"I'm frustrated that every day I'm supposed to accept being talked to rudely and treated poorly no matter what I do."
I read that sentence three times.
Every day.
Not after a hard week, not during a rough patch. Every single day, moment after moment, this mom is showing up with strategies and empathy and patience, and she's still being talked to like she's the problem.
She's exhausted in a specific way that parents of chronically dysregulated kids know well. The kind of exhausted that doesn't go away after a good night's sleep, because you know tomorrow morning the whole thing starts over again.
I want to say something to her directly, and to every parent reading this who relates to this mom:
Your frustration is valid. Any parent in your shoes would feel the same way. This feeling is your nervous system trying to tell you that something in this dynamic needs to shift.
No amount of calming strategies closes that gap if the underlying pattern stays the same.
Yes, your child's behavior makes sense and we can seek to understand it through a child psychology lens AND you don't have to keep absorbing it indefinitely.
Kids who are chronically dysregulated (i.e., the ones who seem to save their most intense behavior for the person who loves them most - aka YOU) aren't doing it because they're bad kids or because you've failed to raise them well.
Their nervous system has essentially learned that resistance is its most reliable coping mechanism.
When everything feels like too much, the default is to push back, escalate, or shut down. Over and over, day after day, until it starts to look less like a rough patch and more like just... who they are.
It's not who they are, though. It's what their nervous system keeps doing when it's overwhelmed. There's a difference, and that difference matters for how you respond.
What also matters (and this is the part most parenting content skips over) is that you are in this dynamic too. Your nervous system is part of this loop.
When you've been on the receiving end of this behavior for weeks or months, you start to brace for it before it even happens. You walk into a morning already tense. Your child feels that tension before you say a single word, and her nervous system responds to it.
The cycle feeds itself, and neither of you is fully aware it's happening.
I’m not naming this to blame you. There’s no blame here. We all make mistakes and we all fall into relational patterns we don’t intend to or even realize. The power is in our awareness.
Once we name our role in the dysfunction, we reclaim our power.
As a mom of 3, I operate under the assumption that I am always a co-creator in the behavior or relational issue I’m seeing reflected back to me. This ensures I stay open, curious, self-reflective and essentially “in the driver seat” in my role as mother and co-leader of my family.
Of course, I’m human. My knee-jerk reaction is often to blame, criticize and control my kids. It’s once I’m able to step back and reflect that I can see my role in the conflict or relational dynamic.
I say all of this to say - your experience of this pattern is also data, and it's worth paying attention to.
