This story is part of “Parenting: What Google Won’t Tell You” — The Better India’s people-led parenting series that goes beyond conventional advice to document how real families are actually raising their children. Through real parents, parenting coaches, influencers and experts, the series brings honest, diverse and relatable perspectives on the questions, choices, challenges and solutions that shape everyday parenting — the things Google can’t always answer. 

Long before we become parents, we hear the same advice on repeat. Stay strong for your children. Don't panic in front of them. Kids take their cues from you. It can sound like something out of an old wives' tale, the kind of wisdom our own parents lived by without ever explaining why. And then, one ordinary day, life hands you a moment that makes it all click.

In a candid conversation with The Better India, Gayathri Prakash, a Chennai-based podcaster, founder of At The BRIM and mother of three, shares the story of the ordinary family morning that changed how she thinks about calm parenting

When a mother became her son’s safe place 

She was visiting family in Bengaluru and packing for an evening flight to Chennai. Her son, Yug, was around five or six and playing with his cousins when she suddenly heard her sister-in-law scream her name. 

"He was already drenched in blood from the top of his head all the way down to his T-shirt, with blood dripping onto his toes," she recalls. Her mind went into a strange, focused stillness. "There was no time for emotions; there was only prioritising," she says. 

"I think it was a moment when the only way to move forward was to fight the problem, not sink into it."

Yug had been holding back........

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