We Make a Mindfulness App. Our Bedtimes Are Still a Disaster Sometimes.

Here is something we probably shouldn't admit in public.

A few weeks ago, on a Tuesday, one of us stood in a hallway at nine-fifteen at night and shouted at a seven-year-old about a toothbrush.

Not a metaphorical shout. An actual one, loud enough that the other two came out of their rooms to see what was happening. Over a toothbrush. On a Tuesday.

We build a mindfulness app for families. We have recorded — and we mean this literally — hours of calm audio about breathing through difficult moments. Some of it is on the phone that was in the pocket of the person doing the shouting.

We're telling you this on purpose.

The gap nobody in this industry talks about

There's a version of a company like ours that we could present to you. In that version, our house is quiet. Our evenings unfold in a warm sequence of stories and breathing and gentle goodnights. Our children are unusually regulated, because of course they are — look what their parents do for a living.

That version would be better marketing. It would also be a lie, and worse, it would be the specific kind of lie that makes parents feel like failures.

Because here's what we've noticed in the messages people send us. The thing parents apologise for, over and over, is not that they can't get their kids to meditate. It's that they can't stay calm. They write to us slightly ashamed, as though everyone else has cracked it and they alone are the person who snapped in a hallway.

Nobody has cracked it. We certainly haven't, and we've read everything.

What actually happened on that Tuesday

It wasn't about the toothbrush. It's never about the toothbrush.

It had been a long stretch. Work was heavy. There'd been a hard phone call earlier that day that neither of us had really processed. Dinner ran late, which pushed everything else late, and by nine-fifteen there was nothing left in the tank — and a seven-year-old, who was also completely out of gas, decided that this was the night to litigate the fairness of the toothbrush rota.

The thing about losing your temper with a child is how fast it happens. There's no gradual build you can catch. One moment you're tired and holding it, and the next you're already three sentences into something you'll regret, listening to yourself say it.

And then the silence afterwards. Everyone very still. That awful hot feeling of having been the biggest person in the room and used it.

What we did next, which is the only part we're proud of

We sat on the edge of a bed and said, more or less: I shouted, and that wasn't about you, and it wasn't okay. You were allowed to be frustrated. I'm sorry.

Not a performance of an apology. Not the kind that arrives with a lesson stapled to the back of it — I'm sorry I shouted, BUT if you had just brushed your teeth when I asked — which isn't an apology at all, and which children can smell instantly.

Just the thing itself. I got it wrong. I'm sorry.

He said "it's okay" straight away, the way kids do, and we said it actually wasn't, and that he didn't have to make us feel better about it. And then we read a story, and it was fine, and everyone slept.

We think about this a lot: our children are going to lose their tempers with people they love for the rest of their lives. Everyone does. What they need from us is not a demonstration of a person who never gets it wrong — they'd have no idea what to do the first time they did. What they need is a demonstration of what happens after. That's the thing we can actually model, and honestly, we get plenty of chances.

What we've genuinely kept from all of this

After several years of building this thing, here is what has survived contact with our own household.

Three minutes beats thirty. We started out imagining a proper family practice — everyone together, a real sit, every day. That lasted about a fortnight. What's lasted years is much smaller: a few slow breaths in the car before we go into somewhere hard. One question at dinner. Two minutes of quiet audio at lights-out. The tiny stuff is the only stuff that survives a bad week, and bad weeks are most weeks.

The routine matters more when we're least able to do it. On good evenings we barely need it. On the bad ones, having a fixed shape to fall into — this, then this, then this — means the evening has a floor under it even when we don't have anything left to bring.

Our own state is the whole ballgame. This is the one we resisted longest, because it's inconvenient. But you cannot deliver calm you don't have. Almost every genuinely bad evening in our house can be traced back to one of us arriving at 6 p.m. already empty. Not to a child's behaviour. To ours.

And it still goes wrong. Regularly. Last Tuesday, over a toothbrush.

Why we're telling you

Because we suspect a lot of parents downloaded something like our app hoping it would make them a different sort of parent, and then felt worse when it didn't.

It won't. Nothing will. There is no version of this where you become a person who is never depleted at nine at night.

What's actually available is smaller and better: a bit more noticing, a slightly shorter fuse-to-repair time, a few reliable small rituals that hold when everything else is falling over. That's it. That's the offer. Anyone promising you serenity is selling something we don't have either.

We're a family that makes things for families. We fight about screen time. We have one child who cannot be reasoned with when hungry and one who goes silent instead of loud, and we still get both of them wrong sometimes.

If your house is like that too, you're not doing it badly.

You're just doing it.

— Mark & Sarah