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Your Kids Borrow Your Nervous System



Lately, I’ve been researching cortisol. Not a real uplifting topic but something we are all trying to regulate or just kick out of our lives. Well…I’ve learned the hard way it is not easy at all, as much as I try.

Apparently the human body in this day and age cannot tell the difference between a tiger attack and the life many of us lead every day as adults and parents. 

If you’re raising kids in this world — managing news alerts, permission slips, orthodontist bills, and the emotional weather of small humans — your nervous system is doing jumping jacks whether you signed up or not.

At some point the question shifts. It’s no longer: How do I do this perfectly? It becomes: How do I stay well enough to enjoy them?

We survive hard weeks. Hard seasons. Years that blur into one long to-do list. 

And we do survive. But the body doesn’t relax just because the moment passed. 

It wakes you at in the middle of the night.  It tightens your jaw before breakfast. It scans the horizon for what could go wrong.

We call it responsibility and many times my cortisol hangs out in my old sweatpants on the couch, with a remote ready to spend the day together.  

Once you’ve been blindsided — by some mistake you made, loss, fear, diagnosis, disappointment — your nervous system makes a vow: Never again.

So you over-plan.

Over-pack.

Over-worry.

Over-function.

You try to prevent every scraped knee — emotional or otherwise.

I used to think being a good parent meant staying one step ahead of disaster. Now I think it means teaching my body that not every shadow is one.

Because here’s the part that makes me think too much- our kids don’t absorb our lectures…

They absorb “our nervous system”. 

If we are always bracing, they learn to brace. If we are always scanning, they learn the world is unsafe.

But if we soften…

If we breathe…

If we laugh at the spilled milk instead of tightening at it… 

They borrow that. They learn home feels steady. So the small things become sacred…

A walk without your phone. Sitting on the floor building something crooked and magnificent out of nothing with yiu child. Letting the laundry wait so you can hear about the “KPop Demon Hunters” dream — every single detail.


These are not wasted moments. They are rewiring moments.

If stress can quietly take years from our lives, presence can quietly give them back.

And one day — years from now —

when your child is grown and the world feels loud to them, they will close their eyes and remember a kitchen where nothing urgent was happening.

They will remember your laugh. Your steady hands. The way you weren’t always preparing for impact.

They will remember that home

felt like a place where no one was bracing.

And that memory — that quiet, regulated, ordinary love…may be the safest thing they carry into the world.❤️


#QuietLessonsInANoisyWorld

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