The Cereal. The Car. The Tears. (And What I Had to Remind Myself On The Way Home.)

We had a truly spectacular Sunday. The kind that leaves everyone buzzing and nobody ready to wind down. But if I'm honest, we'd been running on a deficit since Friday — a late party, too many sweets, not enough sleep. Saturday had been tricky. Sunday was gorgeous but we went big. It was also one thing too many on top of a nervous system that was already stretched. Bedtime was difficult. And as a result, Monday morning was a disaster.

Albus, who is four and is very much doing all the four year old things right now, was physical with both me and his brother. Breakfast was thrown. A new breakfast was presented and ignored. And then, as he walked out the door, he told me he didn't want his bowl of cereal to come with him. Leave it on the side, he said.

So I did.

And then in the car, all the way to and into school, he cried for the cereal. It was traumatic.

I knew. I knew exactly what was coming and I left the cereal on the side anyway. Why didn't I just put the damn cereal in the damn car?

Here's what I know to be true — and what I had to remind myself of on the way home.

At four, the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for impulse control, emotional regulation and logical reasoning — is still in very early development. It won't be fully developed until his mid-twenties. At four specifically, children are in a period of rapid neurological growth that actually makes them more emotionally volatile, not less. The brain is building connections faster than it can regulate them.

Which means Albus wasn't being manipulative about the cereal. His brain literally couldn't do what I was asking it to do in that moment. The emotional brain was firing fast and loud. The rational brain had almost no capacity to override it.

And then there's this — Australian child psychologist Dr Louise Porter suggests that around twenty percent of children have particularly high autonomy needs. They need to feel that decisions are genuinely their own before they can cooperate. Forcing compliance doesn't work with these children. It escalates. Every time.

Both my boys, I am fairly confident, are part of that twenty percent.

I was reminded of this recently when visiting my sister. A friend of hers was describing how her second child — a boy — was draining her in ways her eldest daughter never had. My sister, who has two girls, nodded along and then said: "I know. I watch my sister with her two. It's carnage.” (Or some sort of words to that effect)

She is not wrong.

Though I should say — I know plenty of equally high energy girls. As a boy mum I can only speak to my own experience of this. Your carnage may look entirely different. The twenty percent does not discriminate.

However, knowing any part of that doesn't make the cereal moment easier in real time. And that's the honest part I want to say — because I am equally not always able to hold the space as well as I would like. I know the theory. I believe it completely. And I still got home almost in tears.

That's not failure. That's being human inside this.

Luke and I took a moment to work through what had gone wrong and what we'd do differently next time. And I was reminded — not for the first time — what a difference it makes to have someone to hold you in all of this. To not be doing it alone.

We talk about stages in parenting as though they have neat timeframes. I am trying to retrain my brain to think of them as seasons, it feels a more realistic description. And with bedtime battles right now, we are firmly in a long winter.

And yet — and this is what Luke and I kept coming back to in our conversation this morning — these big emotions are a gift. This defiance is a gift. The intensity, the will, the refusal to be moved — these are the very qualities I want my children to carry into adulthood. They will serve them well in this wild world.

So right now the work isn't stamping any of it out. It's ensuring we all survive it intact — big personalities and all — while we wait for the prefrontal cortex to catch up. And in the meantime I lean more heavily on that track of mine.

And on the hard mornings, it helps to remember how far we've come. It is so easy to forget. My capacity — my patience, my curiosity, my ability to hold the hard moments without completely losing myself in them — has grown beyond measure since I first started truly looking at what it means to raise healthy, resilient, emotionally complex little humans. Monday morning was hard. But the Monday morning version of me from two years ago would not have recognised this one.

And isn't that the whole goal?

Not the elimination of hard mornings. Never that. Because the spectrum that contains the cereal tears also contains the joy that takes your breath away — the cave climb, the crane rebuilt for the fourth time, the brother allowed to join. You cannot have one without the other. The depth of the hard is what gives the extraordinary its extraordinary-ness.

The work has never been about flattening it all into calm. It's about building enough capacity to hold the full spectrum — and to find the magic in it, even on a Monday.

When I talk about a track, I mean it both ways.

The metaphorical one — The Wild Shift, the community, the framework that I return to when things get hard. And the real one — a 4km loop outside our front door that I have been walking and running for years. Some weeks more than others. Some weeks just the short version, nudged out the door by Luke when I'd rather not.

I wrote about it last week — about what it means to have a route that holds your growth without asking anything of you. About why the specific landscape matters less than you think. And about the question that came to me on the back hill, coming over the top with the Early Purple Orchids in bloom, that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since.

👉 Read: The Growth Route (Or, The Root — To Keep On Brand)

And while I'm sharing things I didn't expect — I am somehow on Week 7 of Couch to 5k.

I started in January. Four months ago. I've had break weeks and repeat weeks and weeks where five minutes felt ambitious. I am more tortoise than hare by a considerable distance. But this morning I ran for twenty-five minutes straight. Not comfortably. But continuously.

We all know how that fable ends.

The Wild Shift has never been about getting it right all the time. It's about having a track to return to when you don't. A community that holds you on the hard Mondays. The grace to show your children how to navigate all of it — not just the spectacular Sundays, but the cereal in the car moments too.

Someone in The Wild Shift community sent me a message recently that I've been thinking about a lot these past days. A grandparent, reflecting on their own parenting journey:

"I really wish that I had had your thoughts and advice when my own children were very young. I … Am making up for it now though, explaining to my children where I think I went wrong. They are very kind and understanding and I think they appreciate that I dwell on these things."

I replied:

"I think that becoming parents brings with it a lot of grace for our own parents — and even more so when they are willing to reflect and see where they could have done things differently. One of my favourite sayings is: we are doing the best we can, and when we can do better, we will. As long as we can honestly say that's true, we are on the right track."

That mantra is one I lean on constantly. Because parenting is often a game of guilt management. And knowing that I really am doing the best I can — and will do better when I can — is what keeps me from spiralling. It gives me space to be a human being inside this experience. To let it be imperfectly perfect.

That's the gift. Not the perfect morning, but the recovery from the imperfect one.

And when I picked him up this afternoon it had been a great day and he’d met a chameleon.

If this Monday felt familiar — and you'd like to start building the track that holds you when it doesn't go to plan — this is where most families begin.

The Three-Step Reset is a free training that introduces the first foundational shift of The Wild Shift. Not a list of tips. The beginning of a sequence that compounds.

👉 Start your free reset: thewildshift.com/three-step-reset