation for how you viewed yourself and the world around you – and those views have traveled with you into your parenting journey today.

A few important questions to ask yourself include:

• How was anger dealt with, when you were a child?
• What did you do when you were angry? 
• How were people angry around you in your house?
• Were you allowed to be sad, and who did you go to for comfort? 
• What happened when you were afraid? Who did you turn to? 

The list could go on, but your answers to these questions will be very important for understanding your own capacity to recognize and deal with the spectrum of anger and sadness (or any form of dysregulation) in your own children. 

Read more: What is Motherhood Nature? 

In a nut-shell, our neural networks in our brain draw upon our past experiences and learning, particularly from our childhood when our brain was in a state of growth and development, to guide our current parenting behaviors.

How do childhood experiences come up in our parenting?

When we are stressed, our brain falls on familiar coping strategies and mechanisms – often ones that were modeled to us by our parents. 

So what we want to do when we become parents is: take the good that your parents taught and modeled to you and grow from their unhelpful ways of interacting or being with you. 

Here are some great questions for self-reflection:

a) what are those wobbly or vulnerable areas of growth needed in your life today? 

b) how do you make sense of them now as an adult?

c) how would you like to respond as an adult to challenges you face?

For context, let’s get into some examples of how your understanding of and response to a situation can change how the situation goes – and how getting curious and playing the detective can help you come to a better resolution before the situation escalates.

What is the most important question about your kid’s behaviour?

A simple but extraordinarily important question I ask all parents as we discuss concerning, confusing, frightening or any type of behaviour is: “How do you make sense of this?” 

The reality is, how you understand something impacts what you do and how you feel about it. 

All behaviour is a form of communication and if you don’t know what the implicit or explicit message is communicating, this will cause frustration and relationship erosion for both you and your child. 

I am not suggesting you need to strive to become an all knowing, omniscient parent. I’m talking about becoming a really good detective in discovering what your child’s behaviour means (or anyone’s really). 

This level of curiosity takes a surprising amount of practice, because our brain is wired to make split-second judgements all the time. 

Here are two examples that can help to illustrate this in a clearer way

Problem-solving with a baby

You have a 2 month old baby you are holding and he starts to cry. Right there, the judgment you make is going to impact what you do next. You put on your detective hat and quickly start scrolling through a mental list:

• Is he cold? (you feel his body, no he’s warm)
• Is he hungry? (no, you just fed him)
• Is he scared? (no he didn’t seem startled)
• Is he in pain? (you check him over, nothing seems to be visibility wrong)
• Does he have an air bubble? (you pick him up and start to burp him)

After a couple minutes of rocking and patting, you hear a burp followed by a loud fart and rumble in his bum.

Bingo, you got it.

You change his diaper, wrap him up all snuggly and he is good to go; until the next time when you have to be a detective again.

With a baby it’s often much more obvious, but the skill of being curious is not talked about enough as such a valuable tool that serves you well as your baby grows into a child and later teenager.

Let’s move the example to an older child. You pick up your 10 year old daughter from school and she is short and snappy.

Playing detective with an older child

You ask, “Hey sweetheart, how was your day?” to which she retorts, “Fine. Can we go already? Ugh.”  You see her roll her eyes as she looks out the window.

Let’s play out this scene with two possible reactions.

Additional resources: the PACE Framework

If you would like to learn further about this useful concept you can refer to Dr. Daniel Hughe’s framework of PACE (playfulness, acceptance, curiosity, and empathy). 

There are no magic answers or formulas in parenting but rather, useful frameworks to help guide our understanding and therefore, choices we make as parents so that we help our children grow up to be self-aware adults with the ability for healthy secure relationships, a sense of self-efficacy and agency. 

Why parenting is like gardening with weeds, flowers, and different types of soil.

No child has the same parent twice, as Gabor Mate, renowned Canadian psychiatrist says. Four children raised under the same roof with the same biological mother and father, can turn out very different, from the moment they are born.

Why?

Each child has a unique nervous system, which is impacted by their parents, the preceding siblings who have arrived, the unique familial or societal circumstances that are impacting the family dynamic when the child is born etc. 

This is why it is useful to think of raising children like tending to different gardens, each garden representing one child planted on different areas of a property (sometimes entirely different regions if massive changes have occurred in the family). 

Related: Read more about cultivating your “garden”: The Importance of Mom’s Friends

You would tend to each garden differently depending on the unique soil composition, the amount of natural sunlight or water available, the species of plants or animals surrounding the garden, and the amount and types of weeds that grow in the soil. 

Like knowing all plants need water, sunlight and healthy soil to grow, the nuances will be different in each garden; some may need fertilizer whereas others may need a lot of help with pulling out weeds.

In a similar vein, what you do with one child, you may not do with another child though the same framework and guiding principles would apply. 

Four guiding principles that every child needs are structure, nurture, engagement and developmentally appropriate challenge. Within these principles are embedded concepts like curiosity that we talked about earlier. 

To help your child thrive, like a garden, you need to become the best gardener you can be, or the most knowledgeable and skilled captain of the ship like the first analogy we started with.

This transformation and leveling up only comes when you commit to growing as a parent and individual. And the two guiding questions that will be pivotal in this growth will be first, “What is hard about this situation for me?” with the second, follow-up self-reflective question being, “Where do I need to grow?”

And with those two questions guiding your parenting, you put yourself into an excellent position to become an attuned parent with tools to navigate all that comes with parenting. 

HOW to grow: start changing your triggers and mental pathways with these 5 tips

Just like each child is different, each parent is different based on their experiences. So how do you, based on your history and current circumstances, start growing your mental pathways and changing your triggers to become less reactive in your life?

1. Get curious about your own reactions

Pay close attention to how you make sense of situations (as discussed above) and be extremely curious about WHY a behaviour might be happening. Put curiosity at the forefront of your mind for the next month and ask yourself constantly, “Is this a skill that my child is not developed in?” (e.g. dealing with disappointment, anger, sadness, embarrassment)

2. Start adopting coping strategies

Parenting isn’t easy so you need tools to help keep yourself calm or bring yourself back to calm when you feel overstimulated, worn-out, tired, angry etc. 

Three exercises you can try are:

• Give yourself a time-out and go outside: Turn a timer on for 5 minutes and go outside. Breathe in the fresh air through your nose and exhale out more slowly. 
• Try box breathing: Breathe in for 4, hold for 4, exhale for 4, hold for 4. Repeat until you feel more regulated.
• Splash your face and arms with cold water: This can help settle your nervous system.  

3. Practice reframing the situation

When things are tough and we are stressed out, our brain tends to lose nuance and become more black & white in its thinking and decision making process. 

Sometimes this looks like catastrophizing (seeing the worst case scenario – “My child is sick and is probably going to end up in the hospital with a virus that no doctor has ever heard of.”) or thinking in absolutes (“This is never going to end, I can’t handle this anymore.”) and it can be very helpful to reframe this type of thinking. 

This can look like acknowledging the difficulty and maintaining hope. Here are some mantras you can try keeping at the back of your mind during the really tough moments! 

• “I’ve survived 100% of my hard days.” 
• “This is hard, and I can get through this.” 
• “My child’s big emotions aren’t a reflection of my ability to parent – they’re a reflection of their immature nervous system and difficulty coping with stress.” 

4. Start focusing on making repairs

We all make mistakes. Even once we start this work, we’ll continue to do so – especially on days when we’re tired and overwhelmed, and our kids are feeling ALL of the feelings. 

So, when things go sideways, remember that you are a GOOD parent who is actively trying to do even better. When you make a mistake, try to fix it — and when it comes to parenting, that means creating a moment of connection where your child feels seen and loved despite your big emotions (and theirs). 

5. Getting support is something to be proud of

Speaking to a professional through in-person support or therapy, or using free services such as self-help podcasts, can help to build your awareness in understanding yourself. 

Parenting is hard, but it doesn’t mean there can’t be lots of moments of deep enjoyment, connection, and fun together. The more you deepen awareness of your triggers and build out your tool belt of coping strategies the more at peace, grounded and confident you can feel as you tend those gardens and sail those seas with your children. 

Looking for more information

Frequently Asked Questions

 1. Where do parenting triggers come from?

Parenting triggers are unique to each person as they arise from a combination of past experiences, personal beliefs and current stressors. Not every difficult experience will be a trigger, but parenting triggers occur when a negative response automatically arises in us in response to our children’s behaviour.

Unrealistic expectations (which stem from our beliefs) and current life pressures heighten our risk of having an increased emotional response. Additionally, our children’s behaviours can trigger insecurities within us (e.g. feeling flawed, inadequate, incompetent, a disappointment). By understanding ourselves better (refer to section Be curious about the story you are telling yourself in the hard moments) we can move from a place of reaction to more thoughtful responding.

 2. What is the most negative parenting style?

There is a lot of talk around different parenting styles like authoritative vs. authoritarian vs. positive parenting vs. gentle parenting vs. permissive etc. Decades of research exploring attachment and development have shown that children thrive with the essential ingredients of structure, nurture, engagement and challenge. 

Children need parents who see them for who they are, are sturdy with boundaries, are safe, can engage and soothe them and provide developmentally appropriate challenges. Negative parenting styles would include ways of being around not repairing mistakes, being perceived as unsafe or scary, are emotionally unavailable or unresponsive, have one-way communication, avoid conflict (or are always fighting), and having too rigid of boundaries or none at all.

3. How can I improve bad parenting?

The good news is that parents who are looking up this question are already breaking a cycle. I’d like to offer a reframe, you are likely doing the best you can with the tools you have – and what you are realizing is, you need MORE TOOLS – and welcome to the club! If you find that you have ingrained patterns of responding that you’d like to change, the first thing to do is to become very curious about the story you are telling yourself about your parenting and kids behaviour. 

Some people’s stories sound like this: 

• Baby won’t stop crying: “I am such a useless parent, I can’t even help my baby soothe.”
• Kid doesn’t listen in public: “What will people think of me? I can’t even control my own kids”
• Kids are complaining and whining: “This is totally unacceptable, my kids need to learn to be grateful for what they have.” 

Scroll back up and take a look at some of the mantras and tips I’ve included to see how you can start breaking these cycles inside your own mind. My best advice is: change comes easier when you are kind to yourself. 

4. Can you repair bad parenting?

Yes – your children are never too old to make repairs with them and with yourself. I personally like a 5 finger repair where you: 

• Apologize sincerely for the incident that took place
• Acknowledge what you did or said
• Take an empathetic guess at how your reaction made the other person feel
• As if there’s anything you can do to make the situation right – or say what you are going to do to make it right (for example: say what you will do differently next time) 
• Ask for forgiveness (and don’t forget to remind your kids that you love them no matter what – even when you’re having a bad day)

Everyone makes mistakes. We all lose our marbles at some point, you are not alone, and what repairing does is acknowledge the impact of your actions/words on the other person and that can be very healing for a relationship. 

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