My body flooded with anxiety and my head went to those thoughts – the ones where we wonder if my child is trustworthy, regret that they have made a mistake, worry about the consequences of the mistake, and (embarrassingly) worry that it will reflect on me.

It was 7:59pm and my son’s attendance for school was due through the online classroom by 8pm. He had done his work, but when he told me he would do attendance, he got distracted by the Google Doodle of the day.

As I sat on the couch madly trying to log into my son’s online classroom to get his attendance in at the deadline, I lectured. “You said you were going to do this,” “when you say you are going to do something I want to trust you to do it,” “what happened?”

Luckily my husband stopped me in my tracks.

What I was doing was creating SHAME. The big 5-letter-word that we’ve all learned from Brené Brown that doesn’t serve us or our kids. It creates disconnection and lots of yucky feelings.

In reality my thoughts were not accurate – they had tipped into the realm of being extreme rather than focusing on the present. Instead of “he might be counted as truant today,” or “his teacher will understand we are all busy and have extra to do during this time,” they were “he will be kicked out of the school if he has too many absences!” Suddenly, something that has happened twice in six weeks became in my brain a behavior that was every-day and an unstoppable threat.

With lots of practice, both personal work I’ve done by being coached, and through mindfulness practice, my family has become pros at recognizing when we are going into some of these habitual behaviors of extreme thoughts and shaming others.

We humans that have been raised in the Western Culture tend to jump into shame pretty easily. What are we really trying to change by asking these questions? Are these questions really going to solve the problem at the moment?

When we start asking questions at the onset of a problem, we are actually subconsciously putting up what Thomas Gordon coined as a “communication roadblock.” This causes the party listening to shut down and stop talking. They focus on their feelings instead of the lesson and the brain goes into a place where it actually cannot learn. It shuts down and children label themselves as “bad.”

My personal reality at those moments is that I am in denial of what happened, somehow trying to change the past through asking questions as though changing the past is actually possible.

Once I’ve accepted reality and start to problem solve, my intent is different, timing is different, and both language and intonation change.

I’m thankful that my brain has been rewired to catch these moments when a mistake is made and usually I take a deep breath, and go into unlimited problem solving mode. Luckily, my husband is there as my back-up for when I don’t.

When we gain acceptance of not being able to change what has happened, when we can live in the present with our children and address a problem with “where do we go from here?” instead of “why did you do that?” It is then that we can all grow and connect when problems arise.