"Regulate Yourself First" — Who Resources the Caregiver?
There is an instruction that circulates through parenting spaces, classrooms, therapeutic training, and caregiver support. It goes something like this:
You cannot pour from an empty cup.
Children borrow your calm.
Regulate yourself first, then attend to the child.
It is offered as wisdom. Sometimes as permission. Often as the first intervention when a child, student, or client is struggling.
I have done this too. As a therapist, it is often the first place I go—the caregiver's nervous system, the mother's capacity, the adult's regulation. Not because I believe it is the whole answer, but because it is the lever I have access to. I cannot change the funding. I cannot create the village. I cannot undo the conditions. What I can do is sit with one person in a room and offer what support is possible there.
And there is something true in it.
Co-regulation is real. Nervous systems do affect one another. A dysregulated adult in proximity to a dysregulated child can escalate rather than settle things. The research is clear enough on this.
But the way this idea has been taken up—particularly by mothers, teachers, and those in caring roles—deserves closer attention. Because somewhere between the insight and the application, something started to go wrong.
The Instruction Lands on Certain Bodies
The message regulate yourself firstdoes not land evenly.
It lands on mothers more than fathers. On early childhood educators more than policymakers. On therapists and support workersmore than the systems they operate inside.
It lands on the people already doing the most relational labour, often with the least structural support. And it asks them to do more—internally, silently, before anything else.
The caregiver becomes the intervention.
Not the funding. Not the ratios. Not the housing. Not the village. The person in the room, and what their nervous system is doing.
Who Resources the Resource?
The logic seems reasonable on the surface: if a regulated adult supports a child to settle, then helping the adult regulate is a good place to start.
But thisassumes the adult has access to regulation.
It assumes they are not also exhausted, unsupported, under-resourced, and running on empty. It assumes they have somewhere to put their own activation. It assumes the conditions of their life allow for settling—when often they do not.
The instruction asks caregivers to become a nervous system resource while being systematically depleted of their own.
And when it doesn't work—when the child is still struggling, when the classroom is still disintegrating, when the family is still in crisis—the gaze doesn't move to the conditions. It stays on the caregiver.
Are you regulated? Are you calm enough? Have you done your own work?
The Shame That Follows
When regulate yourself first becomes the frame, a particular kind of shame takes hold.
If the child is still struggling, perhaps the caregiver hasn't healed enough. If the classroom is chaotic, perhaps the teacher isn't grounded enough. If the therapeutic work isn't landing, perhaps the clinician's nervous system is getting in the way.
The impossibility of the ask becomes invisible. What remains visible is the failure to meet it.
This is how structural neglect gets internalised as personal inadequacy. Not enough support becomes I am not enough. A system that refuses to resource care becomes I need to work on myself more.
And conveniently, there are products for that. Courses, memberships, retreats, certifications—an industry built on helping caregivers become more regulated so they can hold what should never have been theirs alone to hold.
What Gets Protected
When the caregiver is the first point of intervention, certain things don't get examined.
The school that packs thirty children into a room with one adult. The workplace that offers no recovery time. The policy settings that have hollowed out family support. The economic conditions that keep parents working past capacity. The intergenerational inheritance of trauma that no single person can metabolise alone.
Focusing on the nervous system of the person closest to the distress protects the systems further away from scrutiny.
It is easier to train a teacher in regulation strategies than to change the funding model. It is easier to offer a parenting course than to address housing, isolation, or poverty. It is easier to tell a mother to calm down than to ask why she has been left to do this alone.
And when the caregiver cannot be the site of intervention—when they push back, or break down, or simply cannot hold any more—the focus often shifts back to the child. The child becomes the problem. Their behaviour, their diagnosis, their dysregulation. The gaze moves, but it never lands on the conditions.
What Else Might Be True
None of this is an argument against self-awareness, or against understanding how nervous systems work.
It is an argument against making the individual—especially the one already holding the most—responsible for conditions they did not create and cannot regulate their way out of.
A different orientation might ask:
What would it take for this caregiver to actually be resourced?
What would need to exist around them for their own settling to be possible?
What is being asked of them that should not rest on one body?
Regulation is relational. But so is its absence.
A dysregulated caregiver is often not failing. They may be accurately reflecting the conditions they are living and working inside. Their nervous system may be the most honest signal in the room.
The question is whether we are willing to read it that way—or whether it is easier to send them to a workshop.
Related Resources
Embracing the Messiness: Dysregulation as communication not dysfunction
The Wisdom of the Nervous System: Seeing the Adaptive Nature of Dorsal and Sympathetic States
Important Information
This piece reflects on the instruction to "regulate yourself first" as it circulates in parenting, education, and therapeutic spaces. It is not intended as clinical advice or as criticism of individual practitioners. The reflections shared here aim to widen the frame around caregiver distress and to acknowledge the structural conditions that shape the work of care. This post is not a substitute for professional support.
