Parenting is not a therapy session
When staying is the strategy
Strategies can be life-changing but they can also become performance pieces. We start to measure our worth as parents by how consistently we use tools. By how well we avoid crisis. By how regulated we seem on the outside. But regulation isn’t linear. And parenting isn't a therapy session.
More so when you're a neurodivergent parent, raising neurodivergent children.
When we put pressure on ourselves to always have the answer, we stop listening, because we're stuck in fix-it mode. And sometimes, we stop seeing the child in front of us and only see the problem we want to solve.
That’s the cost of constant strategy. It flattens complexity. It makes space feel conditional. We ignore our own overwhelm because we’re chasing a checklist. We chase control because we’re terrified of what chaos might ask from us.
That’s not the goal.
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Some of the most powerful moments in my parenting life have not come from strategies, but from sitting on the floor next to my child in shared overwhelm. From saying, “This is hard. I don’t have a fix. But I’m with you.”
There is no printable for that. But it’s real.
What happens after? There’s this moment when the room goes quiet, because everyone is exhausted. That’s when the emotional hangover hits and we go from survival mode right into the wreckage, replaying what happened, what we said, what we didn’t say. Wondering if we missed a cue, if we pushed too hard, if we made it worse.
We process the moment by feeling it in layers. We feel our child’s pain with them. We absorb the noise, the energy, the tension in the air. We try to stay grounded while our own nervous system is in bits beneath the surface. And then we're expected to move on like nothing happened? No chance.
When strategies become a measuring stick, we lose sight of the why. Tools are meant to support, not define. They’re options, not commands. They don’t hold the whole story.
So much of parenting in invisible work, but the real work is in the presence that stays when everything else seems to fall apart.
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