What Do You Do When There's No Script For This?

She grabbed her daughter's body and pulled her back into the car seat, hard enough that her head bonked against the car frame. Her daughter protested, "You're being rude to me," and inside, this mom agreed.

For this mom, it had been one of those days. It was actually the first day back at school. She had brought her daughters to come shopping with her after school, and it was rough. This mom rushed through the shopping trip as the two sisters couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

As you can imagine, by the time they returned to the car, everyone was running on empty and this mom just wanted to be home. Someone was waiting to pull into their parking spot, which added even more internal pressure for this mom. As she scrambled to get the groceries loaded in the car and both girls buckled in fast, her daughter tried to climb into the front seat instead of her own. 🤯😭

She wrote to me about this after reading an issue I did on bedtime meltdowns, and told me something most parents can relate to but find it hard to articulate.

She said something along the lines of, “I understand what you’re saying. It all makes sense. But what about when it’s not bedtime? What if it’s the fact that my kid is climbing in the front seat when they’re supposed to be putting on their seat belt and I have someone waiting on my parking spot? If I don't have a script for the exact situation happening in front of me, how do I know what to do?”

If you’ve ever caught yourself wondering the same thing, then this issue is for you too. At times, it’s not that we don’t know the psychology behind hard moments, it’s that we’re still freezing or reacting the second life doesn’t match the exact scenario I wrote about. That's the real question underneath almost everything I get asked. It’s not "what do I say," but "how do I know what to do when nobody's written the script for this exact moment yet or I just can’t remember?”

After this issue, you'll know:

• Why understanding the psychology and knowing what to do in the moment are two different skills, and why the gap between them isn't a personal failure
• My FLIP framework, which is a way of thinking through any hard moment, including the ones I haven't written about
• Why some moments genuinely can't be run through a parenting framework, and what to do instead
• How to prep your response to the moments you can already see coming
• What real repair can look like, even days after a moment that didn't go the way you wanted