When a child is frightened, parents instinctively do something strange: they narrate. 'You fell down, it hurt, now you're okay.' This isn't just comfort — it's something the philosopher and psychologist Jerome Bruner spent decades studying. He found that humans don't process experience directly; we process it as story. The child who gets a narrative for their distress learns, slowly, that feelings have a shape: a beginning, a middle, and an end. The parent who can name what happened — even imperfectly — is teaching the most durable form of emotional regulation there is. Today, when something spills over (literally or otherwise), try narrating it. Not to explain it away, but to give it edges so it doesn't feel infinite.

What is the opposite of what you currently do when your child is overwhelmed — and what might that reveal about how you handle your own overwhelm?

Drawing from Narrative Psychology — Jerome Bruner