The Compliment About My Kids That Made Me Want to Explain Myself...

Whenever I take my kids out, we get the same comment from strangers and waiters. “Wow they are so well BEHAVED.” 

And look, it's a nice thing to hear. I say thank you every time. But in my head, I'm doing math. Because that comment is usually measuring one thing. Are they sitting still? Are they quiet? Are they not making a scene? It's less about who my kids are and more about whether they're meeting a social norm.

Here's what that comment forgets. It forgets the version of my kid a week ago, completely dysregulated in public for reasons that made total sense to a three-year-old nervous system and zero sense to anyone watching. It forgets the version of my kid five years ago, on the floor of a store, kicking and screaming because he couldn't have what he wanted.

I didn't know back then that we would get here. I just knew I had to keep showing up. Keep holding the limit and staying regulated when he couldn't be. I wasn't teaching him to perform calmly for an audience. I was teaching his nervous system, over and over, that big feelings are safe to have and safe to move through.

So when someone stops me after my son sits through a long boring wait like a champ and tells me how well behaved he is, I smile and say thank you. But what I want to say is, you should have seen him five years ago. You should have seen me five years ago, too, sweating through a meltdown in the middle of the grocery store.

Kids are not well-behaved or badly behaved. They are regulated or dysregulated, and that changes by the hour, by the day, by how much sleep everyone got. What looks like good behavior in public is not a personality trait. It is the visible tip of thousands of invisible reps, the ones nobody claps for. The holding steady during tantrums. The staying calm when they are not. The letting them fall apart and showing them they are still loved on the other side. And also–temperament and brain wiring. 

I sat down with Jon from Whole Parent, who wrote Punishment-Free Parenting and now has a new book for kids called Set My Feelings Free, and we ended up talking about exactly this. What's actually happening in a child's brain during a meltdown, and why the good behavior people compliment us for isn't luck at all. It's years of teaching, most of it invisible, most of it happening nowhere near the moment anyone sees.

A brain that's flooded can't learn

When a kid is dysregulated, the parts of their brain responsible for learning and reasoning actually go offline. Survival mode takes over instead. So telling a screaming kid to calm down, or trying to reason with them mid-meltdown, isn't just hard. It's asking a brain to do something it's temporarily not able to do.

That's why the tools that actually work, like naming colors around the room or a simple breathing rhyme, have to be taught on the easy days. Not in the middle of the grocery store meltdown, but at bedtime, at breakfast, in the car, over and over, until the tool is familiar enough that a dysregulated brain can reach for it without having to think.

I loved this because it took the pressure off needing to find the right thing to say in the hard moment. The real work happens earlier than that, when nobody's watching, and nothing feels urgent.

The compliment isn't about luck

Jon pointed out that when a kid behaves well in public, the parent gets praised. When a kid melts down, the kid gets called entitled and the parent gets quiet judgment, or not so quiet judgment. Same kid…same brain, but just a different day.

This also brings up another point. We give adults the benefit of the doubt all the time. Someone's short with us in traffic and we assume they're having a rough day. A toddler melts down in a store and we assume something else entirely. We're holding fully developed brains to the standard of toddlers, and toddlers to the standard of fully developed brains.

I've lived both sides of that. My son had some of the most intense meltdowns I'd ever seen, and my daughter, by comparison, has always been easier. I didn't know any different at the time, so I just kept doing what felt right for him. We never did corporal punishment or timeouts. Some family members told me I needed to be stricter, that he needed more consequences. I remember telling them I just needed them to believe in us, that he was a big feelings kid and we'd figure it out.

Honestly, it wasn't a magic trick, and that’s why the compliment makes me think about everything we’ve worked on to get here. It was because we kept showing up for him the same way, again and again, until his brain had somewhere to go when the big feelings hit.

One more thing from Jon I want to pass along

Good parenting means you don't get to decide ahead of time what your kid needs. You have to actually watch them and learn who they are, and that takes time you don't get to skip.

He also said something I agree with. The work you put in now doesn't disappear. It becomes the foundation your kid stands on later, when the challenges look different and they need something to draw from.

If your kid is deep in tantrum territory right now, I get it, and Jon's got real tools for it. Naming colors, a breathing rhyme, the kind of things you can actually practice on a Tuesday afternoon so they're there when things fall apart. But more than that, I think you'll walk away from this one feeling a little less alone in the trenches, and a little more sure that the work you're doing counts.

Listen to my full conversation with Jon wherever you get your podcasts.

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