Why Do I Keep Snapping At My Child When They're Just Being A Child?

In this episode Emma looks at a mum called Lizzie, whose son Evan is heading off for a white water rafting weekend. The kit list is long. Evan's excitement is longer. He air-paddles the oars round the garden, turns the sofa into an assault course in the life jacket, leaves the pressure gauge in the kitchen, scatters the swimming shoes up the stairs, and deposits the wetsuit in the flowerbed. And somewhere in all of that, Lizzie snaps.

This scenario opens into the month's core question:
When both you and your child are at the edge of what you can manage in a given moment, whose fault is that?

Emma explores:

• The difference between bad behaviour and a child whose excitement has outrun his self-regulation, and why the distinction matters for how you respond.

• The invisible logistics a mum is carrying on a particular afternoon that nobody accounts for when she loses it.

• The double bind: being expected to have a well-behaved child AND not punish their natural impulses. Both. Simultaneously. Every day.

• Why compassion, for yourself and for your child, is the honest way through impossible standards — not a technique, not a fix, but a way of carrying the contradiction without it meaning you've failed.

• Remembering what it was like for you as a child: do you remember what it felt like to be physically, can't-sit-still excited? And what would it have meant if someone had come back to you and said sorry they snapped?

A different question to take into the week is:
"Given who I am, who my child is, and the reality of today, what can I actually do?"

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About Emma

Emma Reed is a psychotherapeutic counsellor, parent coach, and mum, whose work is about naming the complicated feelings that often get in the way of your parenting, so you can more easily enjoy your children and become a more confident mum.

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