As the U.S. Surgeon General issues a national advisory on parental well-being, a pressing question emerges: who helps the parent before they reach their breaking point? With 48% of parents reporting that their stress is completely overwhelming on most days, and 41% saying their stress is so high they can't function, the issue has become a public health priority. Children's mental health expert Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge will address this in Orlando at two events focused on strengthening families, early intervention, and child abuse prevention.
Dr. Roseann emphasizes that prevention cannot wait until a family is in crisis. "We can't wait until a family is in crisis to decide they deserve support," she says. "Prevention means reaching the parent while they're overwhelmed, not after they've reached their breaking point."
When an overwhelmed parent meets an overwhelmed child, the result can be a collision of two dysregulated nervous systems. "When a child is dysregulated, their stress response can activate the parent's stress response, and vice versa," Dr. Roseann explains. "Before you know it, nobody in that moment has easy access to the calm, flexible thinking needed to solve the problem."
Traditional parenting advice often focuses on what the adult should say or what consequence should follow. However, Dr. Roseann argues that something needs to happen first: regulation. Her Regulation First® framework teaches parents and professionals to understand the nervous system beneath the behavior, regulate before reacting, reconnect, and then move into correction or problem-solving. Regulate. Connect. Correct.
"The goal isn't to create perfectly calm parents," says Dr. Roseann. "Parents are human. They're going to get frustrated. They're going to have bad days. Prevention is about giving them another option when they feel themselves getting close to that edge."
The crisis has prompted organizations like the Ounce of Prevention Fund of Florida to focus on upstream support. Through programs like Healthy Families Florida, they work directly with parents facing significant life challenges, building on family strengths and empowering parents through education and community support.
Dr. Roseann will speak at the 2026 Florida Prevention Convention, themed "Stronger Families, Stronger Florida," which brings together professionals to advance prevention strategies. Her message is that prevention starts before the breaking point—when a parent recognizes their own stress cup is overflowing, when adults understand that a child's behavior may communicate overwhelm, and when families feel supported enough to ask for help before problems become emergencies.
Having spent over 30 years working with children with anxiety, ADHD, OCD, and other challenges, Dr. Roseann has seen parents arrive exhausted and convinced they've tried everything. Often, the missing piece is that they've been taught to start with behavior rather than the nervous system driving it. "When a child's brain is in a stress response, more correcting isn't necessarily the first thing that brain needs," she says. "We regulate so the brain can do what we're asking it to do."
Her forthcoming book, The Dysregulated Kid: The Parenting Playbook for Helping Your Child Find Calm in a Chaotic World, will be published by Page Two Books on September 22, 2026. It introduces strategies like the Love Pause®, CALMS Protocol®, and 10-Minute Resets to help parents move from reacting to understanding what their child's brain and body need first.
"Parents don't need more blame," says Dr. Roseann. "They need a simple way to understand what's happening beneath the behavior and know what to do next." At a time when nearly half of parents feel completely overwhelmed, these tools are about strengthening families. "Every hard moment isn't a crisis," she adds. "But every hard moment is an opportunity to change what happens next."
