Intaspordia Schools

We create a massive amount of our own exhaustion by fighting the biological realities of growth. When a baby wakes up multiple times a night or cries for hours, the pressure we feel is usually about our own urge to fix their natural rhythms, completely forgetting that their system is simply designed to need constant closeness.

Then, as they turn into toddlers, our anxiety shifts from fixing their sleep to policing their intentions.

When a two-year-old throws a massive tantrum on the floor, we project adult motives onto their chaos. We interpret their loud pushback as a deliberate test of our authority or a personal insult, convincing ourselves that they should know better by now.

The real exhaustion of parenting doesn’t actually come from their developmental messy phases. It comes from the frantic energy we spend trying to force them to match our expectations before they are physically capable of doing so.

When we meet their age-appropriate storms with a matching panic of our own — screaming, slamming doors, or stone-walling in response to a meltdown — the hierarchy breaks down entirely. We are essentially asking a child to regulate the room for us.

Slowing down the environment means allowing their developmental limits to exist without taking them personally.

A baby is going to struggle to sleep, and a toddler is going to lose control of their temper. Our only job is to remain the person in the house who stays solid, keeping our own behavior mature enough to hold their reality until the dust lands. ❤️

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If you force a child to quiet down every time they get loud, angry, or sad, you aren't actually teaching them how to handle their feelings. You are just teaching them how to hide them.

The adults who completely freeze, shut down, or panic when life gets heavy were usually the kids who were praised for being exclusively quiet and convenient. They learned early on that their place at the table depended on keeping their internal weather entirely to themselves.

But a feeling that is forced underground doesn't disappear; it just turns into adult anxiety.

We cannot expect our kids to learn how to navigate a massive internal storm if we treat the storm itself like an attack to run from. They need to practice feeling highly uncomfortable while staying safe in the room with an adult who isn't falling apart. It means sitting with them right through the worst of the wave, letting the dust land, and proving to their nervous system that the feeling is completely survivable.

True composure isn't the absence of big feelings. It is the quiet certainty that you can experience the full spectrum of being human without letting the chaos take over. ❤️

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