When We Overshadow Our Kids (and How To Stop)
5 Ways to Rightsize Ourselves So Our Kids Don’t Have to Shrink
We talk a lot about giving our kids space. But in real life, most of us end up taking far more of it than we intend.
Not because we’re careless. Our reactions simply move faster than their experience. Our history rushes in before their story has a chance to land. And when that becomes the norm, our kids shape themselves around us. They learn to read our moods before their own and adjust their expression to keep the room steady.
That pattern doesn’t fade with time. It follows them into friendships, conflict, independence, and the way they come to understand who they are.
When our inner world becomes the primary force in the relationship, kids slowly lose access to their own. They stop exploring who they are and start managing who they think we want them to be. What looks like compliance or maturity is often self-protection. And most of us don’t recognize it until the pattern is well underway.
This isn’t a failure of love. It’s a failure of awareness. And seeing it clearly is often enough to loosen the grip it has on the relationship.
One of the first places this shows up is in the emotional heat of the moment.
When Our Feelings Take Over the Moment
Every parent knows what it’s like when a child walks in carrying something raw. They’re upset or overwhelmed, and for a split second, the moment is theirs. Then our own emotions shoot to the front, and before we realize it, we’ve taken the wheel. The tone turns, the air tightens, and the conversation becomes about our reaction, not their experience.
From where we stand, it feels like we’re trying to manage the situation. We tell ourselves we’re keeping things from unraveling. But to a child, it lands differently. Their feelings get pushed to the edges because ours take up the center. What began as their moment becomes our scene.
Kids adapt fast. If their sadness becomes our anger, their frustration turns into a lecture, or their fear is met with disappointment, they learn to protect us from them. They scale back their truth—hide, edit, and anticipate. They reshape themselves around whatever keeps our response small.
And once a child learns that their parents’ feelings consistently outrank theirs, they stop trusting their own emotional life. They learn to rescript their feelings before we ever see them.
The reset isn’t about nailing the moment. It’s about noticing it. It’s choosing to keep our kids’ feelings in front and ours in check. When we do that, even briefly, the whole interaction changes. They feel met instead of managed. They trust that their emotion won’t get swallowed by ours. And over time, they stop tuning themselves to our reactions and start speaking from the center of their own experience.
That sense of openness becomes the foundation of emotional safety. It’s what allows kids to grow without having to learn to stay small.
Question Worth Considering
Am I responding to what my child feels, or to what their feeling awakens in me?
This question pulls us out of reactivity and back into our child’s experience, letting their emotion stay in the center and giving us the clarity we never have when our own reaction is running the show.