WHY The Adults In The Room Need Tending To First

We book the appointments, run the assessments, and ask what's wrong with our children. We pour everything we have into finding answers for them. And very rarely —almost never — do we stop to turn the same curiosity inward. To ask what our own nervous system might be carrying. And what our children might be quietly absorbing from it.

My father made every person in our family feel like they were his favourite. But everyone secretly knew who really held that title.

It was my son.

They had something between them that didn't need explaining- the kind of bond that just exists, easy and unspoken, built over years of shared jokes and quiet moments and the way my father watched him with a pride only a grandfather could feel.

When my father died, our whole family lost something irreplaceable. But my son lost his person. And I- lost my father. While trying to perform the version of myself that looked like she was holding everything together for two boys who were watching me more closely than I knew.

In hindsight, knowing what I know now, what happened with my son at school the following week is not actually surprising.

I was disappointed to be called into the headmistress's office. Words like "expelled" were thrown around. I remember very little of the detail - only that my son and I were both in tears the entire time, and that we were both terrified.

Later that day I fetched him from school.

And I shouted.

I'm not proud of how far my words went that day, directed at a ten year old who was drowning in the same grief I was. I screamed until I lost my voice - about behaviour, and the very long list of consequences that would follow his.

Only now can I make sense of what was happening in that moment, not to defend my shame, or soften my guilt at how I spoke to my little boy.

But. My nervous system had tipped fully into fight. The part of the brain responsible for reason, empathy, and measured response had gone offline. What remained was pure survival instinct - escalating, louder, harder - because that's what a flooded nervous system does when it feels out of control. It tries to force safety through volume.

And the cruellest part? The more he shut down, the louder I got. Because silence, to a nervous system already past its limit, feels like a threat.

He said: “It's over, Mom”. And went quiet. I didn't recognise it then as shutdown - I didn't have that lens yet. I just knew something in him had closed and I didn't know how to reach it. So, I kept shouting at a door that had already shut.

Two people. Same grief. Same car. Neither one of us held.

What Nobody Asks

The focus, in that meeting, was always going to be the same. The child. And that makes sense. He was the reason we were there. But the question I was never asking myself - and perhaps the most important one - was this: “What is going on in me right now, that might be showing up in him?”

Not as blame. Not as another thing to add to the list of ways I am always feeling like I'm failing. But as honest curiosity about a system I didn't yet understand.

Because the truth is - and this is the part that is uncomfortable to sit with - our children are not separate from our nervous systems. They live inside the emotional climate we create. They feel the grief we think we're hiding. They absorb the instability we're certain we're managing.

They don't need us to explain what's happening.

They already know. And the most powerful thing a parent can do - not the school, not the therapist, not the next appointment - is turn the lens inward first. Not “what is wrong with my child?” But “what might be happening in me, that they might be feeding off of?”

What We Don't Talk About

There is something else I want to say here, and I want to say it carefully. Every family has a pattern. Not because anyone intended it. Not because anyone failed.

But because nervous systems learn from the environments they grow up inside - and they carry what they learn long after the original experience has passed.

Sometimes that pattern is grief or trauma that never got tended to. And without realising it, I was passing on the weight of that - not in words, not in anything I could point to - but in the atmosphere of our home.

Nervous systems don't just borrow regulation in the moment - they begin to inherit our patterns. And only once we own up to them, without blame and without shame, do we build the awareness to break the cycles, so that our children don't have to carry them.

The Turn

I can tell you the exact year things began to shift. I didn't wake up one day and choose differently. It was a slow stirring - months, maybe years - of no longer recognising the person looking back at me. Until eventually, I had lost enough; the relationships, the energy, the motivation, my true self and the version of myself I had been performing for years - that there was nothing left to do but stop.

And in that stopping, something unexpected happened. I started coming back to myself.

Slowly.

Imperfectly.

With a lot of false starts and old patterns pulling at me from every direction. But I started learning the language of the nervous system. Started understanding what my body had been trying to tell me for years - in the exhaustion, in the reaching for intensity, in the inability to sit still in calm.

And as I began to understand myself, something shifted in how I saw my son.

Not his behaviour.

Him.

The grief he had carried. The ways he had adapted to a mother who was doing her best from a nervous system that had been running on override for years.

Divine timing gifted us two weeks in Bali - just the two of us, unrushed, none of the pressure of daily life, a chance to step off and simply be present with each other and unpack some hard truths. Those conversations were only possible because I had started tending to myself first.

Why This Matters Beyond My Story

We pour enormous energy into identifying what is wrong with our children. Assessments. Diagnoses. Behavioural interventions. Medication. Therapy. All of which have their place, and none of which I dismiss. But we almost never begin with ourselves.

What are the nervous systems of the parents expressing?

What is the emotional climate of the home?

What patterns has this child been absorbing - not through any failure of love, but through the invisible transmission that happens between nervous systems every single day? And in schools - what is the teacher carrying into the room? What support exists for the adult who is expected to hold thirty children while their own system is running on override? The answer, in most cases, is very little.

We focus on the performance. The behaviour. The results of the children. But we leave the adults largely untended. And then we wonder why the children are struggling.

What Tending Actually Looks Like

This is not a call for perfection. I want to be clear about that. I've said it a million times, and I'll say it a million more - I am not a perfect parent. I have raised my voice when I should have lowered it. I have been absent when I should have been present. I have chosen my own needs at the wrong moments and ignored them at others.

What I am is someone who finally started asking a different question. Not “what is wrong with my child?” But “what is happening in me, right now, that my child might be responding to?” That question changes everything. It doesn't remove the hard moments. It doesn't make the grief smaller or the bills easier or the relationships less complicated.

But it puts the responsibility where it actually belongs - not on the child to manage themselves in an environment that isn't safe enough for managing, but on the adult to name what's happening with their own nervous system first.

So that the children in the room - whether that room is a classroom or a kitchen or the back seat of a car after a terrible day - have something steady to borrow from. Because they will borrow from us either way. The only question is what we are offering them.