Why Repair Matters After You Lose Your Temper With Your Child

There are moments in parenting when we get it wrong. We lose our patience, misunderstand what our child needs or realise afterwards that our own feelings shaped our response. These moments can leave parents carrying a great deal of guilt, particularly when they care deeply about being emotionally available and responsive to their child.

It can be easy to assume that a strong parent–child relationship depends on getting these moments right, but research into parent–child interaction paints a more realistic and reassuring picture. Healthy relationships are not characterised by constant emotional harmony. Parents and children naturally move in and out of sync with one another, and difficult moments do not necessarily mean that something is wrong with the relationship. What matters is also what happens afterwards.

In times of professional trial, and now in times of parenting trial too, I often find myself asking, “What would Garry do?” I first knew of Dr Garry Landreth as something of a professional guru: one of the most influential figures in Play Therapy and, alongside Sue C. Bratton, the developer of Child-Parent Relationship Therapy (CPRT). These days, I find myself drawing on his ideas just as often as a parent to a toddler as I would professionally.

One of the 'Rules of Thumb' from CPRT has stayed with me ever since:

“The most important thing may not be what you do, but what you do after what you have done.”— Dr Garry L. Landreth

For me, this captures the heart of rupture and repair beautifully. Many of the parents and carers I have worked with have spent a great deal of time punishing themselves for perceived parenting “mistakes” or for moments when they feel they have got things wrong. What I think parents and carers should understand is that getting it wrong sometimes is part of being in a real relationship with your child.

At NYN, I use Know, Notice, Nurture as a simple framework for making sense of what is happening and choosing how to respond.

KNOW what may be happening and what may be influencing it (e.g. developmental stage, context)

NOTICE how it is showing up (e.g. behaviour, feelings, interactions and patterns)

NURTURE by responding in a way that supports wellbeing, connection or growth

When it comes to rupture and repair, we can use the same framework to understand what has happened, recognise when something has shifted and think about how we might respond.

KNOW: Disconnection is a normal part of relationships

Research into early parent–child interaction has shown that these moments of mismatch are a normal part of relationships. In a classic study of mothers and babies, Tronick and Cohn found that parents and infants were only in sync for a relatively small proportion of their face-to-face interactions. Rather than remaining constantly coordinated, their interactions naturally moved between moments of connection and mismatch (Tronick & Cohn, 1989).

The Still-Face research by Weinberg and Tronick gives us another useful window into what happens when connection is interrupted. They found that babies became distressed when their mothers temporarily stopped responding to them, but when their mothers re-engaged, the babies began to recover emotionally and physically (Weinberg & Tronick, 1996). This offers a tangible example of how connection can begin to recover when responsiveness returns. Research with older children also points in a similar direction. Kemp and colleagues found that when mothers and their three-year-olds were better able to repair difficult interactions during play and a challenging task, the children later showed better emotional regulation and fewer behaviour problems (Kemp et al., 2016).

What this research gives us is permission to think differently about good parenting. The aim is not constant harmony, but a relationship that has the capacity to recover when things go off course.

NOTICE: Recognise when something has shifted

Repair begins with noticing that something has happened between us. Sometimes this is immediate because we hear our own tone of voice or recognise that we have reacted more strongly than we intended. At other times, we notice the shift through our child’s response; perhaps they become quiet, angry, tearful, clingy, distant or unusually watchful of our mood.

The purpose of noticing is not to scrutinise every interaction or assume that every difficult reaction means we have got something wrong. It is about becoming curious enough to consider what has happened between us, what it may have felt like for our child and whether there is something we might need to return to.

This is also where it becomes important to separate the relationship from the boundary. A rupture does not necessarily mean that the limit we set was wrong. We may still need to communicate that the dog is not for hitting, that screen time is over or that it is time to leave the park. Sometimes the limit was right, but the way we delivered it was not.

A parent might return later and say, “Earlier, I told you that the walls were not for drawing on, and that is still true. But I shouted, and I scared you. I’m sorry.” The boundary has not changed, but the parent has taken responsibility for how they communicated it.

NURTURE: Returning to the relationship

Repair does not need to involve a long or highly emotional conversation. Particularly with younger children, a simple and genuine acknowledgement can say a great deal. A parent might say, “I yelled just then, and I’m sorry. I was angry, but I did not want to speak to you like that,” or, “That did not come out the way I wanted it to. Let me try again.”

For some of us, however, apologising to a child can feel much harder than those words suggest. Many of us were taught, explicitly or otherwise, that apologising meant admitting that we were wrong and that being wrong was something uncomfortable, shameful or even threatening. We may also have grown up with a model of parenting in which adulthood seemed to confer automatic rightness, while being a child meant that your perspective did not carry quite the same weight.

It brings to mind Harry Wormwood’s wonderfully awful declaration in the 1996 film Matilda: “I’m smart, you’re dumb; I’m big, you’re little; I’m right, you’re wrong, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Although played for comic effect, the idea underneath is familiar: the adult is right because they are the adult, while the child is expected to accept it.

Even when we consciously reject that kind of parenting, traces of it can remain. Apologising to our child may feel as though we are giving away our authority, undermining a limit we have set or allowing the child to “win”. We may also have had very few experiences ourselves of an adult saying, “I was wrong,” “I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that,” or simply, “I’m sorry.” If we rarely saw adults take responsibility when we were children, doing something different with our own children may require a surprisingly deliberate shift.

Apologising does not, however, mean surrendering our authority. We can say, “Your brother is not for hitting, and I am sorry that I shouted at you.” The boundary remains, while the adult takes responsibility for their own behaviour. This distinction matters because an apology can quickly lose its meaning if responsibility is handed straight back to the child: “I’m sorry I shouted, but you weren’t listening.” Repair asks us to acknowledge the part that belongs to us without needing our child to make us feel better or take responsibility for our reaction.

Repair may happen immediately, but it does not have to. We can return to something later in the day or even the following morning and say, “I’ve been thinking about what happened earlier.” Coming back to a difficult moment shows our child that uncomfortable experiences can be revisited rather than ignored.

It is equally important to remember that children may not respond to repair in the way we hope. They may still be angry, they may not want a cuddle, or they may have very little interest in talking about what happened. Repair is an offer of reconnection rather than a demand for immediate forgiveness, and part of taking responsibility is allowing our child to have their own response to what has happened.

This is why I keep returning to Landreth’s words. Parenting gives us many moments we might wish we could redo, but the strength of our relationship with our child does not depend on getting every interaction right the first time. Perhaps one of the most useful things we can offer our children is not perfect parenting, but the experience of a relationship in which mistakes can be acknowledged, responsibility can be taken and we can find our way back to one another.

If you’d like personalised support to develop ways to navigate difficult moments and strengthen connection with your child, you can explore the ways to work with me here.