Tapping Out: One Parenting Strategy That Helps Us Keep Our Cool

Frustration can be just as intense for my husband and me as it is for the boys. But we really don’t want to yell or lose our tempers if we can help it.

So we established something we call Tapping Out.

It works like this: when one of us recognizes that we’re at our breaking point, we let the kids know we’re having big feelings and need to step away. Then we find the other parent, who immediately takes over and calmly handles whatever is happening.

Once the situation is over and we’ve had a chance to regulate, we check in with each other. It gives us an opportunity to model something I want our kids to learn: recognizing when our emotions are getting too big, asking for help, regulating ourselves, supporting one another, and repairing when necessary.

Here’s what that can look like in real life.

I hear the kids playing in the bathroom, so I walk over to check it out. They’re making potions. Cool. I tell them, “Have fun! Please clean up when you’re done,” and go back to what I was doing.

Later, I walk past the bathroom and see toothpaste on the counter, water on the floor, bubbles in the bathtub, and a mirror dripping with who-knows-what.

I take a deep breath and go find the kids.

It turns out the potion explosion didn’t stop in the bathroom. They had transferred it into a spray bottle and sprayed it on mirrors, the stairs, and all over their bedrooms.

At this point, I’m at my limit.

I’m trying to stay calm, but all I can think about is how long this is going to take to clean up and how angry I am that the mess has spread throughout the house.

So I take another deep breath and say, “I’m having really big feelings about this giant mess you guys made. I need to walk away before I do something I don’t want to do.”

Then I turn around, walk straight to my husband, and say, “I need to tap out.”

That’s all it takes.

I remove myself from the situation and give myself time to get regulated. My husband calmly talks to the kids about the mess and how they’re going to fix it. Once I’m calm, I come back, and we all work together to get everything cleaned up.

And here’s the important part: tapping out didn’t mean the kids got out of the consequence.

They still had to clean up their mess. They did the majority of the cleaning. They just didn’t have to do it while I was at the edge of losing my temper.

I know my kids didn’t intentionally set out to make a giant mess. They got hyperfocused on the potion game and didn’t realize how far it had gone. They feed off each other’s energy, and something small can become something huge in a heartbeat.

They were laughing. They were having fun. They were making memories together.

Tapping out allowed me to keep yelling, fear, and negativity from becoming part of that memory.

They made a mess. They needed to fix it. And then we moved on.

My husband and I have talked a lot about the kind of parents we want to be. We don’t want yelling to be our default response to frustration. We know that yelling can create fear and model the very emotional reactions we’re trying to teach our kids to manage.

But we’re also human.

Sometimes we yell.

When that happens, the answer isn’t pretending it didn’t happen or beating ourselves up about it. We repair.

I walk away. I come back when I’m calm. I apologize. I explain that my feelings got so big that they took over my brain. I make the conversation about my emotions and my responsibility to manage them, rather than making the kids responsible for how big my feelings became.

Then we can calmly talk about what happened and what needs to happen next.

That’s the response I want my kids to learn when they’re angry or frustrated, so it’s the response I try to model for them.

It doesn’t always go perfectly.

But sometimes the best parenting strategy isn’t finding the perfect consequence or saying the perfect thing.

Sometimes it’s simply knowing when to say:

“I need to tap out.”

And then coming back ready to repair.