The Storm, The Shore, and The Calm Waters

One Crisis After Another — And What To Do In Between

I am a child and family psychiatrist. Most of my work happens in crisis. Here is what it looks like. A parent, tired of seeing their kid spending nights on their phone and missing school, storms into their room demanding the device. The child retaliates — wrecks the house, threatens to kill themselves. Parent calls 911. The kid comes to the hospital. By the time I see them the next morning, it is calm. As if nothing had happened.

The crisis is loud. It gets attention. The storm is not where you parent with words. It is where you parent with presence. You hold still. But whether you can, was determined long before — in the quiet, ordinary days that nobody really remembers.

In a previous piece, I described two tools: rigid protocols for yourself and flexible frameworks for family relationships. This article is about when each one applies. Every family lives through storms and calm waters. Most parents cannot stop staring at the storm.

The Storm

Everyone knows the storm. You see the clouds darken your kid’s face, conversation stops, and the emotions swell.

I see families come to the hospital with police after an argument about a phone, a curfew, a dishwasher. But it is never about the dishwasher, is it? The storm starts with a ripple in calm waters, miles away, some time ago.

The parents bring the kids in when they ran out of options. They hope I can prevent the next blowup. But the crisis in front of me did not start that night. It started when the protocols were missing and the frameworks were never built. They instead built a pattern.

The parents are so shaken by the crisis that they go lax — they let everything slide because they are terrified of another explosion. Until they cannot tolerate it anymore, and they clamp down again, and the next storm arrives on schedule. So, they see me again. The cycle repeats. Rigid, then lax, then rigid. The same parents, swinging between the only two modes they know.

Many well-meaning parents try to calm crisis by validating, reasoning, talking about feelings. But you are talking to a prefrontal cortex that has left the building. It does not matter how thoughtful the message is. The line is disconnected.

Here is what I tell them. Drop the framework. Execute the protocol.

When my kids and I argue and they slam the door, I want to follow. I want to continue until they understand, until they see my point. But they are not in understanding mode — and no amount of talking will put them there. So, I sit in the living room. I don’t need to be in their room. They know where I am.

The goal in the storm is singular: safety. You must stay present, calm, immovable. State the boundary in as few words as possible and stop. Reduce stimulation. Not a silence as punishment, but a quiet presence. Every word is another wave hitting a flooded system. You become the mirror, showing them the calm they cannot find in themselves. The child will eventually register that there is no actual threat; the adrenaline will ebb, and the prefrontal cortex will come back online. The hardest part is to wait, not to make things worse.

The storm is not where parenting happens. It is where it’s tested. But you cannot be the rock in a storm if there is no rock to begin with.

The Shore

The shore is you.

Beaches sit on solid rock. The rock forms over eons, layer by layer, compressed into a solid structure. Humans are like that. We are born very soft and then layer by layer we build our own. Some of that foundation was laid before you were born. Some was shaped by the people who raised you. But the layers you press down now are yours.

It is small, everyday decisions. No single one matters. Together, they form the shore.

Do you stay up scrolling your phone on a Tuesday night or prioritize your sleep? Do you take your kid to a playdate or go to your therapy appointment? Do you choose a glass of wine on a couch on Friday night or lace up your shoes and go for a run in a park? Decisions, decisions. Protocols form a rock.

But children observe and absorb. When the parent is regulated, rested, and steady, the child registers safety — even when they are pushing back, even when they are testing every boundary.

The shore does not push back; the water must recede.

The Calm Waters

This is 90%.

The morning nobody is fighting. The Saturday afternoon. The drive home from school when the conversation drifts into something real — or doesn’t. These are not fillers between crises. These are the main event. And most parents either coast through them recovering from the last storm or spend them bracing for the next one.

The calm waters are where your child figures out who they are. Quietly. This is their job.

When there are no sweets in my house, my daughter looks up recipes and bakes. She started by asking for help with the oven. Now she does it on her own. I don’t get involved. I’m nearby — reading, cooking, doing my own thing — while she figures out ingredients and the measurements, and what happens when you mess the temperature up. She is building her own protocols, her own structure. My job is to be the shore she can glance at while she works.

This is what calm waters look like when they are working. The parent is present but not directing. The structure is there. The space inside it belongs to the child.

Most of us understand it, but there is one thing that turns calm waters turbulent fast. Phones. This is where most parents lose perspective. Your child is on their phone, and you feel the heat rise. But how long they have been on it is the wrong question. It should be what they are doing.

Are they in a group chat with friends, laughing, making plans? That is connection — messy, loud, exactly what adolescence is for. Are they doomscrolling through an algorithmic feed, glazed over? The difference matters, and most parents never ask because they have already decided the phone is the enemy.

The algorithms are addictive, yes. But they are addictive because they solve emotional problems. Bored? Here is endless entertainment. Anxious? Here is something to procrastinate with. Overstimulated? Here is a way to go numb. The phone is always there, and it always has an answer. Before you take the crutch away, you need to understand what it was supporting.

To see what your child is doing, you need to be calm enough to watch. And you can only be calm if you built the shore.

Pulling away

Here is the part most parents are not ready to hear: your teenager is supposed to pull away from you. It is developmental. They are building autonomy, testing independence, learning to exist as a separate person. It does not mean that they do not love you. Opposite, actually—they feel confident that as they distance themselves, you are always going to be there.

Naturally, it feels like losing your baby. That grief is real. What you are gaining is harder to see – a new relationship between adults. But that takes time, and the in-between is uncomfortable.

For many parents, that feeling triggers a fight-or-flight response that has nothing to do with the child and everything to do with the parent’s own history — their fear of not being needed, of being left behind, of not being able to protect them. It is easier to blame the phones than to embrace the reality.

Your child is redefining who they are. That forces you to redefine who you are without them. That is terrifying.

I had to find it too. Something that was mine — not my kids’ activities, not my clinical work. A place where I think out loud about the things I care about, separate from being a parent. Your children need to see that I exist beyond them.

Repair

The calm waters are also where you fix what broke.

When my son was ten, he missed the school bus. He was afraid to come home, so he went on his own. The school called because he was missing. He eventually arrived at the school by public transit, completely on his own, with no instructions. But not before the police showed up. I was in residency training for child psychiatry and my first reaction was not about him. It was about me — what if this incident affects my record? I panicked. I took away his video games for three months.

He had shown remarkable resourcefulness. A ten-year-old, scared, problem-solved his way through a tough moment — and I punished him for it.

Once the sentence was handed down, I could not take it back. I told myself I was teaching him safety. The police showing up is serious. But he saw three months without video games for missing a bus. My recognition of his resourcefulness sounded hollow next to the punishment.

When I realized how badly I had misread the moment, I apologized. Not once. Over the years, I have come back to that incident more than once to tell him I got it wrong. That is not a single repair. It is ongoing.

The Japanese call this kintsugi — repairing broken pottery with gold. Each time I came back to my son to say I got it wrong, the crack did not disappear. It became visible, part of the relationship. The repair is not a fix. It is the most honest part of what we have built.

There are so many ways to teach safety, but only one way to teach accountability—to live it. That is the mettle.

In my practice, when parents ask me for advice, I turn the question to the kid. I ask them what they think parents should do. Most of the time the kids are reasonable, and it starts a meaningful conversation. Those times when they are not, I explain their parents’ point of view and try again. Given the voice, kids try their best to contribute. The parents still have the say.

The Cycle

The storm, the shore, and the calm waters are not chapters you read once. They are a spiral.

The storm hits. The protocols take over. The shore holds. And when the storm passes, the calm waters return — and the repairs begin. Each cycle, if you do the work, the shore gets another layer. The storms don’t disappear, but they get shorter and your capacity to weather them will grow. The calm waters deepen because the trust between you and your child has one more layer of gold in the cracks.

You will get it wrong. That is part of the spiral too.

Build the shore. Be present in the calm. Weather the storm. Repair.

Then do it again.