How Mindfulness Can Help You Respond — Not React — When Your Kids Drive You Nuts

Our kids push our buttons.

Sometimes they do it on purpose. Sometimes, it's just their behavior, or their attitude. Sometimes it's outright defiance or a big screw-up. But the one unifying factor for most parents is that, when our buttons get pushed, we react. We shoot from the hip, so to speak, or more likely from the lip. We yell, we scold, we make snap decisions that we may later regret. When we're done, nothing is solved, and nothing feels better—and unless we make a conscious decision to find a way to approach these situations differently, we'll enter that same cycle again the next time our child gets us all fired up.

It's a reaction better suited to outrunning a cheetah than to dealing with a child who just spent $268 on in-app purchases, and it's not helpful. Even worse, our stress response cues our child's stress response as well. Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D., a psychotherapist and co-author (with Dan Siegel) of No Drama Discipline, notes that children can't learn effectively—or at all—when what they're feeling is threatened by our anger, especially if it feels unpredictable.

The alternative to that lose-lose situation requires that we take some time to consider in advance who we want to be when things with our children go south, and that we find ways to practice finding that person in tough situations. We want to respond, not react, and that means convincing our brain that our child's bad behavior is not a threat, so we don't need that adrenaline-charged reaction.

But sometimes—especially when trouble comes out of nowhere—we can find ourselves in reactive mode before we have time to think. When that happens, it's not too late to save the situation, especially if we've already given some thought to how we're going to handle the flood of emotions. Here's how Dr. Hanson suggests we pull ourselves out of "the red zone" before we pull everyone else in after us:

1. Bite your tongue. You're not going to say anything helpful at this point, so say nothing at all.

2. Label your feelings to yourself. Admit it—you want to scream. Just let yourself feel it.

3. Exhale. "It activates the parasympathetic nervous system," Dr. Hanson says. "Lift your gaze to the horizon, which engages the circuits in your brain to take a panoramic view."

4. Remind yourself that you and your child are safe. Your brain is moving to threat and alarm and needs to be backed down and reassured that the consequences of this situation aren't deadly.

5. Buy some time. Your child can wait until you're ready to talk about this (in fact, waiting can magnify the gravity of their actions). Very few things can't wait 30 seconds, or even five minutes, for us to think about what we really want to do—and that might even be nothing.