Last Thursday, I was leaning against the cubbies outside Elise’s preschool classroom, scrolling through my phone and half-listening to the usual pickup chatter, when Ms. Alvarez caught my arm. She had that look teachers get when they need to tell you something that isn’t exactly bad but isn’t exactly good either. “Can I share something with you?” she said. I pocketed my phone. “Elise has been apologizing every time she cries. Not after she’s calmed down — the moment the tears start. Before the first one even lands. She’ll say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ and then try to stop herself.”
I stood there for a second, nodding like I understood. But something in my chest had gone cold. Ms. Alvarez was gentle about it. She said Elise wasn’t in trouble, that she was a sweet kid, that it was just something she’d noticed. But there was a question underneath the kindness, and I heard it clearly: Where did she learn that crying requires an apology?
I knew the answer before I got to the car.
She learned it from me.
The Positivity I Thought Was Healing
I grew up in a house where attention almost always meant correction. Where being noticed meant something needed fixing. So when Elise was born, I made a promise to myself — a private, bone-deep one — that I would be different. I would be the parent who saw the good. Who focused on the bright side. Who never let a hard moment pass without offering something hopeful on the other end.
When she fell and scraped her knee: You’re okay! Look, it’s barely anything. You’re so brave. When she got frustrated with a puzzle: Hey, that’s alright! You almost had it. Let’s try again — you’re so good at this. When she cried because Julien grabbed her toy: I know it’s hard, but you’re such a good big sister. He just wants to play with you because he loves you.
Every tear got a silver lining. Every hard feeling got repackaged into something lighter, something easier, something I could handle. I thought I was breaking the cycle from my correction-focused childhood by being endlessly encouraging. I was so proud of that. Proud that my daughter would never feel the sting of a parent who only noticed what was wrong.
But standing outside that preschool, I realized I hadn’t broken the cycle at all. I’d just bent it into a new shape. The message my parents sent was: Your feelings are a problem to be corrected. The message I was sending was: Your sad feelings are a problem to be covered up. Different cage. Same lock.
What Toxic Positivity Actually Looks Like in a Home
We’ve all heard the phrase “toxic positivity” thrown around online, usually in the context of adults telling other adults to “just stay positive” during genuinely hard times. But I don’t think we talk enough about what it looks like when it’s aimed downward — from parent to child — in the daily, micro-moment exchanges of family life.
It doesn’t look toxic. That’s the whole problem. It looks like love. It looks like a dad kneeling down, wiping tears, offering comfort. But the comfort has a direction. It’s always pulling the child away from the feeling and toward something more palatable. And over time, that pull teaches a lesson no parent intends: The way you feel right now is not acceptable here.
Research published in Emotion (2021) found that people who habitually suppress or reframe negative emotions — rather than acknowledging and processing them — show higher levels of psychological distress and lower emotional well-being over time. The study specifically noted that strategies like forced reappraisal, when applied rigidly, can backfire. And what I was doing with Elise — every single tantrum, every tear, every frustrated yell — was rigid reappraisal disguised as warmth.
The darker side of positive thinking isn’t that positivity is bad. It’s that positivity, when it becomes the only acceptable response to pain, stops being supportive and starts being suppressive. The child doesn’t learn resilience. The child learns performance. Elise wasn’t learning to bounce back from hard feelings. She was learning to skip over them entirely — and to apologize when she couldn’t manage it fast enough.
The Sorry That Broke Me Open
After Ms. Alvarez told me, I started watching for it at home. I didn’t have to wait long.
That same evening, Julien knocked over a block tower Elise had been working on for twenty minutes. Her face crumpled. A sob started rising in her chest. And then — before it even reached her mouth — she caught it. She pressed her lips together. She looked at me. And she said, “Sorry, Papa. I’m okay.”
She was not okay. She was devastated. A four-year-old just lost twenty minutes of careful, focused work to a baby’s flailing arm, and her first instinct wasn’t to grieve the loss or even to be angry. It was to make sure I wasn’t uncomfortable with her grief.
That’s what I had taught her. Not intentionally. Not cruelly. But consistently. Every redirected tantrum, every quick pivot to “but look at the bright side,” every time I smiled through her sadness — I was telling her that her tears were a disruption. Something to manage. Something to apologize for.
I’ve written before about how children save their hardest emotions for the parents they trust most. But what happens when a child learns that even the safest person in their life doesn’t want to see those emotions? They don’t redirect the trust. They redirect the feeling. They push it underground. And underground feelings don’t disappear — they calcify.
The Research I Wish I’d Read Sooner
Dr. Gottman’s work at the Gottman Institute on emotion coaching makes a distinction that haunts me now. He describes two types of parents when it comes to handling children’s negative emotions: emotion-dismissing parents and emotion-coaching parents. I always assumed I was the second type. I was warm. I was present. I was down on the floor with her.
But emotion-dismissing doesn’t always look like coldness. Sometimes it looks like relentless cheer. The parent who says “You’re fine!” with a big smile is still dismissing the emotion — they’re just doing it with better packaging. Gottman’s research shows that children of emotion-dismissing parents, regardless of how warm the dismissal feels, struggle more with self-regulation, peer relationships, and emotional understanding.
What Elise needed wasn’t a silver lining. She needed a witness.
She needed me to say: That’s really frustrating. You worked so hard on that tower and your brother knocked it down. That’s a reason to feel sad. Full stop. No “but.” No pivot to the positive. Just the naming of the feeling and the implicit message underneath it: What you feel right now is real, and it’s allowed here.
How Positivity Becomes a Different Kind of Emotional Unavailability
Here’s the part that stung the most when I sat with it: my relentless positivity was its own form of emotional unavailability. It just didn’t look like the version I grew up with.
My parents were correction-focused. I was affirmation-focused. But both approaches shared the same root — a discomfort with the child’s authentic emotional state. My parents wanted to fix the behavior. I wanted to fix the feeling. Neither of us wanted to just be with it.
I think about the survival skills children develop when their parents aren’t emotionally available — the hyper-maturity, the people-pleasing, the constant monitoring of adult moods. Elise apologizing for crying at preschool is exactly that kind of skill. It looks like emotional intelligence. It’s actually hypervigilance. She wasn’t reading the room because she was empathetic. She was reading the room because she’d learned the room didn’t have space for her sadness.
A 2018 study in Psychological Science found that parents who consistently prioritize positive emotional displays — even with the best intentions — can inadvertently model emotional suppression for their children. The children in these families showed greater difficulty identifying and expressing negative emotions by early school age. They didn’t lack emotion. They lacked permission.
What I’m Doing Differently Now
I’m not going to pretend I’ve figured this out. It’s been a few weeks. I still catch myself reaching for the redirect, the silver lining, the cheerful pivot. It’s wired into me at this point — the same way correction was wired into my parents.
But I’m practicing something different. When Elise cries now, I try to do the thing that feels hardest: nothing, at first. I sit with her. I put my hand on her back. I say, “You’re sad,” or “That was really hard,” and then I wait. I don’t fill the silence with solutions. I don’t race toward the bright side. Calm parenting during meltdowns isn’t about controlling the moment — it’s about trusting that the feeling doesn’t need to be fixed to be survived.
Last Sunday morning, I was making pancakes — the box-mix kind, same as always — and Elise dropped her cup of milk. It shattered on the kitchen floor. Her eyes went wide and wet. And I watched her mouth start to form the word sorry.
I got down to her level. “That was an accident,” I said. “And it’s okay to be upset about it. Broken things are startling.”
She looked at me like she was waiting for the second part. The but. The pivot. The bright side.
It didn’t come.
She cried for maybe forty-five seconds. Then she asked for paper towels. We cleaned it up together.
No apology. No performance. Just a four-year-old feeling something real, in the presence of a parent trying — finally — to let her.
That’s what good enough parenting actually looks like, I think. Not getting it right every time. Not optimizing the emotional climate of your household until every feeling is pleasant. Just being honest enough to admit when your best intentions built the wrong thing — and brave enough to tear it down while your kid is still young enough to feel the difference.
