One place to look for an answer is in what researchers call parental meta-emotion philosophy, a term introduced by John Gottman, Lynn Katz, and Carole Hooven in a 1996 paper in the Journal of Family Psychology and developed further in their 1997 book Meta-Emotion (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates). Their central claim was that parents carry organized, largely unconscious sets of beliefs about emotions, and that these beliefs, formed early in life, shape how they respond to their children’s feelings in real time.
Gottman and colleagues identified two broad orientations. An emotion-coaching orientation, in which a parent treats a child’s negative emotion as something to be acknowledged and worked through together. And an emotion-dismissing orientation, in which a parent treats emotional expression as something to be managed, minimized, or ended as quickly as possible. What was notable in their findings was that emotion-dismissing parents were not, in the main, indifferent to their children. They were often deeply distressed by the child’s distress. They simply did not have a framework for sitting with it.
Where the dismissing orientation comes from
The dismissing orientation tends to come from somewhere. It is rarely a deliberate parenting choice. In most cases, it is closer to a direct inheritance: a parent who grew up in a household where feelings were not named, where distress was handled by being redirected or shut down, where the consequences of emotional expression were unpredictable enough that suppression became the sensible strategy. The child who learned to manage their own feelings by going quiet, or going away, or finding something else to attend to, becomes a parent who, confronted with a child who cannot yet do those things, reaches for the same strategies. The strategies don’t work particularly well on someone else’s emotions, and the frustration that results feeds the cycle.
The research on emotion socialization, the process by which children learn to understand and regulate emotions through their interactions with parents, has accumulated substantially over the past two decades. A 2022 systematic review in the journal Children, by Karen De Raeymaecker and Monica Dhar, assembled findings from fifty studies on parental influence over emotional development in middle childhood. Among the modifiable factors identified, the parents’ own capacity for emotional awareness and the family’s emotional climate appeared consistently across studies. Parents who were less aware of their own emotions tended, in these studies, to be less available to their children’s emotional life. Not because they cared less, but because they had less to draw on.
This is not a clinical claim about any particular parent. It is a description of a pattern that appears across a substantial body of research, and that describes a large number of ordinary parenting experiences.
The specific shape of oversized reactions
The reactions that seem larger than the moment usually have some structural features in common. They tend to arrive fastest when the child is displaying the exact emotion the parent was not permitted to display as a child. A parent who was not allowed to be angry, or frightened, or inconsolably sad, often finds their own child’s anger, fear, or sadness uniquely difficult to tolerate. The child’s feeling arrives and something in the parent moves to extinguish it, not from cruelty but from a very old association: this feeling is dangerous, it needs to stop.
They also tend to arrive around the particular situations that were most charged in the parent’s own childhood. A parent who was routinely shamed over food may find mealtime disproportionately activating. A parent who was punished for making noise may find themselves sharpest during exactly the kind of ordinary child noise that should register as background. The situations are contemporary and the children in them are real, but the emotional load the situations carry has older origins.
A 2023 study in Children, examining paternal alexithymia, the difficulty identifying and labeling one’s own emotions, and its association with parenting behavior, found that fathers who scored higher on alexithymia showed more overreactive parenting, and that this overreactivity predicted behavioral difficulties in children aged 18 to 36 months. The sample was 203 fathers. The study was specific in its focus and its conclusions should not be extended beyond the population it examined. But it is one of several studies that point in a consistent direction: parents who have less access to their own emotional experience tend to respond to their children’s emotional experience with less flexibility.
What the first decade of parenting is often doing
The experience described in the framing of this piece, spending the first decade of parenting wondering why your reactions seem bigger than the moment, has a reasonable explanation in this literature. It is not a sign of failure as a parent. It is closer to a sign of being a person who learned, in a particular environment, particular things about feelings, and who is now in a situation that requires a different set of responses than the ones that were learned.
Parenting is an intensive re-exposure to emotional territory that was settled in childhood. The ordinary situations of family life, a child who won’t cooperate, a child who is inconsolable, a child who is frightened of something small, bring up exactly the situations in which the old learning was laid down. The reactions that arrive are often older than the moment, which is why they don’t quite fit it.
Naming this is not the same as resolving it. But a 2022 systematic review of parental reflective functioning in Frontiers in Psychology, by Stuhrmann and colleagues, suggests that the capacity to notice the pattern, to ask “why did I react like that” rather than only “what is wrong with this child,” does appear to be associated with different outcomes in the parent-child relationship over time. This is a finding from the research, not a prescription.
The reactions will not disappear through insight alone. But the question itself, persistent and uncomfortable as it sometimes is, is not a symptom of a problem. It is one of the conditions under which something different becomes possible.
