Emotion Coaching Fatigue—The Exhausted Parent’s Dilemma
Monday, April 14, 2025.
It started as a miracle.
The idea that we could raise children without yelling, without threats, without rupturing their souls every Tuesday morning in the minivan.
Emotion coaching, as popularized by John Gottman and others (Gottman et al., 1997), told us: name it to tame it. Validate their feelings. Co-regulate. Show up with curiosity.
It worked. Until it didn’t.
The New Fatigue
What’s showing up in therapist mom podcasts, trauma-informed parenting groups, and neurodivergent parent circles is a quiet, simmering burnout. A growing population of parents are whispering:
“I know I’m supposed to validate every feeling, but sometimes I want to yell, ‘Get in the car!’”
This isn’t a rejection of empathy—it’s a rebellion against performative empathy. Against the exhausting expectation that every meltdown deserves a TED Talk and a breathing exercise.
An Overcorrection?
Parenting culture has swung from authoritarian to therapeutic without pausing to breathe.
Many millennial parents were raised with silence, dismissal, or discipline masquerading as love. In response, they’ve overcorrected into emotional micromanagement—where every feeling must be honored, narrated, processed.
But real life doesn’t always allow for a three-act emotional arc at 7:48am on a school day.
What the Research Says
Emotion coaching is effective. Gottman’s original research found that kids raised by emotionally attuned parents had better self-regulation, higher academic performance, and stronger peer relationships (Gottman et al., 1997).
But emotional regulation doesn’t mean emotional indulgence.
Eisenberg et al. (2005) found that children benefit most when they experience appropriate levels of emotional scaffolding—not total emotional outsourcing.
In other words, kids need room to build frustration tolerance, not just emotional vocabulary.
The DBT Take
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (Linehan, 1993) teaches us that validation doesn’t mean agreement.
And radical acceptance doesn’t mean you don’t set boundaries. Many therapist-parents are now drawing on DBT to practice limited validation—recognizing emotion, naming it briefly, and then pivoting to problem-solving or behavior shaping.
You can say, “I see that you're frustrated,” and still require the child to brush their teeth.
Why This Trend Matters
Maybe it’s because we’re at risk of turning parenting into a self-negating performance.
Emotion coaching fatigue is a signal that our nervous systems were not designed for continuous, never ending, attunement.
We are not emotion-processing machines—we’re human parents with jobs, deadlines, PMS, and microwaved coffee.
The shift now is toward adaptive empathy: learning when to validate, when to guide, and when to say, “This isn’t therapy. It’s bedtime.”
This is a generational reckoning.
Let me me perfectly clear. Gottman wasn’t wrong at all. He was totally spot on.
But American Culture, as it often does, took a good thing to far in the pursuit of perfection.
It’s the moment when we stop trying to be perfect parents and start becoming present ones.
It’s not about rejecting gentle parenting. It’s about revising it—for real families, with real limits, in a real world. Kids have to develop frustration tolerance, along with their emotional development. That’s why FAFO parenting is shaping this conversation.
You don’t have to be the expert therapist in your child’s life. You just have to be the comfortably good-enough adult in the room.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES
Eisenberg, N., Fabes, R. A., Guthrie, I. K., & Reiser, M. (2005). Dispositional emotionality and regulation: Their role in predicting quality of social functioning. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(1), 136–157.
Gottman, J. M., Katz, L. F., & Hooven, C. (1997). Meta-emotion: How families communicate emotionally. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Linehan, M. M. (1993). Cognitive-behavioral treatment of borderline personality disorder. Guilford Press.