There's a moment most parents eventually have. Your child is in the middle of a meltdown, or shutting down, or doing the thing that drives you most crazy — and you hear yourself say something. And in the exact same instant you say it, you hear your own parent's voice.
The same words. The same tone. Sometimes even the same inflection.
It's startling. And for many of us, it's followed by a quiet, private shame.
The parenting script
Psychologists call this "intergenerational transmission" — the way parenting behaviours, emotional patterns, and relational styles are passed down from parent to child to grandchild, often without anyone noticing.
It's not malicious. It's not even conscious. It's simply what we learned about how humans relate to each other, absorbed during the years when our brains were most plastic and most dependent on the adults around us.
If you grew up in a home where emotions were dismissed — "stop crying, you're fine" — you may find yourself instinctively dismissing your child's emotions, even while a part of you is desperate not to.
If you grew up in a home where anger was scary, you may have a much lower tolerance for your child's normal anger than other parents do. Not because you're a bad parent. Because your nervous system learned that anger is dangerous.
The good news
The research on intergenerational transmission has a hopeful core: awareness breaks the cycle.
Psychologist Dan Siegel, in his work on attachment theory, found that what predicted whether parents would repeat their own childhood patterns was not the quality of their childhood itself — it was whether they had come to understand and make sense of that childhood.
In other words: you don't have to have had a perfect childhood to break the cycle. You just have to have looked at your childhood honestly.
This is why I built Feeling Cards for adults too
When I first tested early versions of Feeling Cards, I handed them to parents to use with their kids. What kept happening — unexpectedly — was that the parents would pick up a card for themselves. And then another one. And then quietly, almost reluctantly, they'd start talking about their own feelings.
One father picked the card that said "ashamed." He held it for a long time. Then he said: "I feel this when I lose my temper with my son. Because I promised myself I never would."
That moment — that recognition — is where change begins. Not in a therapy office (though therapy is wonderful). In an ordinary evening, at a kitchen table, with a small cardboard card that gave him permission to say the word out loud.
A gentle invitation
If any of this lands, I want to offer you something: you don't have to figure this all out before you start.
You can begin by simply noticing. When you react to your child's emotion in a way that surprises you — with more intensity, or more shutdown, than the situation probably called for — get curious. Ask yourself: where did I learn this?
Not to blame anyone. Not to spiral. Just to look.
That's the beginning of something new.