Why I Can’t Follow My Own Parenting Advice: You Can’t Control People, You Can Only Control How You React
It was a Tuesday evening, and my seven-year-old was refusing to do her homework. Not the “I’m tired” kind of refusal, but the full-body, face-down-on-the-kitchen-floor kind, the kind that makes you wonder if someone has quietly swapped your child for a tiny, furious stranger. The worksheet — five straightforward reading comprehension questions — sat untouched on the table. I could feel my chest tightening, that familiar heat creeping up the back of my neck.
“You’re making a choice right now,” I said, in the voice I use when I’m pretending to be calm. “And choices have consequences.”
I meant it to sound firm. It came out strained, almost pleading. My daughter lifted her head just enough to look at me, and I saw something that stopped me cold. She looked afraid. Not of the homework — of me. This red-faced, stiff-shouldered version of her mother, looming over the kitchen table like a character in a cautionary tale.
Here’s the thing. I’ve said what I needed to hear in that moment roughly a hundred times. At school, when two kids are circling each other with crossed arms and hot faces: “You can’t control what she says. You can only control how you react to her.” I say it to my own kids when a friend hurts their feelings on the playground. It’s my go-to line, the tidy gem of advice I hand out like candy, always in the voice of someone who has completely figured it out.
And not once, not a single time, have I been any good at following it myself.
The worst part wasn’t that I got frustrated. Parents get frustrated; that’s not the interesting part. The worst part was that for twenty minutes, I was actively trying to control her — her mood, her compliance, her willingness to just sit at the damn table and circle the word “elephant.” I demanded a reaction, then rejected whatever reaction came. Too grumpy. Too slow. Wrong attitude. I was doing the very thing I call out in the classroom, except it looked worse up close.
That night, after she’d finally gone to sleep, I sat at the same table with the worksheet still sitting there, and I had one of those realizations that lands with a dull thud: I didn’t actually believe the advice I handed out so freely. I believed it in the abstract, but I couldn’t feel it in the moment. When someone else’s behavior gets under my skin, the idea that I have a choice about my reaction feels less like a truth and more like a luxury I don’t have time for.
Why is that? I’ve had time to think about it. Containing your own reaction is slow. It doesn’t produce an immediate result. When my daughter is melting down, there’s a powerful sense that if I don’t do something forceful right now, I’ll lose the whole evening. But managing another person — with raised voice, with threats, with sheer stubbornness — only looks faster. It doesn’t actually work, but it feels like working.
The next evening, the same thing happened. Same worksheet. Same position on the floor. And I felt the same urge to lean over, raise my voice, and fix her attitude directly. But it occurred to me that “controlling how I react” might look different from the mental picture I always had. I’d been picturing it as becoming this zen, stone-faced mother who never flinches, delivering perfectly measured lines. Maybe reacting differently was simpler than that. Maybe it was mostly about doing less.
“Okay,” I said, in a normal voice. “I’m going to go make tea. The worksheet is on the table.”
And I walked into the kitchen. I filled the kettle. I stood by the window and watched the neighbor’s dog make its slow, methodical rounds of the lawn. My shoulders didn’t come down from my ears for a good three minutes. It was not a beautiful moment of maternal insight. I was still annoyed, and I’m sure it showed.
But something happened. About fifteen minutes later, my daughter came into the kitchen, asked for water, looked at me, and said, “Are you mad?”
“A little,” I said. “But I decided not to stand over you about it tonight.”
She looked confused, then bored, then went and sat down at the table and did the worksheet in about four minutes, mostly by herself.
I don’t want to rewrite history and make this sound like one clean lesson. That moment didn’t rewrite the habit. I’ve blown it plenty of times since, and I’ll probably blow it again tonight or next week. What that evening taught me is something the neat little phrase never did: that controlling how you react isn’t about becoming a different, better person. It’s about noticing the moment when the reaction you’re about to choose isn’t going to work, and having an actual backup plan ready.
The backup plan for me has been physical. When I notice my jaw getting tight, or my voice getting flat and loud, I treat that as a signal to change my body’s position, not to ramp up. I move to the other side of the room. I sit down. I pick up something neutral, like a tea kettle, to keep my hands from doing their own anxious drumming. It sounds silly, but the physical change interrupts the loop long enough for a real choice to be possible.
I’ve also started refusing to answer questions in the heat of a conflict. When my daughter or one of my students demands, “What’s going to happen if I don’t?” they’re usually looking for a fight. My old instinct was to provide an escalating consequence, which guaranteed the fight. Now I try to have a stock line ready before I need it: “I’ll answer that when I’m calmer, and you can ask again then.” It doesn’t always land. But sometimes it dissolves the standoff entirely, because they didn’t actually want an answer. They wanted the battle.
There’s been a side effect I didn’t anticipate. When I stopped trying to control my daughter’s reaction so tightly, she got more room to have one of her own. Backing off didn’t create a meltdown. It created a pause where she could watch me, read the situation, and decide for herself that the worksheet wasn’t worth the energy it would take to blow up about it. She got to the place I had been trying to force her toward, but she arrived there under her own power.
This doesn’t mean every evening ends with her calmly finishing her homework. Some evenings she sits under the table and hums. Some evenings the tea gets cold while I stare at the wall. It’s not a system. It’s a slightly different starting position, and that’s enough to change the shape of the evening.
I still hand out the “you can only control how you react” line, because it’s a good line and because it’s true, in the same way that “we should drink more water” is true. But I’ve stopped pretending I’ve mastered it. The honest version is this: most of the time, your reaction is not yours at all. It’s the default one that pops out when you’re tired and pushed against. Real control isn’t found in the moment itself. It’s built in the ordinary minutes beforehand — the tea kettle, the stock answer, the decision to stand over there instead of over here.
And on the evenings when I forget all of that, then notice it, then still get it wrong? Those matter too, probably. The gap between what I say and what I do is the most honest teaching I’ve got. My daughter will learn the lesson at her own pace, the same way I’m still learning it at mine.
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