Lara Ann West

Do you agree?

The more I work with families, the more I notice how deeply behaviour can activate adults too. Especially when the emotions being expressed are emotions that maybe weren’t allowed when we were children. I’m talking about the big emotions like anger, overwhelm, frustration, meltdowns, and outbursts.

For so many adults, those emotions were punished, shamed, dismissed, or simply not safely held. So when we see them expressed in our children, it can activate something very deep in us too.

And this is why I think CURIOSITY matters so much. Because underneath most outbursts is a nervous system that has reached capacity, not a child intentionally trying to be difficult.

No human wants to feel that level of overwhelm. It’s exhausting and confusing and often children don’t yet have the skills to express what they’re feeling in healthier ways.

Healthy expression of our emotions is something that gets built over time and this is where I think emotional regulation is often misunderstood. Regulation is not about suppressing emotions or making children “calm down”. It’s about learning how to:
1. notice what’s happening internally,
2. allow it without judgement, and
3. express it in safer and healthier ways.

The emotion itself is never the problem and the feeling is not ‘wrong’. But the way those emotions get expressed absolutely can be shaped, supported and guided over time. And that process starts long before the outburst itself.

It starts with helping children notice what fills their cup, what overwhelms them, what helps them process, what helps them feel safe enough to express rather than suppress.

This isn’t about perfection and it definitely doesn’t happen overnight. But these are lifelong skills.

The way children learn to move through emotions now will shape how they show up later in relationships, friendships, workplaces, parenting, and within themselves.

And I think many children don’t need less emotion, they need more support learning how to move through those emotions safely.

Decision fatigue is something I see constantly in family systems and classrooms, in both the children and the adults.

On the surface, this often looks like overwhelm, irritability, forgetfulness, or difficulty coping with everyday demands, but underneath it is something much deeper, a kind of invisible cognitive overload.

In many homes, one or two people end up carrying most of the daily decisions, things like
meals, schedules, school admin, appointments, emotional needs, planning, remembering, anticipating. And over time, that load doesn’t just create stress, it also directly impacts regulation, patience, and capacity.

But there’s another side to this that’s just as important. Children also need age-appropriate opportunities to make decisions. Not overwhelming decisions, but small, supported ones.

Decision-making is not separate from development, it’s part of how executive functioning grows.

Sometimes what looks like “difficulty starting” or “lack of motivation” is actually a child who hasn’t yet built the scaffolding for how to begin, choose, or sequence a task.

Even something like homework isn’t one decision.. it's usually a series of invisible ones, such as
- Where do I start?
- What do I do first?
- How do I break this down?
- What do I do when I'm stuck?

So when I look at decision fatigue in families, I’m often holding both truths at once:

1. Some people are carrying too many decisions.

2. Some children are not being given enough supported opportunities to build decision-making capacity.

This is why I often find it helpful to make the invisible visible, not to assign blame, but to understand the system more clearly, because when we see it clearly, we can adjust it gently.

And what I've witnessed is that small shifts in structure can create very real shifts in regulation, confidence, and connection.

When I was a classroom teacher, I would often give parents positive feedback on their child's behaviour and manners at school and the most common reply I got from countless parents was "Are you sure you're talking about my child?".

They weren't being unkind, they were just genuinely surprised that their child was so "well behaved" all day at school. And that's usually because the behaviour that the parents were seeing at home was not at all aligned.

It's a fascinating thing to realise that children are not choosing to be difficult or suddenly having a different personality. Their 'invisible cup' (I.e. nervous system) was simply filling all day and once in the safety of their home, they let it all flow out.

And sure, they sometimes choose less than ideal ways to express the overwhelm, but we can model and teach safer and more helpful ways.

When we begin understanding nervous system load, their (and our) behaviour starts making a lot more sense.

DM me “MENTORSHIP” if you’d like support understanding your child (and yourself) through the lens of the nervous system.

We all know those moments where something trivial sets us off and suddenly we feel wildly irritated, reactive, or guilty afterwards.

But what if it’s not because something is wrong with us? What if our nervous system is simply at capacity? And what if we could support our nervous systems to create more space before overflowing?

DM “WORKSHOP” if you’d like to explore this work more deeply with me 💛

So often we focus on the behaviour itself when in reality, the overflow is usually the final stage of a much fuller cup.

Behaviour makes far more sense when we stop asking: “What’s wrong with them?” and start asking: “What filled their cup today?”

I currently have 2 spaces available to join my private 1:1 family mentorship in 2026.

DM me “MENTORSHIP” for details.