Choose Your Hard: Parenting What You Can’t Control - or What You Can

Laura and I set up The Emotions Lab to help anxious and neurodivergent children.

Our journey began with trying to fix our own children.
Courses. Trainings. Tools. Strategies. Experts.
Anything that promised calm, compliance, or fewer meltdowns.

And along the way, we became very good students.

But eventually, everything we were learning pointed us to one clear and uncomfortable realisation,
the most effective change we could make wasn’t to our children.

It was to ourselves.

What makes our work different (and sometimes challenging to communicate) is this understanding:
a mother’s emotional state plays a significant role in shaping her child’s emotional and behavioural responses, particularly for children who are more sensitive, anxious, or neurodivergent.

This is not opinion.
It is well established in developmental psychology and mental health research.

A large body of evidence shows consistent associations between parental stress, anxiety, and depression, and increased emotional and behavioural difficulties in children. Conversely, caregiver emotional regulation and responsiveness are repeatedly identified as protective factors.

Developmental research has shown that emotional regulation develops in relationship, with caregivers playing a key role in supporting regulation during childhood while these skills are still emerging.

When we share this part of our journey, we’re sometimes met with understandable responses:
“Isn’t that just more pressure on mums?”
“Don’t mothers already have enough to deal with?”

And we want to be very clear
this was never about blame.

In fact, it’s the opposite.

When the solution feels like changing someone else, we’re left feeling powerless.
But when we understand that we are part of the problem, part of the pattern, the work moves back into our sphere of influence.

That isn’t pressure.
It’s agency.

Another way we often frame this is: choose your hard.

Raising an anxious or neurodivergent child is really hard.
Living in constant vigilance, worry, and emotional exhaustion is hard.
Trying to control outcomes you can’t control is hard.
Feeling stuck in repeating cycles is hard.

Turning towards yourself, noticing your own emotional patterns, stress responses, and learned behaviours, can also be hard.
But it’s a hard that sits within your control.

At the heart of our programmes, we don’t ask mothers to become different people.
We support them to:

• trust what they have always known about their children

• advocate with confidence rather than fear

• recognise patterns that are inherited, learned, or socially conditioned

• understand the science behind behaviour and change

• look at challenges through fresh, compassionate eyes

• give themselves permission to lead their families emotionally

Because when a mother’s emotional capacity strengthens, relationships change.
Not because anyone was “fixed”, but because the environment around the child becomes more supportive and predictable.

That realisation changed everything for us.
And it’s why The Emotions Lab exists.

Join us for the next Coaching Edition of The Leadership Method, starts 25th Feb only 2 spaces left. If you have any questions please feel free to email us on info@theemotionslab.co.uk, or click here for more details.

With warmth,
Emma & Laura

Research references (searchable & defensible)

• Goodman, S. H., et al. (2011). Maternal depression and child psychopathology: A meta-analytic review. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review.

• Stein, A., et al. (2014). Effects of perinatal mental disorders on the fetus and child. The Lancet.

• Feldman, R. (2007). Parent–infant synchrony and the construction of shared timing. Developmental Psychology.

• Tronick, E. Z., et al. (1978). The infant’s response to entrapment between contradictory messages in face-to-face interaction. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry.

• Schore, A. N. (2001). Effects of early relational trauma on right brain development. Infant Mental Health Journal.