The Gap Between What We Know and How We Show Up
I know that when my daughter looks at me and says "Mama, you are not being nice," what she really means is: this is scary. I want you to be soft again. Please come back. I am little.
I know this because I have spent years studying children's behavior, nervous system science, and attachment. I can translate what she is really saying before she even finishes the sentence.
And yet.
When my brain hears those words, it does not stay in the present. It goes straight back to when I was seven or eight years old. Being told I was a bad daughter. A bad girl. And because my daughter is now a safe person, someone who will not leave me, who will not withdraw love forever, I end up responding to her the way I wished I could have responded to my caregivers all those years ago.
She does not deserve it.
And I do not know what is happening until after the fact.
I have the knowledge. I have the books, the certifications, the training. I can explain to any parent exactly why their child is behaving the way they are. I can translate the behavior.
But in my own kitchen, at 5pm, with a toddler pulling at my legs and my daughter looking at me with those eyes, everything I know vanishes. My body takes over. And the reaction that comes out is not mine. It belongs to a version of me that learned, decades ago, that being told "you are not nice" means love is about to be taken away.
That is what I mean when I say this is not an information problem.
Most of the parents and teachers I work with have read the books. They have listened to the podcasts. They have done the courses. They understand that children's behavior is developmentally appropriate. They know that yelling does not work. They know that connection matters more than correction.
And they still lose it.
Not because they are bad parents or teachers. Not because they have not done enough work. But because the gap between what we know and how we show up is not about what is in our heads. It is about what is in our bodies. And what is in our bodies was put there long before we became parents.
What happens after
After I lose it with my daughter, the guilt arrives immediately. Like a wave I cannot run away from. I feel like a monster. Like I knew better and chose to react that way. Which is not the truth, but it feels so viscerally real.
I start beating myself up, even though I know the theory of what just happened inside me, even though I can name the neurobiology, even though I teach this for a living.
But the knowledge does not protect me from the shame. You can understand the science perfectly and still collapse under the weight of "I did it again."
And I think that is the loneliest part of this whole journey. Because when you know the theory, when you have done the work, when you are supposed to be "further along," the shame of still struggling feels even heavier. You think: everyone else has figured this out. I am the only one who cannot get it right.
YOU ARE NOT.
The thing my mother never did
After the guilt, after the spiral, I do the one thing that was never done for me as a child. I go to my daughter, and I repair.
I get down to her level and I do a redo. I say something like: "I am sorry my love. Mama was not feeling ok and didn't have access to how I would have liked to respond. Can I please do a redo? You did not deserve that." And then I practice with her what I would have liked to do instead.
And it still feels foreign. Every single time. Because nobody ever did this for me. Nobody knelt down and said "I am sorry, that was not okay." In my childhood, after a rupture, there was silence. Withdrawal. Days of cold. Love taken away as punishment for being human.
So when I repair with my daughter, part of me still wonders: will this actually make a difference? Will she remember these moments, or will she only remember the ones where I lost it?
I believe it will make a difference. The research tells me it will. But believing something and feeling it in your body are two different things. And that gap, between believing and feeling, is the same gap I help other parents navigate.
What I want you to know
If you are reading this and you recognize yourself in any of it, I want to say something to you directly.
YOU ARE NOT ALONE.
We are raising a new generation of humans who will learn that we can get infinite chances after we make mistakes. Because mistakes do not define us. They are part of our humanity.
We are all scared of making mistakes because we had ultimatums around our behavior as children. Love was conditional on performance. Getting it wrong meant exile. So, of course, we panic when we lose it with our own kids. Our bodies are still running the old program.
But we get to rewrite the story now.
We get to try again. And again. And again. Until it lands. And then, when we mess up again (because we will), we get to try again.
That is true for us. And it is true for our children.
The gap is not the problem
The gap between what we know and how we show up is not evidence that we are failing. It is evidence that our bodies are carrying something old. Something that was never witnessed, never named, never tended to.
At some point, the work is not about learning more. Most of us have learned enough. The work is about understanding what is happening inside of us when our children's behavior triggers us, and how our own childhood shaped those reactions.
Once we start to see that, we can see subtle shifts happening in our day-to-day. Not all at once. Not perfectly. But slowly, the gap gets smaller. The moments of peace get longer. The repair gets less foreign. And the children in our lives start to learn something our generation was never taught: that love does not have conditions, that mistakes are not the end, and that the adults around them are trying, imperfectly and their hardest, to show up differently.
If this resonated, I would love to connect with you. I work with parents and teachers through one-to-one coaching, workshops, and speaking.
I am currently building The Village, a small, intimate online cohort for mothers who want to be witnessed in the harder parts of this journey.
Learn more about The VillageNoa Stisin is the founder of Rewriting Childhood. She is a JAI Institute certified parent coach, a speaker, and a mother of two. She helps parents and teachers rewrite how they see children, so the hard moments feel less hard. She teaches from the middle of the mess, not from the other side of it.