Parenting

Tired of Snapping at Your Kids? ‘Raising Good Humans’ Explains How to Actually Keep Your Cool

September 24, 2025

We’ve all been there: Your kid rolls their eyes, mutters something snarky, and suddenly you’re delivering a TED Talk nobody asked for—10 minutes of lecturing that leaves you more frazzled than they are. Even Dr. Aliza Pressman admits she’s spiraled into that very trap.

That’s exactly why she brings Yale’s Dr. Marc Brackett into the conversation on Raising Good Humans. He’s the author behind Permission to Feel and Dealing with Feeling who’s spent his career breaking down what emotional regulation really looks like when you’re parenting in the trenches. Forget “just calm down”—Brackett has actual strategies for keeping your cool, communicating what matters, and teaching kids to do the same.

Why self-regulation comes first

You can’t help your kid regulate their emotions when you’re completely dysregulated yourself. “You gotta deactivate before you can co-regulate,” Brackett says.

This isn’t just a nice idea. It’s how our nervous systems actually work. When you’re angry, frustrated, or overwhelmed, your brain can’t easily access the parts responsible for empathy, problem-solving, and clear communication. Instead of calming your child, you slip into what Brackett calls “co-dysregulation,” basically handing your frazzled energy over to them and making the situation worse.

Kids pick up on that more than we realize. Research shows that children’s stress response systems are directly shaped by their caregivers’ emotional states. If parents are consistently dysregulated, kids’ brains start to treat that as danger. Over time, they’re more likely to default to fight, flight, or freeze.

The stakes go way beyond a tense bedtime or a blow-up in the kitchen. Brackett points out that 80 percent of his Yale students—young adults who nailed every academic marker of success—are struggling with anxiety, depression, and other mental health challenges. The kicker is that most of us never learned how to manage our emotions in the first place. When Brackett asked thousands of people what they’d been taught at home about healthy regulation, the overwhelming answer was “nothing.”

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The meta-moment technique

Of course, knowing you need to regulate and actually doing it are two very different things. Snapping is inevitable sometimes, but Brackett’s “meta moment” offers a quick reset you can use before things spiral:

Step 1: Sense it. Catch the shift early—tight shoulders, clenched jaw, faster heartbeat. You don’t need to name the emotion perfectly. Just notice your body telling you, “Hey, this isn’t going anywhere good.”

Step 2: Pause and breathe. Literally stop what you’re doing and take a breath. “You can’t even think about it. It doesn’t matter how you feel. Just stop what you’re doing and pause and take the breath,” Brackett says. But he’s quick to warn that not all breathing is helpful. An angry sigh only keeps you in fight mode.

Step 3: Connect with your best self. In that pause, ask, “Who do I want to be right now? How do I want my kid to remember this moment?” This is where you pivot from triggered mode back to your values.

Step 4: Strategize from that place. Now you’re ready to choose a response that matches your values instead of reacting on autopilot.

The trick is making your “best self” easier to access. Brackett shares stories of parents who anchor the “meta moment” to something physical—a ring on their finger, the Golden Gate Bridge on their commute, even the Statue of Liberty on their way into work. He used to remind himself of his values before opening the door to his own house: How do I want to walk in right now?

“I think all of the steps that don’t take more than a minute in total, but make a massive difference are so impactful,” Pressman says of the technique. “The reminder to come back to who you are and who you want to be…it just seems really doable.”

How to approach kids’ big emotions

So you’ve regulated yourself—now what? According to Brackett, the rule is simple: “Always approach, never avoid.”

Most of us grew up seeing “negative” emotions as bad behavior to fix. But emotions are signals. A tantrum, an eye roll, a slammed door… those are cues that something underneath isn’t working. “It’s a signal that a need is not being met,” Brackett explains. “It’s a signal that something is wrong in that child’s environment and they need co-regulation.”

That shift changes everything. Instead of treating anger as disrespect or sadness as drama, you treat them as information. Your child’s nervous system is essentially saying, “Help me out here.”

In practice, this means getting curious before you get corrective. Try:

“What’s happening for you right now?” instead of “Stop acting like this.”
“That sounds really hard.” instead of “You’re overreacting.”
“What do you need?” instead of “Go to your room.”

This doesn’t mean throwing rules out the window. Boundaries and expectations still stand, but when you start with “I get how you feel” instead of “cut it out,” you build trust—and your kid is way more likely to actually take in what you’re asking.

For more insights on handling big feelings, listen to the full convo on Raising Good Humans.