September 17, 2026 at 12:00pm EDT

Before we became parents, we likely had plenty of ideas about the way we’d raise our kids and the type of parent we’d be. Once you’re deep in the throes of raising kids, however, you realize that parenting is hard and most of us are just trying our best. Sometimes, we’re lucky enough to find friends to talk to about our parenting struggles, which can be tremendously helpful in figuring it all out.

That’s what happened to The View co-host Sarah Haines, who recently spoke to People about a few realizations she’s had about mothering her three kids. “You have all these thoughts of what you’re going to be like as a parent and you think about it in your head,” said Haines, who shares sons 10 and 7 and a daughter, 8, with husband Max Shifrin. “And then on the job, you find your knee-jerk reaction is more in response to how you were raised than all of the thoughtful things you put in place.”

“I found myself responding as my mom would,” she admitted, “like, ‘You kids need to stop. What are you doing to me?’”

But Haines credits a conversation with a friend with helping her reframe her thoughts and changing the question she was asking her kids during a stressful moment. “When I shifted how that sounded, and I thought, ‘Wait, what’s happening for them right now and how can I help that?’ it really took away the inner ego of ‘the world is doing something to me,'” she said.

“And [it] allowed me to go inside and say, ‘Wait a second, that wasn’t the way I ever wanted to parent,’” she added. “That’s all human relationships, because when you stop taking it personally, you’re able to reach out to people because something’s going on and it wasn’t about you.”

Haines also shared about this change in thinking on Instagram, captioning her video, “Parenting Hack: instead of thinking ‘my kid is GIVING me such a hard time,’ think ‘my kid must be HAVING such a hard time.’”

“I think when you attend to that part, you stop resisting and going head to head,” she said in the Instagram reel. “You actually allow that moment to pass better… It’s really not about us, usually, if that makes sense. I hope that helps.”