I snapped. Then I felt terrible. 😞
Why I stopped trying to teach in the chaos — and what I do instead.
It was a Saturday afternoon. The girls had been circling the same plastic unicorn for twenty minutes. My four-year-old had it, my seven-year-old wanted it, and the volume in the playroom had been climbing in a way I'd been half-tuning-out while I tried to finish one email. "It's MINE right now." "You've had it FOREVER." "You're not even playing with it right, you're just holding it."
I was already keyed up from the bickering when I heard the crack. My seven-year-old had grabbed for it, my four-year-old had pulled back, and the unicorn's horn had snapped clean off against the edge of the coffee table. Both girls froze. And before I had a chance to think, I heard myself say, loud and tight, "Nope! We're ALL done. If we can't be kind with the unicorn, no one gets it. I'm putting it away." My four-year-old burst into tears. My seven-year-old's face went to that flat, shut-down place it goes when she feels unfairly lumped in. And I stood there with a broken unicorn in my hand knowing I'd just made everything worse in about four seconds flat.
It might have made me feel better in the moment. But I didn't do anything to help them learn. My four-year-old went to her room. My seven-year-old curled up on the couch and wouldn't look at me. By the time everyone was speaking to each other again, it was nearly dinner, and the thought of reopening the whole thing felt like picking at a scab on something that had mostly scarred over. I told myself I'd bring it up at bedtime. I didn't.
The real challenge
Finding the time to repair and teach
You cannot effectively do emotional skill-building in the middle of a meltdown. Not because you're failing... but because of how the brain actually works. Research on stress and learning consistently shows that when we're dysregulated, the part of the brain responsible for reasoning, empathy, and integrating new information goes largely offline. In those heated moments, nobody (not you, not your child) is in a state to absorb anything except survival. Which leaves you waiting for a calmer window. But calmer windows are harder to find than they sound.
So I'd read all of this. I knew it, intellectually. And yet every time one of my daughters used a sharp tone with her sister or grabbed a toy from the other one's hands, I tried to use the moment to address the behavior. I'd launch into explaining why we use kind words, how to ask for turns, or how to address unhelpful thoughts to prevent these situations in the first place. And then I'd watch it land exactly nowhere... because they were still in it, and honestly, so was I.
The part that's harder to admit? Even when I remembered that I should circle back later, in a calmer moment, it almost never happened. Not because I didn't want it to. But because by 5pm there's dinner and homework, and my youngest skipped her nap, what happened at noon feels like another lifetime. The intention was always there. The follow-through kept slipping.
What actually changed
The story does the heavy lifting. I just show up.
I started using Wanderly in that in-between hour: after dinner, before baths, when we're winding down but not yet at teeth-brushing. It's become our low-key anchor. We'll pick a story together, the girls will both pile in close, and without me having to construct a lesson or remember to revisit Saturday's unicorn incident, we're naturally in a conversation about feelings, choices, how it feels when someone takes something, and what to do with the big, uncomfortable emotions.
The story does the heavy lifting. I just show up. And because we're calm, because they're regulated, and I'm regulated, things actually land. My four-year-old will point at a character and say "she's like me when I'm mad." My seven-year-old will ask a question that tells me she's been carrying something around all day. These are the moments I was always trying to manufacture in the heat of it, and they were happening naturally, in the quiet.
If this sounds familiar, check out the story below, or browse our list of stories (I just redid the library so it's aligned to skills for easy browsing!).
P.S. The unicorn? We glued the horn back on (mostly). And a few evenings later, curled up with a Wanderly story about two characters who both wanted the same thing, we talked about turn-taking, about asking instead of grabbing, about what to do when something breaks. I didn't have to bring it up. The story did.
How I Feel and What I Do
This is the story I go to when one of my daughters has chosen some unhelpful behaviors during the day. It gives them a chance to talk about their feelings and choose the behaviors with it. I'm always surprised when they play out the unhelpful behaviors again, but then ask to read the story again and make different (more helpful) choices. Under The Hood also works if your child really likes cars.
