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, according to the American Psychological Association, the U.S. Surgeon General has issued a national advisory on parental well-being, calling it a public health priority. This crisis has prompted children's mental health expert Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge to ask a crucial question: Who helps the parent before they reach their breaking point?
Dr. Roseann is set to address this issue at two events in Orlando focused on strengthening families, Healthy Families, early intervention, and child abuse prevention. '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.'
The scenario is all too familiar: a child melts down, the parent's heart races, patience evaporates, and the child's reaction intensifies. Dr. Roseann explains that this is what happens when two overloaded nervous systems collide. 'When a child is dysregulated, their stress response can activate the parent's stress response, and vice versa,' she notes. 'Before you know it, nobody in that moment has easy access to the calm, flexible thinking needed to solve the problem.'
Her Regulation First® framework teaches parents to understand the nervous system beneath the behavior, regulate before reacting, reconnect, and then move into correction or problem-solving. 'The goal isn't to create perfectly calm parents,' she clarifies. 'Parents are human. They're going to get frustrated. Prevention is about giving them another option when they feel themselves getting close to that edge.'
Child abuse prevention has traditionally focused on intervention after problems emerge, but organizations like the Ounce of Prevention Fund of Florida and Healthy Families Florida have long recognized the importance of strengthening families before crises develop. Dr. Roseann's message aligns with this upstream approach. 'Supporting parents isn't separate from supporting children,' she says. 'When we give parents tools to understand their own stress response and their child's nervous system, we're strengthening the entire family.'
Dr. Roseann will speak at The Ounce of Prevention Fund of Florida and the 2026 Florida Prevention Convention, themed 'Stronger Families, Stronger Florida.' Her message is simple: prevention starts before the breaking point. It starts when a parent recognizes their own stress cup is overflowing, when adults understand that a child's behavior may be communicating overwhelm rather than disrespect, and when families feel supported enough to ask for help before problems become emergencies.
Drawing on more than 30 years of clinical experience, Dr. Roseann has seen parents arrive exhausted, convinced they've tried everything—sticker charts, consequences, rewards, reasoning. Often, the missing piece isn't effort but understanding the nervous system driving the behavior. '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.'
This approach is the foundation of her forthcoming book, The Dysregulated Kid: The Parenting Playbook for Helping Your Child Find Calm in a Chaotic World, which will be published by Page Two Books on September 22, 2026. The book 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,' Dr. Roseann asserts. '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 report feeling completely overwhelmed, these tools are about strengthening families. 'Every hard moment isn't a crisis,' she says. 'But every hard moment is an opportunity to change what happens next.'
Dr. Roseann is available for media interviews and speaking engagements, bringing her nervous system-first approach to organizations to improve attention, reduce reactivity, and build more regulated nervous systems. While in Orlando, she is available for in-studio, on-location, podcast, and remote interviews on topics including the overwhelmed parent epidemic, nervous system collisions, and why kids are so dysregulated.
