How ordinary parenting moments become shame spirals, and why learning to return, repair, and forgive yourself is part of mental fitness.
By Sutton Burke, MS, LCPC
Adapted Sutton Burke’s forthcoming book, Now We Play: Mental Fitness for Everyday Life.
Sometimes I am in the middle of an ordinary evening with my kids. Dinner, homework, the usual. For a moment, I am just there. Present. Then it starts. One tells on the other. A name gets called. A little teasing turns into touching, then pinching, then hitting, and suddenly everyone is louder than they need to be, including me. I am trying to de-escalate a situation that materialized in approximately forty-five seconds. If you have more than one child, you probably know the scene.
My kids are fighting, and somehow my brain decides this is about me. What did I do wrong that they behave this way with each other? Apparently feeling bad about one thing is not enough, so my mind starts assembling the case against me. Maybe I have not been consistent enough. Maybe I have yelled too much. Maybe I work too much. Maybe I should have handled things differently when they were younger. Maybe I fucked up somewhere.
My children have gone from annoying each other in the kitchen to becoming evidence in a trial about whether I am a good mother. I am also a therapist. I know better. That has never prevented my mind from doing it.
This is the part of parenting shame I don’t think we talk about enough. It isn’t only the shame we feel when we lose our temper or make a mistake. Sometimes we take our children’s behavior, struggles, choices, even their personalities, and use them as evidence for or against ourselves.
When Their Behavior Becomes About Us
One night, the fighting had gone on long enough that I decided to shorten our normal bedtime tuck-in. Usually, that time is sacred to us: cuddles, tickles, talking, one-on-one time. That night it was a hug, a kiss, the Shema ( a Jewish prayer), and good night. They complained. I held the boundary. I loved them. Their behavior was not acceptable. Then I walked upstairs.
Before I reached the top step, my brain had already delivered its verdict: You’re a piece of shit mom. That was their special time and you took it away.
Not: You set a boundary. Not: They were fighting and there was a consequence. Not even: Maybe you got this one wrong and you can repair it tomorrow. Straight to identity.
In cognitive behavioral therapy, there is a cognitive distortion called personalization. It happens when we assume excessive responsibility for an outcome, often without considering all the other factors that may have contributed to it. Your kids fight and the thought becomes, What did I do wrong? Your child struggles at school and it becomes, What did I miss? Your teenager makes a bad decision and suddenly you are asking, Where did I fail? Your child has trouble socially and you wonder what it says about your parenting.
Of course our parenting matters. We have tremendous influence over our children. That influence is not the same thing as total responsibility. Our children are also people. They have personalities, temperaments, nervous systems, friendships, insecurities, and developmental stages that do not originate entirely from us. Sometimes siblings fight because siblings fight.
It can happen with the good stuff too. Our child gets the award and some small part of us thinks, I must be doing something right. They are polite at someone else’s house and we feel relieved, maybe even proud of ourselves. Then they melt down in public, struggle socially, or make a terrible decision and the equation flips. If their successes validate us, their struggles can start to indict us.
Our children are not extensions of us. They are people we are responsible for raising, guiding, protecting, and loving. That is different from being responsible for every choice they make or every difficulty they experience.
The Shame Spiral
Personalization becomes especially dangerous when it meets shame. One useful way psychologists distinguish the two is this: guilt says, I did something wrong. Shame says, I am bad and wrong. That distinction matters enormously in parenting. If I believe I handled something badly, I can examine it. I can take responsibility. I can apologize. I can learn something and behave differently next time. If I decide I am a bad mother, there is nowhere productive to go. Now I am no longer responding to my children. I am defending myself against myself.
This is what I call thoughting: when we leave the actual experience and enter the endless narration about the experience. The actual moment was simple: dinner, kids, bedtime, Wednesday. The thoughting became an entire story about my worth as their mother. Shame loves that story. It starts recruiting evidence: See? You yelled last week too. Remember that other time? Good mothers don’t do this. You should know better.
That last one gets me. I am a therapist. I teach emotional regulation. I know the research. I have read more child psychology books than I care to admit, many of them saying conflicting things. I still lose my shit sometimes. Knowing how humans work does not exempt me from being one.
Coming Back Before We Parent
For me, mental fitness is not becoming a mother who never gets dysregulated. I don’t think she exists. Mental fitness is the practice of noticing what is happening inside us, learning to be with it, regulating instead of overriding it, repairing when we get it wrong, and returning to the life that is actually in front of us.
Sometimes my return looks almost ridiculously simple: one hand on my heart, one hand on my stomach, one breath. My kids know what this means. This is not my little yoga moment. When they see me do it, they know I mean business. I am actively choosing not to be swept away by what I am feeling so I can actually be present with them. Not because one breath suddenly turns me into some perfectly regulated parenting goddess, but because what I say next matters.
Repair Without Punishing Yourself
Sometimes I still get it wrong. I yell. I raise my voice. I tell them I cannot handle what is happening right now. Sometimes I need to remove myself for a minute so I can find myself again before going back in. The question I am practicing asking myself is not, Was I a good mom or a bad mom in that moment? It is: What part of this is actually mine?
If I yelled, the yelling is mine. I can repair it. If I said something cruel, that is mine. I can own it. If I set a reasonable boundary and my children are angry about it, their anger does not automatically mean the boundary was wrong. If two siblings are fighting, I can look honestly at what I have taught, modeled, and allowed without deciding their conflict proves something terrible about me.
Mental fitness asks us to get honest about what is ours to repair without making everything ours to carry. When something is mine, I go back. I apologize for yelling. I tell them I was frustrated and that is not how I want to speak to them.
The AND matters. I can apologize for how I handled something without pretending their behavior was okay. I can own my part without taking responsibility for theirs. I can hold a boundary and still repair how I delivered it. Multiple truths can exist at the same time.
Repair is not evidence that I failed as a mother. Repair is parenting.
Our children get to watch what happens when a human being recognizes her behavior, takes responsibility, comes back to the relationship, and tries again. Then comes the part I sometimes find even harder: forgiving myself.
Self-forgiveness is not letting myself off the hook. It is refusing to turn one moment into an identity. For me, self-forgiveness has to include responsibility. Otherwise, it can become another way of avoiding what needs to change. Responsibility without any self-forgiveness can turn into self-punishment. Neither one helps me parent better. I can ask myself: Is there something I need to repair? Is there something I need to learn? Is there something I want to do differently next time? If the answer is yes, I do it. If the answer is no, I practice letting the case against myself close. Shame does not make me a better mother. Presence does. Responsibility does. Repair does. Trying again does.
Your Child Is Not Your Report Card
Our children are not report cards handed back to us at the end of every day. Their hardest moments are not automatic evidence of our failures, just as their greatest accomplishments are not entirely evidence of our brilliance. That does not remove our responsibility. It puts it back where it belongs. My job is to look honestly at how I parent, take responsibility for my behavior, repair what needs repairing, teach what needs teaching, and keep showing up. My job is not to turn every struggle my children have into a referendum on my worth. They are becoming themselves. So are we.
Maybe good parenting was never supposed to mean getting every moment right. Maybe it means building enough capacity to stay in the relationship when things get messy: to notice when shame takes over, to return to our bodies, to own what is ours, to let go of what isn’t, to repair, and to forgive ourselves.
Then we walk back downstairs and keep being their mom. Tomorrow, somebody is probably going to pinch somebody again. I will probably have another reaction to manage. They will have another lesson to learn. So will I. We get another chance.
About the Author
Sutton Burke, MS, LCPC, is a psychotherapist, speaker, and founder of Infinite Mindcare. Her forthcoming book, Now We Play: Mental Fitness for Everyday Life, explores the practices that help us build the emotional and psychological capacity to be present for the full human experience. The book will be released September 23, 2026 and is available for pre-order on Amazon. Follow Sutton on Instagram: @suttonburkeofficial