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Leaving the Pool Can Be a Real BEACH!
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How to shift from the Pool to the Car Without a Public Power Struggle.
In this article: Leaving the pool shouldn’t feel like unleashing a public power struggle. Discover how to navigate stressful summer transitions using the Parallel Journey™ philosophy—the reality that you cannot center a child until you shift your own emotional state first. Through a raw, relatable personal story about the hidden costs of avoiding parental judgment, this guide breaks down the biological science behind preschooler brain crashes during transitions. You'll get a practical, playful tool—The Pool-to-Car Song—and learn how to use proactive co-regulation and vagus nerve stimulation to turn a high-dread exit routine into a calm, connected, and tear-free game.
What You Will Learn in This Article:
- Parental Self-Regulation: by practicing the Parallel Journey™—learning how to process your own public discomfort and center your emotional state before you ever try to manage your child's behavior.
- Why Transitions Are Hard for Kids: from a developmental science perspective, shifting your expectations away from adult cognitive functioning to meet their developing brains where they actually are.
- Playful Co-Regulation Tools: like the Pool-to-Car Song, using a simple, rhythmic call-and-response game to naturally stimulate the vagus nerve and physically down-regulate the fight-or-flight response.
🎁 Free Companion Resource Included:
To help you put this into practice tonight, I’ve created the Pool-to Car Song, so you to finally swap empty control for collaborative play!
The checklist is a free resource when you join the Satori Kid Club community—it’s completely free to join. Every week, straight to your inbox, I share one practical, bite-sized tool just like this to help you move past daily power struggles and get back to what really matters: building a stronger relationship with your child.
Summer in Alberta is... an acquired taste.
My husband and I love to take Sunday drives and visit a local “beach” so I can dip my feet , which, let’s face it, in Alberta is usually 10% sand and 120% rock. But water is my ultimate nervous system reset. So my husband drives an hour one way just for me to dip my toes. It makes me happy.
But two weekends ago, my calm oasis was pure family mayhem. Parents dragged coolers like pack mules, while little kids in scuba masks circled them like sharks. I am long past summers like these, but it triggered a total flashback. Summers are supposed to be magical, but for me, they were just exhausting.
For kids, a day by the water is a portal to endless fun where the sun never sets. But for parents? We still have jobs, dinners, and now, a mountain of wet towels. Add in sand EVERYWHERE, and it’s insanely overwhelming.
So, how do we transition from the magic back to reality without a public power struggle?
Hell hath no fury like a 3 year old ginger preschooler being removed from her shiny mermaid pool
When my children were those sweet ages of 5 and 3 , we lived in an apartment building that actually had an outdoor pool. I had picked it specifically because of the pool. As a young single mother on an extremely limited income I thought this would be the answer to summer, a free activity accessible all the time.
I had not considered, wait, they would actually want to be there, ALL the time?
What started as a free, accessible blessing quickly turned into a daily source of dread for me. Because while my kids saw a sparkling oasis of endless play, I saw a ticking clock, a mountain of chlorine-soaked laundry.
I was constantly walking on eggshells, trying to figure out when to tell my little mermaid she had to come back to land.
For me, calling out the phrase “We have to go.”, was the equivalent to
“Release the Kraken!”
The skies turned dark, winds began to blow…
Okay not really but giant tears and kicking sure did feel that way.
So, if she wanted 5 more minutes to splash her magic tail and be Barbie as Elina, a flower fairy who has recently gained wings but now gets a mermaid tail to help a friend in trouble, I thought …I could handle 5 more minutes of peace.
The Day My Mermaid Turned into a Little Lobster
When the pool is in the complex you live in, everyone gets to know you.I felt like the mother who could not control her child. I was so invested in what people thought, I am ashamed to say I prioritized keeping my child quiet over her safety.
One hot day, we went to the pool for relief. I followed the rules for a fair-skinned baby: sunscreen, a floppy hat, and an umbrella. We had been there for some time and I knew in my gut we should head back inside, but she wanted to stay. I saw the other parents side-eying me, so I said, “Ok, 5 more minutes.”
When I look back now, I was solely avoiding my own discomfort of being judged a bad mother. So 5 minutes turned into an hour before I finally got her out. The walk home took another hour with a willful 3-year-old.
We got out with no tantrums, so I thought the day went well. But later, dinner was left untouched, she complained her tummy felt icky, and her skin became hotter to the touch. Yup, my little mermaid looked like a lobster—sunburned to a crisp, with heat stroke.
I had let worrying about what other parents were going to say impair my judgment. Holding a cold cloth to her tiny feverish forehead, I realized not dealing with my discomfort had only led to my child’s greater discomfort later that night.
Looking back 20 years later, avoiding our own discomfort is the root of most parenting dilemmas, isn’t it?
One of many lessons I learned the hard way.
It’s easy to believe the point is to set a boundary and stick to it, yet it’s not. Stricter rules or consequences only ended in a battle of will, I was exhausted, they were resentful. None of the standard control behaviour worked in my home.
There was no Zen moment on a mountain top that I realized “Oh, I must do this differently”. I was a 28-year-old single mother of 2 children 3 and 5, living with a debilitating chronic illness. I was in survival -mode. Otherwise known as parenting in the 2000s.
To be honest my “epiphany moment” came to me more like a fever dream of exhaustion between laundry and bathtime where I said “Eff this, I can’t do it this way anymore! I got to just do it my way.” My way has always been to talk and make a plan and so we talked and made the plan.
How to Deal With That Shift Right Now
Before even attempting to shift the situation, I had to practice the first step of what I know call the Parallel Journey™: shifting my own state, because you cannot expect a child to be centered if you are not centered yourself, (You can read my article on disciplining a 5-year-old to see how I use the Satori Shift™ for this).
I also had to shift my expectations and stop expecting a three-year-old to have adult cognitive functioning. Shifting gears is a massive biological project for a preschooler's brain; while this isn't the article to dive into a clinical research spotlight on executive function, you can look up the exact developmental science behind why these system short-circuits happen via Laura Dimler, PhD’s excellent breakdown,Why Transitions Are So Hard for Kids.
Once I realized play was the only language their developing brains could truly process during a transition, it completely changed when and where I handled the rules.
You cannot teach a child how to swim while they are actively drowning.
I learned not to wait for the storm to hit on a public pool deck. The rug at home is exactly where I needed to front-load the pool transition while we were still sitting in our dry swimsuits.
Right there, when the emotional skies were completely clear, is where I introduced our proactive tool:
The Pool-to-Car Song.
I turned the entire exit ordeal into a call-and-response song. Singing isn’t just a cute distraction—it is a profound, biological regulation technique.
- The Science: Singing stimulates the vagus nerve, enhancing parasympathetic activity and triggering physical relaxation.
- The Body Mechanics: The physical act of singing forces you and your child to take deeper breaths and extend your exhales, down-regulating the fight-or-flight response. You physically cannot sound frantic while singing a rhythmic nursery rhyme!
By giving your kids the “response” parts of the song, you hardwire the exit routine into their bodies so they are proudly playing a game they’ve already mastered.
🎵 The Pool-to-Car Song (Sung to the tune of London Bridge is falling down)
Verse 1: “When it’s time to leave the pool, leave the pool, leave the pool. When it’s time to leave the pool, what do we do?”
Verse 2: “Take our towel and roll it up, roll it up, roll it up. Take our towel and roll it up, that’s what we do!”
Protip:
Sing both parts until they start to sing along. This is play not marching drills.
Closing Thoughts:
Before I could go on to set effective boundaries at the pool, I had to take absolute responsibility for my own emotional state. I had to step back and process my deep-seated beliefs about what looking like a “bad parent” meant to me, and why setting strict boundaries felt so intolerable. This is why the Satori Shift™ and the Parallel Journey™ have meant so much to me. Learning to process my own feelings has helped me guide my children as they now do the same.
Many people think getting stricter as a parent will make things easier. I’ve found the opposite. Leaning into understanding — and a little playful fun — always has a better return. It’s not about being permissive; it’s about staying connected when things get hard. When I take responsibility for my own emotional state, I can meet my kids where they are instead of trying to control the moment. That’s the shift that keeps us both learning, laughing, and growing.
💡Bring This Practice into Your Home:
Leaving the pool easily begins at home.
To help you with this transition from the pool, I’ve created a printable version of the "Pool to Car Song" with all the fun verses to get to your child from the pool to the car in a fun playful way.
It's the practical tool to help you actively engage your "connect" step and stay regulated practicing connection over control, right away.
How to get it: The checklist is a free resource when you join the Satori Kid Club Community—it’s completely free to join.
Every week, I share one practical, bite-sized tool just like this, straight to your inbox, to help you move pool power struggles and get back to what really matters: building a stronger relationship with your child.
Satori Kid Club Community Members also receive access to my library of printables to help you build your Growth Garden Tool Shed.
Coming Next Week in Our Summer Survival Series:
"Why are my kids fighting so much more during summer?"
☀️ "Why are my kids fighting so much more during summer?"
Your only 3 weeks into summer vacation and the initial magic of summer vacation has officially worn off, the lack of school routine is starting to show.
If you’ve ever found yourself standing in the kitchen, whisper-yelling at your kids to just stop picking at each other while trying to manage snacks, endless laundry, and a massive wave of parent guilt... next week’s edition is your absolute life raft.
We are taking a deeper dive into the messy reality of summer sibling dynamics and why the lack of structure turns sweet kids into relentless gladiators.
Join Satori Kid Club to get this article and unlock my growing Member Tool Shed of free pdfs to help you build stronger relationships with the child in your life.
☀️Read More from My Summer Survival Series
Angela Thibault is the creator of Satori Kid Club and the author and illustrator of children’s stories that children’s stories that help children learn to process BIG feelings with confidence. She is a Relational Growth Specialist who guides families in practicing emotional awareness together through dual growth between the grown up and the child. A mother for twenty-eight years, Angela has spent the last fourteen years dedicated to early childhood emotional development and relationship-based learning.
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