Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be

by Becky Kennedy

“What is my child struggling with and what’s my role in helping them?”

Behaviorism privileges shaping behavior above understanding behavior.

It sees behavior as the whole picture rather than an expression of underlying unmet needs. This is why, I realized, these “evidence-based” approaches felt so bad to me—they confused the signal (what was really going on for a child) with the noise (behavior). After all, our goal is not to shape behavior. Our goal is to raise humans.

Understanding that we’re all good inside is what allows you to distinguish a person (your child) from a behavior (rudeness, hitting, saying, “I hate you”). Differentiating who someone is from what they do is key to creating interventions that preserve your relationship while also leading to impactful change.

many parents see behavior as the measure of who our kids are, rather than using behavior as a clue to what our kids might need.

how we talk to ourselves when we are struggling inside—the self-talk of “Don’t be so sensitive” or “I’m overreacting” or “I’m so dumb,” or, alternatively, “I’m trying my best” or “I simply want to feel seen”—is based on how our parents spoke to or treated us in our times of struggle.

Underneath “bad behavior” is always a good child.

Finding the good inside can often come from asking ourselves one simple question: “What is my most generous interpretation of what just happened?”

focusing on a child’s impact on us sets the stage for codependence, not regulation or empathy.)

Choosing the most generous interpretation of your child’s behavior does not mean you are “being easy” on them, but rather you are framing their

behavior in a way that will help them build critical emotion regulation skills for their future—and you’re preserving your connection and close relationship along the way.

when our kids are dysregulated—meaning their emotions overwhelm their current coping skills—they look to their parents to understand, “Who am I right now? Am I a bad kid doing bad things . . . or am I a good kid having a hard time?”

if I look for perfect, I’ll miss growth

There’s nothing more valuable than learning to find our goodness under our struggles, because this leads to an increased capacity to reflect and change.

Building strong connections relies on the assumption that no one is right in the absolute, because understanding, not convincing, is what makes people feel secure in a relationship.

when we seek to understand, we attempt to see and learn more about another person’s perspective, feelings, and experience.

“I am having one experience and you are having a different experience. I want to get to know what’s

happening fo...

When we approach someone with the goal of understanding, we accept that there isn’t one correct interpretation of a set of facts, but rather multiple experiences and viewpoints.

Understanding has one goal: connection.

Parents have the job of

establishing safety through boundaries, validation, and empathy. Children have the job of exploring and learning, through experiencing and expressing their emotions. And when it comes to jobs, we all have to stay in our lanes. Our kids should not dictate our boundaries and we should not dictate their feelings.

Boundaries, when created with intention, serve to protect and contain.

Boundaries are not what we tell kids not to do; boundaries are what we tell kids we will do.

Empathy comes from our ability to be curious: it allows us to explore our child’s emotional experience from a place of learning, not judgment.

the way parents interact with kids in their early years forms the blueprint they take with them into the world.

We’ve touched on this already, but it bears repeating: our earliest relationships influence what parts of us feel lovable, what parts we look to shut down, and what parts we feel ashamed of. In other words, children’s experiences with their parents in their earliest years impact how they think about themselves, what they learn to expect of others, what feels safe and good, and what feels threatening and bad.

we want our kids to seek out relationships where they can balance dependence and independence, where they can feel close to others and still not “lose” themselves, where they can voice their vulnerabilities and get support, then we have to put in the work now, in the early years. Because the safer and more secure a child feels with his parents, and the wider the range of feelings he can feel within that relationship, the safer and more secure his adult relationships will be.

dependence and independence are not necessarily opposites, but rather, each force allows for the other—two things are true! The more children feel they can depend on a parent, the more independent they can be.

When we feel overwhelmed and become reactive, it’s almost always because one part of us

has essentially taken over; we lose track of our identity and instead “become” these feelings.

because I’ve seen how powerful it can be, I am passionate about using the language of parts with young children, to wire early on the idea of sensations and feelings and thoughts as parts we can relate to, not experiences that take over and consume us.

This is why it’s so important to distinguish behavior from underlying feelings and experience

Children interpret our interactions with them not as a reaction to the specific moment but as a message about who they should be.

If we don’t explicitly recognize the feelings underneath our kids’ behaviors and show them that we love them even when they’re acting out, they will collapse behavior and feelings into one. They will learn that attachment security depends on disavowing the feelings under the behaviors, leading to longer-term problematic relationship patterns.

When your child sees you as a work in progress, he learns that he, too, can learn from his struggles and take responsibility when he acts in a way he isn’t proud of.

Because, as we all know, solid relationships aren’t solid because they lack conflict, they’re solid because the people in them possess the ability to reconnect after disagreements and to feel understood again after feeling misunderstood.

And, again, how we teach our kids—through our interactions with them—to relate to pain or hardship will impact how they think about themselves and their troubles for decades to come.

After all, cultivating happiness is dependent on regulating distress. We have to feel safe before we

can feel happy

Resilience allows for the emergence of happiness.

Building resilience is about developing the capacity to tolerate distress, to stay in and with a tough, challenging moment, to find our footing and our goodness even when we don’t have confirmation of achievement or pending success. Resilience building happens in the space before a “win” arrives, which is why it can feel so hard to access.

the qualities children most need from their parents in order to develop resilience include: empathy, listening, accepting them for who they are, providing a safe and consistent presence, identifying

their strengths, allowing for mistakes, helping them develop responsibility, and building problem-solving skills.

am I helping my kid tolerate and work through this distress, or am I encouraging my child to avoid and beeline out of the distress? We want the first, not the second.

the more we emphasize our children’s happiness and “feeling better,” the more we set up them up for an adulthood of anxiety.

When we tell ourselves that we just want our kids to be happy, we take on the job of happiness police, eager to help our kids avoid discomfort instead of teaching our kids how to cope with discomfort.

Parents don’t so much need to protect kids from having tough feelings as much as we need to prepare our kids to have those feelings.

You are the architect of your child’s resilience, and that is the ultimate gift you can give them. After all, successfully managing life’s many challenges is a person’s most reliable path to happiness.

It was a window into the main event. Behavior, in all its forms, is a window: into the feelings, thoughts, urges, sensations, perceptions, and unmet needs of a person. Behavior is never “the story,” but rather it’s a clue to the bigger story begging to be addressed.