5 Parenting Tools That Adults Should Also Adopt for Stress Relief
Dr. Jessica Gold explains how adults can apply five fundamental parenting strategies—such as timeouts and self-care—to manage everyday stress and emotional overload.
Raising children is a continuous, on-the-go learning process. Many parents turn to professionals, educational counselors, and psychologists to navigate the minefield of tantrums and emotional crises in children. However, as one learns to help young children manage high-intensity emotions, a surprising realization emerges: adults need these exact same strategies just as much.
In the hustle and bustle of daily life, it is easy to focus on tasks that need completion while forgetting the person behind them—ourselves. Dr. Jessica Gold, a psychiatric expert and senior wellness official at the University of Tennessee, explains that adults tend to validate children's emotions and treat them with compassion, yet fail to extend that same grace to themselves.
Gold shares five tools from the world of parenting that she has adopted into her personal life. According to her, one does not need to be a parent to benefit from them: these are tools that can help anyone cope with stress, frustration, and emotional overload.
1. Give Yourself a Timeout
When a child is overwhelmed by emotions, sometimes the best course of action is to allow them to step away from the situation and calm down. It turns out adults need this kind of break too.
When you feel on the verge of an outburst, try to pause and step away from the stressful trigger for a few minutes. Instead of reacting out of anger and saying things you might later regret, you can simply say, "I need a minute."
Gold calls this a "preventative timeout": briefly stepping away from a situation helps reduce tension before it reaches a boiling point. Even if leaving the room is impossible, the simple decision to delay your reaction can give you time to reset.
2. Ask Yourself: Is This a Big Problem or a Small One?
Small children can react with intense emotion even to minor events. A broken toy or a finished game can feel like a genuine crisis to them. Yet adults, too, sometimes react to minor events as if a disaster has struck.
A mistake at work, an unanswered message, or a daily routine decision can occupy us for hours. We analyze what happened over and over, criticize ourselves, and waste energy on matters that do not necessarily warrant such worry.
The solution is simple: stop and ask yourself whether it is a big problem or a small one. If the problem is small, it can be handled quickly or set aside for now. The goal is not to ignore difficulties, but to learn to distinguish between what truly demands our attention and what we can release and move past.
3. Give Yourself a Five-Minute Warning
Parents know the struggle children face when transitioning from one activity to another. Finishing a game to sit down for dinner, or leaving the park to head home, can provoke resistance and frustration. One way to cope is to announce in advance: "We're finishing up in five minutes."
Adults can benefit from this method as well. If you tend to get lost in work, lose track of time, or struggle with task-switching, try setting an alert a few minutes before you need to wrap up. Gold shared that she has learned to rely on calendar alerts and phone timers to remind herself when it is time to transition. This reminder allows her to prepare mentally rather than realizing belatedly that time has slipped away.
4. Take Three Deep Breaths
This is one of the simplest yet most useful pieces of advice. When a child is upset, many parents urge them to pause, take a deep breath, and count to five. The idea is to create a moment of respite between emotion and reaction.
This same tool can help adults. Slow, deep breathing can reduce the body's stress response, lower the heart rate, and foster a sense of calm. Try inhaling slowly through the nose and exhaling through the mouth for three breaths. You can do this before a tense conversation, during a busy workday, or the moment you feel anger taking over.
5. "Just Eat Something"
Parents of young children know well that hunger can turn a calm child into a cranky and impatient one. Thus, they make sure to pack snacks and water even for short outings. Adults, by contrast, easily skip meals during busy days and rely solely on coffee. Later on, lack of concentration, fatigue, and irritability set in—and we do not always understand why.
Gold emphasizes that physical health is deeply intertwined with mental health. A lack of food, water, or sleep can make us impatient, reactive, and less resilient to frustration.
Before assuming your entire day is falling apart, check when you last ate and whether you drank enough water. Sometimes a proper meal, a glass of water, or a small snack helps far more than expected.
The message is clear: adults need to take care of themselves, too.
