Your calm is contagious but so is your chaos

The
other day, a friend confessed her new nightly routine: hiding in the
bathroom for 10 minutes after putting her kids to bed. The reason wasn’t
to scroll TikTok, but to breathe. “It’s either that or cry into the mac and cheese,” she laughed. It struck me: parenting in 2025 often looks like quietly triaging our own stress while juggling work deadlines, permission slips, Slack pings, and dinner prep.

Headlines
scream about the youth mental health crisis, but what rarely makes the
front page is the state of the people raising those kids. Working parents are running on fumes. And here’s the part we can’t gloss over: our kids’ emotional health is directly tied to ours.

As
psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr. Raghu Appasani explained to me,
emotional regulation is contagious. “Both the calm and the chaos are
felt by children. When parents experience chronic stress or burnout, it
doesn’t just live in their nervous system. It shapes the family’s
emotional climate,” he said. Even babies, before they can speak, sense
our tension. Over time, parental stress can erode a children’s sense of
safety, making the world feel less predictable than it is. Neuroscience
backs it up. A child’s developing brain learns to self-regulate by
co-regulating with their parent’s nervous system. In other words, if
we’re running on fumes, so are they.

The
good news is, there are practical ways to flip the script, and we don’t
need a three-day meditation retreat to do it. A few ideas:

Micro-pauses matter.
Before you rush from Zoom call to carpool, take 60 seconds in the
driveway to breathe. Literally. These moments act like emotional shock
absorbers, resetting your nervous system so you show up calmer and more
present.

Leverage digital tools as check-ins, not crutches. Dr. Raghu, chief medical officer for the child-centered wellness app Ginko, recommends InsightTimer and Calm to help adults regulate stress through guided mindfulness. Other platforms, like Wysa, provide exercises to track mood and offer coping strategies. He’s also a fan of journaling tools like Daylio or Stoic, which offer quick “check-ins” that can help you notice when you are sliding into burnout.

Pair parenting with prevention. If therapy apps like BetterHelp make it easier to fit sessions into a packed schedule, think of it as mental fitness, not just as a crisis hotline.

The
reality is that self-care isn’t indulgence. It’s infrastructure. Just
like we maintain the Wi-Fi so homework can get done, we need to maintain
our mental bandwidth so our kids can feel steady. Shielding them from
every stressor isn’t possible. But modeling how to downshift, recover,
and stay connected? That’s a parenting lesson with lifelong returns.