Children are our most precious gifts. But that doesn’t negate the reality that little kids can very easily get on your last nerve. Children throw tantrums, ignore directions, make messes and generally make adults’ lives harder - they’re completely dependent on us, still learning their manners and motor skills and limited in their ability to empathize and understand all the pressures of day-to-day adult life. And it’s not always evenly distributed amongst your children. It’s not unusual to have one child you get along with easily and another you’re constantly fighting with.

Every parent reaches the breaking point some time or another, but you don’t have to give in to the chaos. Practicing emotional regulation is crucial both to your mental health and your child’s emotional development. Here are tips for coping when your child is pushing all your buttons.

Remove yourself when overwhelmed

One of the ways parents can unintentionally worsen a situation with a child is engaging in a fight when they’re worked up. Sometimes you can handle one issue, like children fighting with each other, but then completely break down when it comes to another problem, like a child talking back or neglecting their homework. If you find yourself getting worked up - your heartbeat is racing, your body temperature is rising, your voice is getting higher and higher - oftentimes the best course of action is to remove yourself entirely.

Retreat to your room, to your car, to a bathroom. You can cry if you need to, but your priority should be calming yourself down so you can get back to your child quickly without leaving them feeling as though they’re ruining your life - your child probably noticed that mid-argument, you suddenly left the room, and may be worried about what you’re doing.

Giving yourself time to calm down can help you get back to a calmer state and resume parenting. Anger can build on itself if you don’t stop it in its tracks. Avoid continuing an argument with your child when you know you’re having your own meltdown - you can’t take back words you say in a fight, but you can prevent them from being said.

Identify behavior that sets you off

It may be that you have no problem calmly telling your child they can’t leave the table without finishing dinner and easily tune out their complaints and whining. But once your kid turns around and gets into a scuffle with his sibling, you have to fight back the instinct to slap your child, slam doors and drawers and start screaming. People have their own ‘triggers’ that can set them off, and it’s not unusual for those triggers to descend from your own psychological experiences.

For example, if you have a particular problem with responding to your kids fighting, you may want to think about the role sibling fights played in your own childhood. Did you have an older sibling who picked fights with you that seemed unfair, or parents who ignored it when you got into a fight?

Think about what motivates your behavior and why particular behaviors set you off more than others. Then think about how to separate that incident from your own parenting. Focus on communicating information and improving behavior, not screaming and insulting, to tell your child to knock it off.

Learn how to move on

After you’ve calmed down, you have to eventually return to reality, and some of those behaviors may pop up again. That’s when you learn to take the issue less seriously.

You can try to turn it into a cute anecdote by writing it down with a positive interpretation. Turn a negative incident into a funny story you can share with your friends. Think about what your child learned from the experience and frame it in those terms.

Most importantly, have a conversation with your child about why you want them to improve their behavior. You don’t have to be totally honest - you don’t have to say, for example, that your child left you in tears and mad because his behavior is abhorrent.

But you can say that causing a mess in your home means you have to spend more time cleaning up, along with all your other chores, and it makes you sad when you don’t get a break at the end of the day. You can avoid saying “Don’t hit your little sister because I’ll hit you harder” and instead opt for “When you hit your sister, it makes me worry because you can accidentally seriously hurt her.” Don’t dwell on the incident and remember that while bad behavior should be corrected, it doesn’t have to come in the form of a potentially traumatizing argument or breakdown. Use your patience, use your words and vent your anger in private. Parenting is hard, but they won’t be young forever.