Pregnant Aussie woman breaks down after ‘screaming’ at her toddler son: ‘I feel disgusting about it’

An Australian fitness influencer fought back tears on Wednesday as she recalled the moment she “screamed” at her three-year-old son.

Steph Claire Smith, 30, who is pregnant with her second child, shared a video on Instagram showing her looking very tired after stepping out of the shower.

She told her 1.4 million followers that she felt incredibly ‘tired’ and ‘disgusting’ after shouting at her toddler the night before as he struggled to sleep.

‘I shouted at it [son] Harvey last night and I don’t mean like I raised my voice a little bit, I like to totally scream,” she said.

‘I’m not going to brag about that. I feel as disgusted about it now as I did then.”

The KICPOD co-founder went on to say that Harvey came to her and her husband Josh Miller’s bedside on Tuesday night and asked if she could sleep with them.

“I woke up with him next to my bed and asked if he could come in… I would love to invite him into bed and just sleep with him,” Steph continued.

“But 99.99 percent of the times we’ve done that, he doesn’t go back to sleep.

“He’ll lie there pretty still for about 15 minutes and then he’ll be kicking and screaming for about 15 minutes, and then it escalates to him wanting to get up and play.”

Steph said she offered to stay with Harvey in his own bed, but he “wasn’t happy about that” because he was afraid she would go back to her room if he fell asleep.

“It just caused a huge meltdown in him and he and I both became incredibly unregulated. It escalated so much,” Steph recalled.

‘I was so tired. All I thought was, “Of course this is going to happen the night I go back to work.”

She continued: ‘It got to the point where he kept repeating himself saying he didn’t want me to warm his bed.

“Eventually I realized what he was saying was, ‘Don’t make my bed warm, because my excuse for coming to sleep in your bed was that my bed was cold.’

‘At that moment I didn’t feel like it and I shouted. I raised my voice completely and I screamed and I scared the hell out of him.”

Steph added that her partner Josh, 34, heard her ‘screaming’ at their son and came upstairs to try to help calm them both down.

“I just took a breath and it kind of clicked in me: I’m dysregulated and he’s dysregulated. Neither of us will get better if we both stay like this,” Steph said.

She and Josh then stood “there in silence” in Harvey’s room, waiting for him to stop crying.

Eventually, the toddler calmed herself down enough and agreed to go back to sleep, but Steph stayed awake next to him for another hour because her “heart rate was so high.”

“I did my best to fix it at the time, but it probably didn’t come across as sincere,” Steph told her followers.

“So when he wakes up this morning, I’m going to try to fix him as best I can before I go to work. I hate it. I hate yelling at him.”

She said she wanted to share the raw parental story with her fans because “it’s so normal and honest enough and sometimes it just tests our patience.”

“I just don’t want anyone else to feel as gross as I felt last night because they were like that and thought they were the only parents doing it,” Steph added.

Steph has been very open on social media about the challenges she faces as a mother.

In July last year, the fitness influencer broke down in tears on her Keep It Cleaner Podcast when she revealed “the worst thing” her son Harvey had ever said to her.

The model, who shares her child with husband Josh and has a second on the way, could barely keep her emotions in check as she shared the story.

She admitted that Harvey recently told her that she “scared” him when she got angry.

‘I don’t like this. I feel like shit when I explode in front of him,” Steph explained to her guest speaker Lael Stone.

“The worst thing you can hear a child say to you is, ‘Mommy, you scared me.’

‘[They are] I heard him say my least favorite words, but it happened. I’m crying now. I think it’s because as a parent you put so much pressure on yourself to do well.’

A month earlier, she shared yet another parenting struggle when she uploaded a screenshot of a wellness app page that showed she was only getting three hours of sleep.

Steph called it the “worst night” she’s ever had as a mother and shared a heartbreaking update on her son’s sleep patterns.

“Well that was the worst/most challenging night in my three years of being a parent,” she captioned the chart.

The co-founder of fitness program Keep It Cleaner then shared a photo of herself lying in bed next to her son, looking less than impressed.

‘I came home from the cinema at 11pm and immediately jumped into bed. 11:30am Harvey woke up from a nightmare, Josh settled down again, we thought he was asleep again, ten minutes later he’s awake and crying out,” she started.

“Josh tried to resettle, but Harvey wanted to sleep with us. So I got into his bed, and twenty minutes later he told me he wanted to go to our guest room and not sleep in his room. So I did. And then I stayed awake with him for another half hour, until he petted me hard and wouldn’t stop, as if he was stuck and couldn’t hear me.’

Steph went on to explain that Harvey was then “adamant” that if he went downstairs to sleep in his parents’ room, he would eventually fall asleep.

But as soon as Steph went to her bed with Harvey, things went from bad to worse as the toddler continued to ‘kick’ them and ‘climb on their heads’ until he finally fell asleep at 3.30am.