What You Cannot Tolerate in Your Child May Not Be About Your Child

Your child starts crying over something that seems small. You immediately feel tense, while your spouse remains calm.

Or your child becomes loud, silly, demanding, sensitive, argumentative, or easily frustrated. The behavior feels almost unbearable to you, yet your spouse does not seem nearly as bothered.

It is easy to assume that one parent is overreacting or the other parent is not taking the behavior seriously enough. But the difference may be telling you something important.

If the same behavior affects each parent differently, the behavior may be only part of the reaction. The other part may come from what that behavior brings up inside each parent.

What you struggle to accept in your child may be what you never accepted in yourself.

Your child may be showing what you had to hide

Children often express themselves freely. They cry when they are hurt. They complain when they are disappointed. They become loud when they are excited. They ask for reassurance when they feel unsure.

But perhaps you were not allowed to express those things.

Maybe you were told to stop crying, toughen up, sit quietly, stop complaining, or handle things on your own. Maybe certain parts of you were criticized, embarrassed, ignored, or treated as unacceptable.

Eventually, you may have learned to hide those parts of yourself.

Then your child comes along and shows the very thing you learned to push away.

When that happens, you may not only be reacting to your child. You may also be reacting to the part of yourself that you were never comfortable being.

The same behavior can carry a different meaning

Imagine a child crying loudly because a family plan suddenly changed.

One parent hears disappointment and thinks, “He needs help calming down.”

The other parent hears the same crying and thinks, “This is ridiculous. He has to stop acting like this.”

Why does the crying feel so much more upsetting to one parent?

Perhaps that parent was embarrassed whenever he cried as a child. He may have learned that tears were weak, dramatic, or unacceptable. His child’s crying now touches something he worked hard to remove from himself.

His reaction is not coming only from what is happening now. It is also coming from what crying meant in his own childhood.

This can happen with many different behaviors.

Your child’s sensitivity may bother you because you had to become tougher.

His strong opinions may bother you because you were expected to stay quiet.

His need for attention may bother you because you learned not to need anyone.

His mistakes may bother you because your own mistakes brought criticism or shame.

His silliness may bother you because being playful once got you into trouble.

You may not remember one specific experience. You may simply feel an intense need to make the behavior stop.

A strong reaction is a clue, not proof

Not every difficult reaction comes from childhood. Sometimes a child’s behavior is disrespectful, unsafe, disruptive, or in need of a clear limit.

You can be triggered by a behavior and still be correct that it needs to change.

The helpful question is not:

“Am I allowed to be bothered by this?”

The better question is:

“Why does this behavior feel so urgent, personal, or intolerable to me?”

When your reaction feels much bigger than the moment, your past may be adding meaning to what your child is doing.

Recognizing that does not make the behavior acceptable. It helps you respond to the actual behavior instead of reacting to everything the behavior represents to you.

Acceptance does not mean permission

Accepting a part of your child does not mean allowing every way he expresses it.

You can accept your child’s anger while teaching him that he cannot scream in someone’s face.

You can accept his sensitivity while helping him recover from disappointment.

You can accept that he has strong opinions while teaching him to speak respectfully.

You can accept his need for reassurance while helping him build confidence.

The goal is to guide the behavior without making your child believe that the feeling, need, or personality underneath it is something shameful.

Before You Correct the Behavior

A strong trigger creates urgency: Stop the crying. Shut down the silliness. End the arguing. Make the behavior disappear.

Before responding, ask one question:

“What needs guidance here, and what am I trying to make disappear because it is hard for me to see?”

Your child may need a limit. But he should not have to reject part of himself in order to receive it.

Let your spouse help you see the difference

When your spouse is less triggered, it does not automatically mean that your spouse is right and you are wrong.

It may simply mean that your spouse can see this behavior without the same history attached to it.

Instead of arguing over who is responding correctly, try asking:

“This seems to affect me much more strongly than it affects you. What are you seeing that I may be missing?”

Your spouse may help you identify which part of the behavior truly needs guidance and which part may need more understanding.

The difference between your reactions does not have to divide you. It can give both of you a fuller picture of what your child needs.

Respond to your child without repeating the rejection

Parenting has a way of bringing us face to face with parts of ourselves we thought we had left behind.

Your child may freely express something you once learned was unacceptable. Without realizing it, you may feel driven to teach him the same lesson you were taught.

But you have another choice.

You can recognize what the behavior touches in you. You can accept that this part of yourself once needed understanding too. Then you can give your child the guidance he needs without handing him the same rejection.

Strong reactions do not mean you are failing as a parent. They are information.

Sometimes the most important question is not only, “Why is my child acting this way?”

It is also, “Why is this so difficult for me to see?”

You can correct the behavior without teaching your child to reject himself.