Borrowing Your Calm

Children don’t learn calm because we explain it to them.
They learn it because they feel it in us.

Before they understand words, consequences, logic, or tone, they understand presence. They understand whether the adult in front of them is steady or tight, open or braced, available or somewhere else entirely. They read it in our breath, our posture, our pace. They borrow what we carry long before they have their own.

This is why two parents can say the exact same thing, with the same words and the same rules, and get completely different responses. One child softens. Another escalates. The difference is rarely the sentence. It’s the nervous system delivering it.

When an adult is regulated, not calm in a performative way, not “relaxed” while holding tension underneath, but genuinely settled, the child doesn’t have to work as hard. Their body doesn’t need to scan for danger or brace for impact. They can lean. They can offload. They can borrow.

Borrowing calm doesn’t mean permissive parenting. It doesn’t mean never saying no or never holding boundaries. In fact, boundaries land better when they’re delivered from steadiness instead of control. A regulated adult can say no without threat, without fear, without needing the child to comply in order to feel okay themselves.

Children sense when an adult needs something from them emotionally. They feel when the adult needs obedience to feel in control, agreement to feel validated, closeness to feel soothed. That’s when children either push back or disappear. Neither is misbehaviour. Both are adaptation.

A child who escalates is often borrowing chaos because calm isn’t available.
A child who shuts down is often protecting themselves from carrying too much.

What we often call “good behaviour” is sometimes just a child managing an adult’s state.

This is why telling a child to calm down rarely works. It asks them to access a state they haven’t been given yet. It’s like asking them to speak a language they haven’t heard.

Calm is transmitted, not instructed.

When an adult can pause instead of react, slow instead of push, stay present instead of overwhelm, the child’s body notices before their mind does. Their breathing shifts. Their shoulders drop. Their nervous system starts to match the rhythm in the room.

This isn’t about being perfect. Children don’t need perfect parents. They need repair. They need adults who notice when they’ve lost their footing and come back. Adults who can say, “I got activated there,” without shame or over-explaining. Adults who model returning to centre instead of demanding regulation from a child who can’t yet do that alone.

Borrowing calm is how children eventually learn to generate their own.

It’s how safety becomes internal instead of conditional.
It’s how resilience is built quietly, without drills or speeches.
It’s how children learn that emotions can move through them without taking over the room.

And long after childhood, this is still how humans work.

We borrow calm from partners, friends, therapists, teachers. We borrow it until our own nervous system remembers the way back. There is no failure in that. It’s how regulation has always been passed down, person to person, body to body.

The most powerful thing you bring into a relationship with a child isn’t your rules, your strategies, or your words.

It’s your state.

And when your state is steady, you become a place they can rest.