Staying Calm When Your Daughter's Emotions Start Flying

Excerpted from Kari's New Book

One challenge we face in raising daughters today is finding a healthy balance in our mother-daughter connection.

While we don’t want to engage too little, we don’t want to engage too much either. As the old saying goes: Never do for your child what they can do for themselves—or almost do for themselves.

This is how we raise independent girls who can handle life without us.

The current trends of our culture veer toward overparenting. Not cutting the cord in places where we can and should.

Getting too invested in your daughter’s life can stunt her growth. It can foster a relationship where she can’t function without calling you twenty times a day—or where you might feel justified in calling her college professor to argue about a grade or complaining to her boss for making her work on her birthday.

Clearly, we don’t want to swing that far. We don’t want to create codependence.

But what often happens when we know the details of our child’s daily world is that the lines start to blur. We stop seeing where their life ends and our life begins.

This explains why I’ve found myself saying, “We have a test on Friday . . . We are trying out for the dance team . . . We just made the dance team! . . . We are really struggling . . . We are studying for the ACT.”

Being plugged into my daughters’ lives can make their emotions and my emotions run together. My favorite story comes from a counselor who saw a mother and daughter at Starbucks both sobbing and falling apart. The mom told this counselor, “We are so upset because we just broke up with our boyfriend!”

It’s a funny example yet relatable too. While I love that moms today are more engaged than previous generations, this can create a codependency where our well-being depends on theirs.

And when your daughter faces a heartache, you may become a bigger wreck than her—and lose influence as you fail to provide the emotional support she needs.

I’ve certainly been guilty of this, and when I need a reset, I remind myself that no child wants to be the strongest person in the room. As parents, we’re called to be bigger, stronger, wiser, and kind.

The bigger, stronger, wiser, and kind concept comes from the Circle of Security, which my counselor friend Kim Anderson uses. It’s an attachment theory that allows kids to draw strength and enjoy life through their relationship with us.

A healthy attachment helps our daughters feel more freedom and confidence to explore the world while knowing that we delight in watching them and welcome them back anytime.