The CALM Parent - with Katie McKenna
Sep 15, 2026 · 28 min · 11 segments
This week, I get into the tug of war on power — the daily battles where so many of us hand our authority straight back to our kids without even noticing. I introduce dropping the rope: not giving…
Katie McKennaHost
For anybody's number when they have taken the quiz, if you are anywhere between a zero to three or zero to four category, it doesn't mean that you don't lose your shit.
What it means is that you have way more capacity before something happens that you end up feeling really stressed out, that you end up exploding, shutting down, yelling, feeling guilty, all of those things.
And so this is what I'm talking about calm parenting, is to be able to reduce your baseline.
How can we reduce your baseline to a 5.8 or a 5.5? And I'm even wondering as I'm saying that, I wonder what was your expectation.
Do you think, "Okay, I have to get back to a zero or a one"? And that's an example of an unrealistic expectation.
This is, how can we reduce your baseline slightly? But in order to do that, we have to be aware of when you are in survival parenting and when you're parenting from this place.
Because if you've grown up walking on eggshells all your life, if you've grown up being hypervigilant and been attuned to the emotions and needs and been able to anticipate everybody's needs around you, you might be still operating from a place of survival and have not been able to toggle into your parasympathetic.
And this is gonna be represented to how much safety and how much support you have in your own home, in your own relationships.
For anybody's number when they have taken the quiz, if you are anywhere between a zero to three or zero to four category, it doesn't mean that you don't lose your shit.
What it means is that you have way more capacity before something happens that you end up feeling really stressed out, that you end up exploding, shutting down, yelling, feeling guilty, all of those things.
And so this is what I'm talking about calm parenting, is to be able to reduce your baseline.
How can we reduce your baseline to a 5.8 or a 5.5? And I'm even wondering as I'm saying that, I wonder what was your expectation.
Do you think, "Okay, I have to get back to a zero or a one"? And that's an example of an unrealistic expectation.
This is, how can we reduce your baseline slightly? But in order to do that, we have to be aware of when you are in survival parenting and when you're parenting from this place.
Because if you've grown up walking on eggshells all your life, if you've grown up being hypervigilant and been attuned to the emotions and needs and been able to anticipate everybody's needs around you, you might be still operating from a place of survival and have not been able to toggle into your parasympathetic.
And this is gonna be represented to how much safety and how much support you have in your own home, in your own relationships.
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