A mother sat across from me in my consulting room, and before she said a single word about her son, she told me something else. She told me about her mother-in-law. About the WhatsApp messages from her sister. About the long dinner table silence that followed every time her eight-year-old knocked something over. “They all think I’m just not strict enough,” she said. And then, quietly: “Sometimes I start to believe them.”

I’ve sat with that particular kind of exhaustion more times than I can count. And I want to say clearly, if you’re reading this right now that what you’re feeling is real. The loneliness of parenting a high-energy, spirited, or differently-wired child, while the people around you reduce everything to a discipline problem, is genuinely hard.

It doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It means they don’t have the full picture.

Why Everyone Thinks They Have the Answer

Unsolicited parenting advice is as old as parenting itself. But when your child is louder, more impulsive, more emotional, or more physically active than the children around him, the advice gets louder too.

Part of this is generational. Many grandparents grew up believing that children who misbehaved simply lacked firm handling. Discipline, strict, swift, consistent  was the answer to most things. And for many children, it worked well enough. So when they see a grandchild who talks back, can’t sit still, or melts down over small frustrations, they reach for the only tool they know.

Part of it is also human nature. When we see something that looks like a problem, we want to solve it. Giving advice feels like caring. What most well-meaning relatives don’t realise is that their advice, however kindly meant, can quietly communicate to you that the problem is your failure.

The research on this is worth knowing. Psychologist Martin Seligman’s work on learned helplessness showed that when people receive repeated messages that their efforts aren’t working, they begin to stop trying. You don’t need a laboratory to understand this. You’ve probably felt it yourself  that creeping self-doubt that follows one too many comments about being ‘too soft’ or ‘not consistent enough.’

What “He Just Needs Discipline” Actually Gets Wrong

The phrase isn’t entirely wrong. Structure, boundaries, and consistency absolutely matter. I talk about them with my parents every day. But discipline is not a single lever you pull, and it certainly isn’t a substitute for understanding what’s driving a child’s behaviour.

When a child is high-energy, hyperactive, or showing signs of ADHD, his nervous system is working differently. His brain’s ability to regulate impulses, manage emotions, and transition between activities is genuinely harder than it appears from the outside. He isn’t choosing to be difficult. He isn’t testing you because you’ve been too gentle. He’s responding to a world that often moves too fast, demands too much stillness, and offers too little of what his particular brain actually needs.

Telling a child whose nervous system is already overloaded to simply “behave” is a little like telling someone with poor eyesight to just try harder to see. The intention might be there. The effort might even be there. But without the right support, the gap doesn’t close.

What helps these children is not more pressure. It is more understanding, more structure, more movement, more co-regulation  and a parent who feels confident enough to provide those things without second-guessing herself at every turn.

When It’s Your Own Parents Doing It

There’s a particular sting that comes when the criticism is from your own mother or your mother-in-law. These are people who love your child. They mean well. They also have decades of an entirely different parenting framework informing their opinions, and they’re watching your child through that lens.

What makes this harder is the relationship stakes. You can’t simply dismiss what a grandparent says the way you might with a stranger’s raised eyebrow in a restaurant. These are people your child loves. People who are likely a regular part of his life.

A few things that genuinely help:

• Choose one conversation rather than many. Repeated small disagreements escalate over time. A single, calm, well-timed conversation where you explain what you’ve learned about your child’s needs  without defensiveness  tends to land much better.
• Bring information, not argument. Sometimes sharing an article, or mentioning that a child psychologist has worked with your son and given you a specific approach, gives grandparents a face-saving way to update their view. It shifts the conversation from opinion vs. opinion to evidence.
• Set limits around what gets said in front of your child. A child who repeatedly hears that he just needs more discipline begins to internalise that he is a discipline problem. That framing has real psychological consequences. You are allowed to say clearly: “I’d love to talk about this when the children aren’t listening.”
• Accept that you won’t always win the conversation. Sometimes the most protective thing you can do is stop trying to convince and simply hold your own position quietly. You don’t need their agreement to parent well.

How to Respond in the Moment

Sometimes the comment comes at the dinner table. Sometimes it’s in a group chat. Sometimes it’s the slow, disapproving silence that says everything without saying anything at all. A few phrases that parents in my practice have found useful:

• “We’re working with a professional on this and it’s going really well.”
• “I know it looks like a behaviour issue from the outside, there’s actually quite a lot going on underneath.”
• “I’m not going to discuss his behaviour in front of him, but I’m happy to talk about it another time.”
• “I appreciate that you’re concerned. We’re handling it in the way that works for him.”

You don’t owe anyone a detailed explanation. You don’t need to justify your parenting choices to prove you are a good mother. A short, calm, confident response  delivered once is often more effective than a long defence.

The Most Important Thing

The noise around you will be loudest at exactly the moments when you feel most uncertain. That is not a coincidence. Doubt makes us more vulnerable to other people’s certainty.

What I want you to hold onto  in those moments at the dinner table, in the group chat, in the car on the way home  is this: you know your child in a way no one else does. You are with him every day. You feel his frustration and his joy and his exhaustion. The people offering advice see snapshots.

Getting support for yourself as a parent isn’t an admission that they were right. It’s a decision to stop managing everyone else’s opinions of your parenting, and to start getting clarity on what your child actually needs  and how to give it to him.

That shift, in my experience, is where things begin to change. Not perfectly. But meaningfully.

You don’t need to figure this out alone, take help before it’s too late.

If you’re navigating unsolicited advice, family pressure, or simply feeling unsure of your footing with a high-energy child, I’d love to talk. At Saar Holistic Wellness, I work with parents one-on-one to help you understand your child more deeply  and parent with more confidence and less noise.