Don't read your building chat before talking to your kids

I mean it. A moment ago you were a normal person. You opened the building chat at home — and someone's already outraged, someone's demanding, someone's blaming, someone wrote something you desperately want to answer and get pulled into all of it right away.

And you couldn't hold back and … you replied. You put the phone aside. But the anger — you didn't put that anywhere.

And right then your child comes up: "Mum, look…"

And you snap: "Just wait, will you!" And it seems like nothing terrible happened. We all answer like that sometimes. We're human, everyone is prone to saying something in the heat of the moment.

But the child doesn't know that five minutes ago some neighbour drove you to a boiling point. In this story there's only him and a mum who suddenly turned angry. Five minutes ago she was gentle, and now — she yelled at him for no reason at all!

There's your invisible thing.

The building chat stayed in the phone, but the state it caused walked into the house together with you.

We devote a lot of time and effort to questions of home safety. We check locks, intercoms, cameras, we worry about lifts, fire safety, pipes.

And who looks after the atmosphere? Because we also come home to stop being on guard. Home is a place of calm and trust.

Of course, people do argue at home, sort things out. Sometimes they say too much. I'm certainly not talking about a picture of a perfect family where everyone speaks in whispers and smiles at one another.

I'm talking about something else.

About not making your irritation the climate of your home. About not making your grievances, anger and inner chaos the home's permanent atmosphere. The key word here is permanent!

Especially when there are children growing up there. Because a child can't say: "Your atmosphere is a bit toxic today, I think I'll go live somewhere else for a while."

He stays. And he adapts. And later, whatever he had to adapt to in childhood is very easily taken for normal life. That's how, with our own hands, we plant a toxic environment into the lives of the people dearest to us — our children.

Building chats, work correspondence, traffic jams, other people's rudeness — all of that will be there. We can't switch off the outside world.

But we can at least notice the moment we're carrying it home.

And that is already our own, adult, responsibility.

We can't make the whole world safe for our children. But at home, at least — we can.

My dears, don't read your building chats before talking to your children.