Last Thursday evening, Elise fell off the step stool in the kitchen. Not badly — she caught herself on the counter, bumped her elbow, and started to cry. Not the shocked, sharp cry of real injury, but the slow, building kind. The one that means something hurt and she needs a minute. I was already moving toward her, already smiling, already saying, “You’re okay! You’re totally okay! Wow, what a tough girl!” And she looked up at me, tears still on her cheeks, and whispered, “Sorry, Papa. I’m okay.”
She was apologizing. For crying. In her own kitchen. At four years old.
I picked her up and held her. I didn’t say anything for a long time. Camille was in the other room with Julien, and the pancake griddle was still warm from a late breakfast-for-dinner, and the whole house smelled like syrup. And I just stood there, holding my daughter, realizing that the thing I’d spent four years carefully building — this bright, encouraging, relentlessly positive household — had a crack running straight through the middle of it.
The Overcorrection I Didn’t See Coming
I grew up in a house where attention almost always meant correction. Where being noticed meant something needed fixing. My father’s presence was sparse, and when it was there, it was editorial. My mother tried — she really did — but she’d grown up in a house where affection was communicated through acts, not words, and her parents before her had done the same. Nobody was cruel. Nobody was absent in the dramatic, made-for-TV way. They were just… always adjusting me. Sit up straighter. That’s not how you hold a fork. You could do better on that test. The message, absorbed over years, was that love looked like someone pointing out what was wrong so you could fix it.
So when Elise was born, I made a decision. A quiet, private, fierce decision. I would be different. I would be encouraging. I would be the dad who said “great job” and “I’m so proud of you” and “you can do anything.” I would flood my kids with positivity until the water level of their confidence was so high that nothing could drain it.
And for a while, it felt like it was working. Elise was bold, creative, funny. She’d try new things. She’d perform little shows in the living room. Julien, still in his high chair mashing banana into the tray, would clap along. It looked like everything I’d hoped for.
But here’s what I missed: I wasn’t just being encouraging. I was being only encouraging. And there’s a difference between filling a house with warmth and filling it with a rule that says warmth is the only acceptable temperature.
When Positivity Becomes Its Own Kind of Pressure
There’s a body of research that most of us in the “break the cycle” generation haven’t fully reckoned with. We know about the damage of harsh, critical parenting. Children who grew up without praise develop patterns that follow them into adulthood. That part we understand. What we understand less is that forced positivity — what psychologists sometimes call toxic positivity — can create its own set of problems.
A 2021 study published in the journal Emotion found that people who felt pressure to feel happy — whether from themselves or their social environment — actually reported lower well-being and higher symptoms of depression. The researchers, led by Dr. Egon Dejonckheere at KU Leuven, found that it wasn’t negative emotions themselves that caused distress. It was the belief that negative emotions were unacceptable.
Read that again. It’s not sadness that breaks children. It’s the message that sadness isn’t welcome here.
And that’s exactly what I’d been communicating. Not with anger or discipline or correction — but with relentless brightness. Every time Elise was frustrated and I redirected her toward the sunny side. Every time she was sad and I quickly reassured her she was fine. Every time she was angry and I distracted her with something fun. I was saying, in the kindest possible voice, that feeling you’re having? We don’t do that here.
The Invisible Rules of Happy Houses
Camille saw it before I did. She usually does. A few weeks ago, during one of our Sunday night calendar syncs — phones charging in the kitchen, both of us at the table with mugs going cold — she said something that stopped me. “Adrian, have you noticed Elise never gets mad at you?”
I said something like, “Yeah, because we have a good relationship.”
And Camille, gently: “Or because she doesn’t think she’s allowed to.”
I sat with that for days. I thought about how Elise would sometimes get upset with Camille — genuinely, vocally upset — and then turn to me and be perfectly cheerful. I’d always interpreted that as a sign of our bond. But research on emotional suppression in parent-child relationships tells a different story. Children learn very quickly which emotions get rewarded and which ones get redirected. And redirection, even loving redirection, still teaches them that some feelings need to be put away.
I wasn’t giving Elise permission to have her full range of feelings around me. I was giving her a performance review with only one acceptable outcome: happy.
What My Body Was Teaching Before My Words Could
The tricky thing about toxic positivity is that it’s almost invisible to the person doing it. I never told Elise “don’t cry.” I never punished her for being upset. What I did was subtler. My face would tighten — just barely — when she started to whine. My voice would speed up, get brighter, when I sensed a meltdown coming. I’d physically move toward distraction: “Hey, look at this! Want to draw? Let’s go see what the dog is doing!”
Dr. Edward Tronick’s work on the Still Face Experiment showed us decades ago that infants are exquisitely attuned to their caregivers’ emotional responses. They don’t just hear our words — they read our micro-expressions, our breathing patterns, our muscle tension. When I was rushing to make everything okay, Elise was reading the urgency underneath. She was learning that her sadness made Papa uncomfortable. And she loved me enough to stop showing it.
That’s the part that undid me. She wasn’t being repressed. She was being loyal.
Breaking the Cycle by Breaking a Different Thing
I think a lot of us who grew up in correction-focused homes have a specific blind spot. We know exactly what we don’t want to repeat. We can name the wounds — the criticism, the emotional distance, the patterns that turned us into people-pleasers. So we swing hard in the opposite direction. We become the Encouraging Parent. The Positive Parent. The parent who will never, ever make their child feel like they’re not enough.
But overcorrection is still correction. It’s just correction with a smile. And the cage it builds — one made of “good vibes only” and “you’re doing great, sweetie” — is still a cage. It’s just painted in brighter colors.
I think about my mother, who calls me every week now and says “I love you” before she hangs up. She didn’t used to do that. She grew up with parents who never said it, and it took her years to learn. She wasn’t a perfect parent, but she modeled one thing beautifully: she learned to apologize. She learned to say, “I could have done that differently.” That kind of honesty — that quiet, unperformative self-regulation — is worth more than a thousand “great job”s.
What I’m Trying Now
I’m not swinging back. I’m not going to start being the correction-focused parent my father was. That’s the trap of the pendulum — thinking the answer is always the opposite extreme. What I’m trying to do is something harder and less satisfying: sitting in the middle.
When Elise is upset, I’m practicing saying, “I can see you’re really frustrated. That makes sense.” And then stopping. Not fixing. Not brightening. Not redirecting. Just… being there while it’s hard. Dr. Dan Siegel and Dr. Tina Payne Bryson call this co-regulation — the act of being emotionally present without trying to change what the child is feeling. It’s the difference between saying “you’re okay” and saying “I’m right here.”
Last Sunday morning — pancakes, box mix, same as always — Elise spilled her juice. And instead of the cheerful “no big deal!” that would have come out of me a month ago, I just handed her a towel and said, “That’s annoying, huh?”
She looked at me. Really looked at me. And said, “Yeah. It is.”
And then she wiped it up, and we kept eating.
The Hardest Part of Good Enough
The hardest part of all this is accepting that breaking the cycle doesn’t mean getting it perfectly right. It means getting it differently wrong, noticing sooner, and being honest about it. My parents’ house had too much silence. Mine had too much noise — the constant, anxious noise of reassurance that wasn’t really about Elise at all. It was about me. About my need to prove I was doing it differently. About my fear that if I stopped performing encouragement for even a second, I’d become the parent I’d promised myself I’d never be.
That’s the dark side of positive thinking in a family: it can become less about what the child needs and more about what the parent needs to believe about themselves. I needed to believe I was the encouraging dad. And Elise, at four, was already learning to give me what I needed — a happy face, a brave front, an apology for the crime of having a bad moment.
I don’t want her to perform happiness for me. I want her to know that in this kitchen, with the box-mix pancakes and the dog underfoot and Julien banging his spoon on the high chair tray, every version of her is welcome. The happy one, yes. But also the angry one, the sad one, the one who needs to cry about a bumped elbow without being told she’s tough.
The relationships that become performances start somewhere. They start with a child learning which feelings get welcomed and which ones get managed. I don’t want Elise to visit me in thirty years and put on a show. I want her to walk in and be exactly how she is — and know that’s enough.
That’s the real cycle I’m trying to break. Not just the absence of criticism. But the presence of permission. Permission to feel the whole thing, even when it’s messy, even when it’s hard, even when Papa’s first instinct is to make it all better. Sometimes the bravest thing I can do as a father is stand in my own kitchen and let it not be okay for a minute.
She doesn’t need me to fix every feeling. She needs me to survive them with her.
