Why do so many parents feel like they’re failing — even when they’re doing everything “right”?

In this episode of the Where Parents Talk podcast, host Lianne Castelino is joined by Manu Brune, postpartum specialist, parent coach, mother of 3 and author of Overcorrecting: Parenting in the Middle While the World Shouts in Extremes. They unpack a timely issue facing parents today: overcorrection.

Brune explains how many parents are unconsciously parenting in reaction to their own childhood experiences, swinging between extremes in an effort to “break generational cycles.” The result? Chronic stress, nervous system dysregulation, parental burnout, and growing self-doubt.

This episode explores:

1. How nervous system regulation shapes parent-child relationships
2. Why perfectionism and hyper-vigilance are exhausting parents
3. The long-term impact of reactive parenting on children’s mental health
4. What co-regulation means and how children “borrow calm” from adults
5. How to parent with consistency without rigidity
6. Why the space between parenting decisions matters more than the decisions themselves

This podcast is for parents, guardians, teachers and caregivers to learn proven strategies and trusted tips on raising kids, teens and young adults based on science, evidenced and lived experience.

You’ll learn the latest on topics like managing bullying, consent, fostering healthy relationships, and the interconnectedness of mental, emotional and physical health.

Links referenced in this episode:

1. whereparentstalk.com

Welcome to the Where Parents Talk podcast. We help grow better parents through science, evidence and the lived experience of other parents.

Learn how to better navigate the mental and physical health of your tween teen or young adult through proven expert advice. Here's your host, Lianne Castelino.

Welcome to Where Parents Talk. My name is Lianne Castelino. Our guest today is a postpartum specialist and founder of Beyond Birth Basics, a parent coaching practice.

Manu Brune is also a nervous system informed parenting educator and an author. Her first book is called Parenting in the Middle While the World Shouts in Extremes.

Manu is also a mother of three children under the age of five and she joins us today from Columbus, Ohio. So great of you to make the time.

Thank you for having me on really.

Interesting topic because I think a lot of parents find themselves doing that dance in terms of the extremes that you talk about in your book. You contend though that many parents aren't failing, they're over correcting. Why do you believe that?

Yeah, I think, you know, many parents in today's age, they grew up in households that were on one end of a spectrum.

They were either very authoritative, their parents saying things like because I said so, or children should be seen and not heard, or on the opposite end where maybe their adults just avoided conflict altogether and kind of let the kids do whatever they could so that they could keep the peace in the house. And so now parents today, we're just, we're deeply motivated to not repeat the patterns that hurt us.

And while this motivation is loving, it is sending us into overcorrection because we're trying so hard to heal the wounds of our past and to break these generational parenting patterns that we start outsourcing our trust. We're leading with our heads rather than our hearts and our bodies these days.

And we're consuming everything, endless advice and frameworks and how to's and just hoping that we get everything right. And in the process, we're losing touch with our own nervous systems. And that's really what's leading to this overcorrecting.

So interesting and lots to unpack in what you just said.

So, you know, part of it has to do with parents having the self awareness to understand that maybe that's what they are doing and trying to not repeat, as you say, the, you know, the mistakes that, that they experienced. So what do you suggest to a parent in terms of trying to actively address overcorrecting?

Yeah, great question. So what I really like is I have a three step framework that I usually Work on with my parents. Right.

The first one is just understanding that this is not an overnight transformation. Being able to be aware of our bodies and our responses in the moment to our children. And when we're slipping into overcorrection, it takes time.

So having some time, maybe in the evenings or in the mornings where you can journal and you can think about, maybe there were some things that didn't go the way that you wanted them to, some interactions throughout the day and really putting yourself back in that moment and replaying the moment almost as if there's like a camera that's up, you know, above watching what you were doing and watching your body in that moment as you're visualizing what happened, right. Are you tensing your shoulders? Do you see them coming up? Do you see, you know, the hands tightening?

Do you see yourself like your breath getting more shallow?

And then trying to take that a step further and really, okay, maybe there was some heat rising to my cheeks at that moment because I was getting really frustrated or I have some parents who they're like, honestly, my whole body was screaming at me to just curl up in a little ball and be done because I'm failing in this moment. And that's really the first step to understanding is to be able to put yourself back in situations after they've happened.

And then the next step is visualize figuring out where in your body you're having a body based response. And then we'll figure out, okay, how do we resource you from there? Right.

So if you are somebody who is getting red in the face or your breathing is getting shallow and you're, you're activated into the spider flight system, maybe a sip of cold ice water is really beneficial to your system to de escalate it or downshift it.

If you're somebody who tends to kind of freeze in these moments, maybe you need something more activating like a sip of hot coffee or to pull on your fingers or something. And so it's really bringing awareness to one's own self in the beginning before we can really do the deeper work.

For parents listening to or watching this interview, listening to you just share what you did, that's a tall order, right?

In the heat of the moment, stuff's happening, people are on schedules, your child's melting down, whatever's happening, what is the first step to basically then paving the way for what you just described. If you don't have that self awareness.

Yet and most parents don't. Right? Most parents do not have that self awareness yet. And so it's just stepping back after the fact.

I'm not asking parents to do anything in the moment, in the beginning of our work together. I am asking you after the fact, maybe at nighttime, after you put the kids to bed.

I know you're exhausted and I know you also don't want to continue this pattern of overcorrection. So take five minutes, think about your day. What went really well in the day, what maybe did not go so well in the day?

Maybe you were really rushed to get out the door in the morning and you were yelling and everybody was escalating and you ended up just grabbing your child and throwing him in a car seat. Right. And saying, it's time, we gotta get out the door. How could you at the end of the day, sit down, replay that moment in your brain?

And how can you look at what was happening in everybody's nervous systems and everybody's bodies in that moment?

So, unpacking the extremes that we were talking about earlier, I think that's, that's a really important point. So parents are often told, you know, to be gentle but firm, structured but flexible. So again, your point about the extremes.

Confident, but always self correcting. So why does this combination create exhaustion and self doubt and essentially is really not sustainable over the long term?

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I think the burnout happens because parents are trying to hold this impossible contradiction all at once almost. Right.

We're, like you said, we're told to be calm but authoritative, flexible but consistent. Confident, but always questioning ourselves. Right. And that keeps parents in this constant hyper, vigilant state of internal monitoring.

Am I doing this right? Am I being too much in this moment? Am I not enough? Did I just fail my child with my reactions?

And it really shifts parenting from a relationship into a performance, you know, like it's something to get right or prove your worth in rather than a dance and a rhythm in relationship with yourself, your child and your spouse.

So on that note, we live in a culture where, you know, that demands perfection when it comes to parenting. You've talked about it, but offers very little support.

So what pressures feel uniquely intense for parents right now compared to, let's say, past generations?

Yeah, I think in past generations, you know, there were often more layers of that built in support. Right.

There were extended family nearby, there was shared caregiving, there were fewer eyes on your parenting decisions because social media wasn't really a thing back then. Right. And parenting happened in a community rather than under constant observation or what feels like constant observation.

You know, today parents are raising children Largely in isolation, almost. Right. With unprecedented visibility into almost every move that we're making.

You know, every choice is watched, it's judged, it's analyzed and compare it. And often in real time. Right.

Like, you'll often hear these stories of people running into someone in Target and their child is having a meltdown and that person's coming up to the parent in the middle of it, like, oh, well, you should do this right? Or, you know, the influencers on social media who are like, this is exactly what you do in the moment.

And while that's great and it's really helpful to have these tips, it's just what you were saying earlier in the moment. It's so hard to go back to that if you don't have the self awareness that it's happening in the moment.

So your book, as we said, is called Overcorrecting. And you yourself are a young mother with three children under the age of five.

When did you realize, given your lived experience as well as your professional experience, which is quite expansive, when did you realize that this pattern wasn't just personal but cultural?

Yeah, so when I was working with parents, I work with a lot of parents who come to me and they say, I'm following all of the advice. I've read all of the books, and it's still not. Something's still not clicking. I still keep yelling. I still keep falling into these old patterns.

I feel like I am failing. And that is a really heavy sentence to hear. And I hear it near daily from the people that I work with and my husband and myself.

Even sometimes, right. If we don't feel like we're living up to standards, we feel like we're failing.

And a lot of it, again, goes back to, you know, just our, our nervous system, steady states, how we were raised, how we were brought up. You know, in this culture of just being able to see everything at all times, I think is really, really weighing heavily on us.

And that's what fuels the pendulum that I talked about in my book as well.

You are also a proponent of parenting in the gray. What does that mean? And what does it actually look like in practice?

Yeah. So parenting in the gray, it really means there's a rhythm, right? There's a rhythm and a swing in your parenting.

It's letting go of rigid schedules, letting go of shoulds and expectations and living in the moment.

It is, oh, I, you know, I yelled at my kid, I'm gonna go back and I'm going to repair, but it's going to be an authentic Repair versus a surface level. I'm sorry I did it, you know, I saw. I'm sorry I just yelled at you, buddy.

Parenting in the gray is really, it's coming back to yourself, your intuition as a parent and realizing, yes, there are amazing resources out there and understanding how to implement those in a loving and attuned way.

For parents listening to what you just said, who believe that structure is absolutely critical and if you kind of let go of that structure, it means being inconsistent. As a parent, how do you respond to that?

Yeah, I think that concern makes just a ton of sense because as a generation we have been taught to equate consistency with rigidity. And in reality, consistency is not doing the same thing in the same way every day with the same schedule.

9:00am, I'm going to feed breakfast, 9:30, we're going to go to school, etc. Right. But it means being reliable in a way that your child can count on you.

So you know, it's being consistent with the underlying, I'm here, I'm safe, I understand you.

Rather than being consistent in the way that you are structuring your day, it's being consistent with coming back to, I'm so sorry I screamed and yelled at you earlier today. I was really overwhelmed in that moment and it's not an excuse. I will try to do better. Right. So there is something to be said about consistency.

It's just not consistency in such a strict and rigid way.

What would you say then to a parent who is not trusting their own intuition on a regular basis for fear that they may mess up their child? How would you respond to that?

I totally understand where you're coming from. You know, I was the exact same way. You, as a parent, know your child best.

You as a parent are the one who gets to be with them at 2 o' clock in the morning when they're crying and upset at, you know, after school when they've had a long day, you know how your child is best going to respond to comfort. As parents, it's our job to observe our children and attune to their needs.

So you know, if you have someone telling you, like for instance, I've had a client in the past say, well, we've worked with professionals in the past and they told us when my child is melting down that we just need to go give them a giant bear hug because that'll help calm their nervous system down and get them, you know, downshifted.

But if you have a child who maybe touches not something that they respond really well to or you're noticing, hey, my child is having a really hard time right now and they're wanting to run around the room. Right. They've got a lot of energy. Giving them a bear hug is probably going to do the opposite of what you want them, what you want. Right.

So it's noticing what's happening for your child in that moment and responding appropriately in an attuned way. So you can absolutely use the tools that the professionals are giving you.

And you also need to use that observation of your child and that inner knowing that you know your child best.

I want to go back to what you were talking about with respect to nervous system regulation. This is an area of expertise that you bring to this topic. And I wonder, why is a parent's nervous system so often missing in parenting conversations?

I think a lot of it has to do with, you know, we want quick fixes. We're a generation that was kind of taught we need quick fixes. Right.

And with the rise of social media and Door dash and Uber Eats and all of these things at our fingertips, it's like instant gratification. And so we go to how to guides, we go to education. We want the knowledge.

Because we as a society at this point really feel like that's the way to go in order to better ourselves. We were told, a lot of us were told, like children should be seen, not heard.

A lot of us were, you know, conditioned to believe that maybe our needs didn't matter as much. Right. As like, conforming to societal expectations.

And so we've really been taught to kind of tamp down our own nervous system and not listen to our body, but listen to what adults are saying or what the experts are telling us because they're, they're the professionals, so they know better. So I think it's more of like a conditioning that we've kind of grown up with that we're, I think a lot of us nowadays are trying to break free from.

Well, and in many ways, you know, as you, as you describe it, your book is really flying in the face of conventional wisdom in many ways.

Right.

So I'm curious as to what your approach was as you sat down to put this book together, bringing in your lens as a parent with your lived experience and certainly your vast, multi layered professional experience as well.

Yeah.

So really I, I would take scenarios from client conversations that I had when I would meet with clients and something came up multiple times, either in a session or throughout multiple different clients, and I would see this pattern happening. Right. And I would see, you know, this, the advice that I keep giving is go back to center. Let's go back to the basics.

Let's go back to our survival needs. What does your nervous system need in this moment? Because CO regulation is huge with children.

If adults are not centered and adults are not calm and regulated, no matter what we do, no matter how we approach our children, no matter if we're doing everything quote, unquote correctly, our children are not going to calm down.

Their nervous systems are going to stay in this heightened awareness and it's, it's going to almost escalate the situation, even though we're trying to de. Escalate. Right. And, and so my process is always parenting first parent, the parent first. Let's look at your roots.

And I even broke my book into, you know, four parts, one of them being the roots, so we could understand what's happening underneath the surface. What is your instinct in the moment? Right.

And that's where we explore childhood and we explore your upbringing and we explore, okay, maybe this is bringing up an implicit memory for your body. And so you're having this body based response.

And it's really important for parents to understand that before they move into, okay, what does conventional wisdom tell us to do in this moment? And then we're going to blend the two of those together to find the rhythm. And that's part four of the book, right? It's the rhythm.

It's how do we get to a pendulum that might still be swinging, but it's not swinging to extremes anymore? And then I just layered in, you know, client stories because.

And my own stories in there a lot too, because I feel like parents these days feel very alone and isolated. And so I hope, you know, parents reading the book will be able to read some of these stories and think, oh, I'm not alone, I get it, I'm not alone.

And feel seen and, you know, feel like they're part of something bigger.

You mentioned CO regulation. What is that in simple terms? And what does that look like in practice and daily life?

Yeah. So in the very simplest of terms, CO regulation is when one person borrows calm from another person.

So again, it's just, you know, as parents, we are the leaders of our house. So if we can remain calm and we can remain regulated, not just on the outside. Right.

But on the inside where our heart is not racing, our, you know, our shutdown systems are not active, but we remain present in the moment, not spiraling into anxiety and what ifs and oh, my child should be able to do this, but they're not able to do this right now, but we really are able to breathe in and understand our child is a unique human right in front of our eyes. Right. And we have our own responses, regulate ourselves. Our children will then borrow our calm. And they will, it will help them to calm down as well.

How about for parents who feel consistently dysregulated or are constantly reactive? Is there something you can suggest, a small step that they can take to get out of sort of survival mode and without adding more pressure to them?

Yeah, that's a really great question. And I see a lot of parents who are in this mode. Right. They're constantly reactive.

And a lot of it goes back to they, they don't know to look internally. So it kind of goes back to what I was saying previously. Right. Give yourself some grace. Parenting is not a performance.

Parenting is a human relationship between you and yourself and you and your child and you and your spouse. It's, it's multifaceted. And, you know, it's okay that our children act out every once in a while.

It's okay if our children want to wear PJs on a school tour. I talked to a parent about this yesterday. First impressions, sure. They matter. And their kids let them be kids. Right.

And that's really, really hard for us to do because we all have these, I call it part, I call it parts of us, right, that, that rise up. They are protectors and they want to protect us from feeling what we've felt in the past.

And I think one of the biggest things that parents can do is acknowledge their bodies and understand their reactions. Not in the moment, because that is way too tall of an order. But again, after the fact, we need to sit down.

We need to understand why we are reacting the way we are. And we need to embrace our nervous systems instead of running from them.

And I think that's what a lot of parents right now who are in constant reactivity are doing, is we're running, we're running away from ourselves. We're running away from our react, our reactions. Maybe because we're afraid of them, maybe because we don't know. It's the fear of uncertainty.

What happens if I embrace it? And so that's that internal work that parents need to do.

What would you say then is the potential long term impact of not addressing what you're talking about over, you know, the lifespan for the parent and certainly for the relationship they have or do not have with their children?

Yeah. So I write about this a little bit in my book, but you know, mental health issues have been on the rise for children lately in the United States.

I don't have the exact numbers right in front of me, but I think it's something as horrible as like 17 of children have some sort of a mental health disorder by the age of like 10. And that I think really is the impact of parents who are living in this constant reactivity. We don't have a secure attachment with our children.

Our children don't know what to expect when we show up. Are they going to get a happy parent today? Are they going to get a really frustrated and angry parent who's yelling a lot today?

And so kids are hypervigilant and this hyper vigilance in their nervous system is turning into anxiety or depression or we're projecting the I'm not good enough right onto them. So there's major impacts to our children if we keep showing up in reactivity and to ourselves. That's health impacts. Right.

If our nervous system is not working properly, if our nervous systems are in constant reactive states, we come up with chronic health issues, chronic pain issues. Right. Migraines, and then it just, it impacts us overall.

And so it's really important for us to look, look inward and try to do some of this work and try to, you know, understand how we can maybe even like go to a somatic therapist and get some of this body based responses, get some of the, like, oh, how do I loosen my jaw, how do I get rid of this knot that's constantly in my belly, etc.

Was there anything in the science that you looked at in the course of writing your book that, you know, struck you in a particular way that gave you pause on this topic?

Yeah. So there's, I mean, there's a lot of science and I question this a lot in, okay, we're reactive and then let's repair the relationship. Right.

And repair helps us.

Because of the neuroplasticity of our brains, every time that we fire, we wire is what Dr. Dan Siegel, I think it's Dan Siegel was talking about through like neuroplasticity. But what gave me pause was, okay, what if a parent is constantly in this reactive state and constantly then apologizing to their children?

And what I came up with was a lot of times parents who are like that, they are apologizing because they think they have to apologize, right? And they're asking for forgiveness.

Forgiveness from a child who might not be able to grant them forgiveness and who doesn't really understand what forgiveness is. So instead of apologizing with an expectation. It needs to be more authentic, right? It needs to be more grounded.

And you know, I also, I, I don't want parents to feel like I'm putting additional pressure on them, right, to fix themselves. Because you don't need fixing. You just need to understand what's going on underneath the surface.

And so that, that also gave me pause when writing this book because I'm like, I don't want parents to feel like I'm attacking them or I'm attacking how, how they're parenting or what their bodies are doing right now.

And I think it's really important for us to understand what's happening and how we make true, lasting changes in our parenting and in our relationships.

So building on that point, what do you believe that most parents misunderstand about the impact of their mistakes on their children?

So my theory is that parents believe that it is every decision that we make that has an impact on their children, right? So to sleep train, to not sleep trained, to do baby led weaning or eating purees, you know, what kind of car seat am I going to buy?

Like, I think parents are putting too much weight on every single decision and not enough weight on the space between our choices. What's happening between the choices? What's happening in your interactions with your children, right?

Because a baby who's, who does baby lead weaning and a baby who eats purees when they're a toddler, they're all still probably eating those french fries off of the, the car floor, right? Or the hairy, you know, the hairy chicken nugget that dropped in their house with their dogs.

A baby who is, you know, sleep trained versus not sleep trained, depending on the way that they're sleep trained and depending on the amount of, you know, repair that parents are doing throughout the day after, after the sleep training nights, that's going to also be very impactful. It's not just am I, you know, am I leaving a baby to cry it out, but there's also, you know, all of these in between ways, right?

Am I doing a fading method, am I doing a habit stacking method, am I doing a chair method? Etc, right? And nowadays everything is just so extreme. It's like you have to do this or this. There's no middle way.

And I think parents have just kind of lost the fact that there actually is a middle way that we can all, you know, get what we need to. We don't have to suffer through it.

You've talked about a little bit and you have an area of Expertise in generational trauma.

How does a parent go about beginning that healing journey to repair generational patterns that they may have experienced in their own lives without it becoming a pressure filled, overwhelming project for them before they are able to effectively parent?

Oh, that is such a good question. And I think it's, I think it's twofold, right?

We as parents need to get that understanding of what is this generational trauma that we're bringing forward.

I think a lot of parents these days, we don't really want to re, explore our past because maybe there are some hidden wounds there or, you know, we're too focused on why things happened in the past versus understanding and learning from, okay, this happened and this is why, you know, this is why I'm parenting the way that I am. So the first step is really gaining that understanding and it's really okay what, what happened and, and how is that impacting me moving forward now?

And then the second step is acknowledging it, not running from it.

Like I've, you know, I think said a couple of times now, you know, we need to honor our pasts as parents, as humans, we need to honor that things have happened in our past that shaped our nervous systems and we're, we're trying too hard to run away from that and completely just throw it out the door and just move towards this. I know what I'm doing because I'm reading all of the books and I'm doing all of the things. Why is it not working?

In what ways? Manu, would you say that all that you've learned, that you've researched, that you've experienced in this space has influenced how you parent?

I think it's influenced it, you know, quite a bit. And I can even give you some concrete examples. Right. So with my firstborn, I didn't know what I was doing.

I was a first time mom, and I responded to every single little whine. Not even a cry, just every single little whine.

Because I, it felt so uncomfortable to me to hear him cry out, to hear him whine, to be upset about literally anything. And I once had a nanny tell me, she was like, you cannot do that.

Like every single time that he winds you move him or you do something for him, he's never gonna learn and grow like they get. Babies get upset when they're learning new skills and trying to do new things, and you have to let him get upset a little bit.

And, you know, I kind of took that with a grain of salt because I, I wasn't 100 certain, but then I went through the Jai Institute for Parenting to get my parent coaching certification. And I learned all about attachment and I learned all about emotional intelligence and the nervous system and mindsight.

And I learned to really look beneath the surface of the behaviors. Right. So why is my child having this behavior? Why is my child whining right now or crying right now?

What is this behavior trying to communicate to me?

And so when I looked at it from that perspective, it helped me understand when I needed to go to him immediately versus when I needed to maybe give him a little bit of space to start working through some stuff. And you can see it now in my 5 and 4 year olds, how different they are even though they're only 16, 16 months apart.

I went through the JAI program while my 16 month old was like 6 months old is when I started it.

And so you can see how much quicker he is to take those deep breaths and to calm down and to just regulate and how much easier it is for me to regulate with him than it is for me to regulate with my oldest. And hopefully with my third, it'll be even better because I've been in this work for a while now.

Yeah, no, that sounds great. We're almost out of time. But I did want to ask you, what do you want parents and anybody who reads overcorrecting to leave with?

I want them to leave with a sense of support. You know, I wrote this book because I really want parents to feel held.

I want them to understand that again, it's not every single decision that shapes your child. It's those steps, space between those choices.

It is how you hold yourself, how you repair, how you come back to connection each and every single time. I really, really want parents to understand that you're not failing, you're not failing your children.

And I think that's the big theme of the book is, you know, all the parents I talk to, they all feel like they're failing. They all feel like they're doing something incorrectly when things don't go according to plan.

But I want parents to understand that parenting is a rhythm, it's a dance with your child. It is a connection ritual. And you can do this. You can, you can parent in a way that feels authentic to you.

You can listen to the advice of the experts and you can still do what feels right in your body. And that's how you'll build these long term relationships with your children. And that's how you'll be able to find your center again.

Incredibly important insight in particular for the times we live in Manu Bruni, master parenting coach and author of Overcorrecting. Thank you so much for your time today.

Thank you.

To learn more about today's podcast, guest and topic, as well as other parenting themes, visit whereparentstalk.com.