Why I Struggle to Take My Own Parenting Advice: You Can’t Control People, Only How You React
On Thursday evening, I stood in the kitchen doorway holding a dishtowel and watching my fourteen-year-old daughter, Ella, scroll through her phone at the dining room table. Her chemistry textbook was open in front of her, but the only thing moving was her thumb. The quiz was the next morning. She had told me twice that she wanted to do better this semester.
“Are you going to start studying?” I asked.
“In a minute,” she said.
In a minute. She had said that at 6:40. It was now 7:15. I felt the familiar heat move up my neck. I wanted to walk over, set the timer on her phone, and stand there until she opened the book. I wanted to remind her of every conversation we’d had about grades and responsibility. I wanted to control her, essentially.
And standing there, I heard myself. Earlier that same week, I had sat across from a parent in my classroom and said the exact words I was now failing to follow: “You can’t control people. You can only control how you react to them.”
It’s one of my standard lines during parent-teacher conferences. When a parent tells me their son won’t do homework, or that their daughter cries every morning before school, I nod and offer that sentence like it will make everything simpler. I explain that we can’t make a child sleep, or study, or be kind. We can only decide what we do next. I say it calmly, with my hands folded on the desk, and the parent usually looks slightly relieved.
I have never once, in four years of saying that sentence, been able to apply it to Ella without significant resistance.
That Thursday night, I stood in the doorway and gave myself a little lecture. You don’t control her. You control you. So what are you going to do? The problem was that I didn’t want to control me. I wanted to control her. I wanted to make her understand that this mattered, that grades mattered, that I was her mother and I knew better. The urge to take the phone, shut it off, and place it on top of the refrigerator was so strong that my arm actually twitched.
The trouble with good advice is that it assumes your brain is working when you need it most. But in the middle of a conflict, my brain is not working. It’s jumping straight to fight or flight. A fourteen-year-old ignoring me feels like a threat to my sense of being a good parent. If she fails, what does that say about me? If she refuses my help, what is my role? So I don’t pause. I react. I raise my voice. I point my finger. I say things like, “I didn’t ask you. I said turn it off,” and then I wonder later why she so often does the opposite.
That evening, I did something slightly different. I noticed my fingers gripping the dishtowel. I noticed that I had stopped breathing. And I noticed that the words I was about to say were the kind of words I later apologize for. So I said only this: “I need a minute.”
Ella looked up. I think she expected more. I turned around, walked to the sink, and ran water over a dish I had already washed. I stayed there for maybe thirty seconds. Then I came back to the doorway and said, “I’m frustrated because I’m scared about tomorrow. I can’t make you study. I don’t want to fight about it. I’m going to take a walk after dinner. If you want help before then, the kitchen table is open.”
Then I left the room.
She didn’t suddenly put her phone down and dive into chemistry. She did, about twenty minutes later, ask me to explain molarity. We went through two practice problems. She yawned a lot. She probably didn’t pass the quiz. But the evening didn’t spiral into a shouting match, which, in our house, was a legitimate outcome.
What I’m gradually learning is that “you can only control how you react” isn’t a strategy. It’s an observation. It reminds me that I have a choice, but it doesn’t tell me what to choose. So I’ve had to build small, practical habits around that sentence.
The first habit is getting out of the room. In my classroom, when I feel myself starting to dig into a power struggle with a student, I say, “I’m going to check on the rest of the class for a minute. I’ll be back.” This sounds like I’m being responsible, and I am, but the real reason is that I need to not be looking at that particular student’s face for a few seconds. Distance changes the pressure. At home, I sometimes leave the kitchen entirely. I go to the bathroom and run the faucet. I check the mail. Anything to interrupt the automatic loop of my own irritation.
The second habit is naming my actual emotion. Usually I think I’m angry, but when I force myself to slow down, what I find underneath is worry. “I’m frustrated because I’m scared” is a sentence I use now at school as well. It’s not therapy-speak; it’s just a way to communicate to the other person what is really driving me. When I say it aloud, it is harder for me to act like a drill sergeant.
The third habit is letting the other person have their part. If I don’t demand a phone, I also don’t get to demand that Ella study. I can set a boundary, like “I’m going for a walk,” or “I’ll provide help until eight thirty,” or “The phone goes on the counter during dinner because that’s a family rule.” Those are reactions too. They aren’t passive. They don’t require me to control anyone. They simply define what I will do within the limits I actually have.
I used to think that if I wasn’t controlling my daughter’s choices, then I wasn’t doing my job. That idea has been hard to unlearn. I still catch myself trying to micromanage the amount of time she spends with certain friends, the way she does her math work, how she packs her schoolbag. Much of that is just fear wearing a parent’s clothes.
A few nights after the chemistry incident, I lost it completely over a jacket. She wanted to wear her denim jacket on a cold day, and I yelled about how she never listens and how I didn’t know why I even bothered. The jacket wasn’t the issue. I was tired. She was being sixteen, or at least acting like a teenager half a decade early. The advice, that same good advice, was nowhere in sight.
Later, we sat in silence at dinner. I said, “I think I yelled too much.” She shrugged. We ate. I still believe the advice is true. I just wish I was better at living it.
But I’m starting to recognize the exact moment when I’m trying to control someone. It’s a specific tightness in my chest. It’s the feeling that everything will be fine if only they would do this one thing right now. And more often now, I can step back from that feeling before it turns into words. Not always. But sometimes.
Last Tuesday, Ella and I were arguing about her study habits again. She said, “You can’t force me to care about this. I either do or I don’t.”
I was about to argue back. Instead, I heard the advice, the one I gave to a stranger in the hallway last week, and I took a breath.
“Okay,” I said. “I said my piece. The choice is yours.”
She nodded. It didn’t resolve anything. But maybe it didn’t have to.
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