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

by Becky Kennedy

a result, 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. What if we saw behavior as an expression of needs, not identity? Then, rather than shaming our kids for their shortcomings, making them feel unseen and alone, we could help them access their internal goodness, improving their behavior along the way.

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.

child who is struggling and likely feels insecure. Underneath “bad behavior” is always a good child. And yet, when parents chronically shut down a behavior harshly without recognizing the good kid underneath, a child internalizes that they are bad. And badness has to be shut down at all costs, so a child develops methods, including harsh self-talk, to chastise himself, as a way of killing off the “bad kid” parts and instead finding the “good kid” ones—meaning the parts that get approval and connection.

How our caregivers responded to us becomes how we in turn respond to ourselves, and this sets the stage for how we respond to our children. This is why it’s so easy to create an intergenerational legacy of “internal badness”: my parents reacted to my struggles with harshness and criticism → I learned to doubt my goodness when I am having a hard time → I now, as an adult, meet my own struggles with self-blame and self-criticism → my child, when he acts out, activates this same circuitry in my body → I am compelled to react with harshness to my child’s struggles → I build the same circuitry in my child’s body, so my child learns to doubt his goodness when he struggles → and so on and so forth.

I want to start something different: I want my children to feel good inside, to feel valuable and lovable and worthy, even when they struggle. And this starts . . . with re-accessing my own goodness.

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

“Wow, those are big words, let me take a breath . . . I hear how upset you are. Tell me more.”

focusing on a child’s impact on us sets the stage for codependence, not regulation or empathy.) The third option sends the message that I believe my son is unreasonable, and his concerns are unimportant to me.

He’s sad. And jealous. Those feelings are so big in his small body that they explode out of him in the form of big hurtful words, but what’s underneath is a raw, painful set of feelings.”

The intervention that comes next—the empathetic statements based on seeing my child as good inside—acknowledges his words as a sign of overwhelming pain, not as a sign of his being a bad kid.

Finding the MGI teaches parents to attend to what is going on inside of their child (big feelings, big worries, big urges, big sensations) rather than what is going on outside of t...

We orient them to their internal experience, which includes thoughts, feelings, sensations, urges, memories, and images. Self-regulation skills rely on the ability to recognize internal experience, so by focusing on what’s inside rather than what’s outsid...

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’r...

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 we want our kids to have true self-confidence and to feel good about themselves, we need to reflect back to our kids that they are good inside, even as they struggle

I remember once watching my older son wrestle with whether he would share his snack with his sister. I felt myself wanting to say, “Your sister would share with you! Come on, do one nice thing!” but I also heard another voice crying, “Most generous! Most generous!” and instead I said to him, “I know that you have just as much sharing capacity and generosity as anyone else in this family. I’m going to leave the room; you and your sister can work this out.” I

All good decisions start with feeling secure in ourselves and in our environment, and nothing feels more secure than being recognized for the good people we truly are.

advice: We don’t have to choose between two supposedly oppositional realities. We can avoid punishment and see improved behavior, we can parent with a firm set of expectations and still be playful, we can create and enforce boundaries and show our love, we can take care of ourselves and our children.

This idea of multiplicity—the ability to accept multiple realities at once—is critical to healthy relationships. When there are two people in a room, there are also two sets of feelings, thoughts, needs, and perspectives. Our ability to hold on to multiple truths at once—ours and someone else’s—allows two people in a relationship to feel seen and feel real, even if they are in conflict. Multiplicity is what allows two people to get along and feel close—they each know that their experience will be accepted as true and explored as important, even if those experiences are different. 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.

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

What’s the opposite of understanding? For this argument’s sake, it’s convincing. Convincing is the attempt to prove a singular reality—to prove that “only one thing is true.” Convincing is an attempt to be “right” and, as a result, make the other person “wrong.” It rests on the assumption that there is only one correct viewpoint. When we seek to convince someone, we essentially say, “You’re wrong. You are mis-perceiving, mis-remembering, mis-feeling, mis-experiencing. Let me explain to you why I am correct and then you’ll see the light and come around.” Convincing has one goal in mind: being right. And here’s the unfortunate consequence of being right: the other person feels unseen and unheard, at which point most people become infuriated and combative, because it feels as if the other person does not accept your realness or worth. Feeling unseen and unheard makes connection impossible.

In a study of two types of listening, clinical psychologist Faye Doell demonstrated how people who listen in order to understand versus listen in order to respond have higher across-the-board relationship satisfaction.

“feeling felt” in relationships. He describes this as “our minds being held within another’s mind,” but ultimately he’s talking about connecting to someone else’s experience.

Multiplicity is what allows a person to recognize that I can love my kids and crave alone time;

Our ability to experience many seemingly oppositional thoughts and feelings at once—to know that you can experience several truths simultaneously—is key to our mental health. Psychologist Philip Bromberg may have said it best: “Health is the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them—the capacity to feel like one self while being many.”* We are at our best when we notice the multiple feelings, thoughts, urges, and sensations inside of us without any of them “becoming” us, when we can locate our self amid a sea of experiences (“I notice a part of me is feeling nervous and a part of me is feeling excited,” or “I notice a part of me wants to scream at my kids and a part of me knows to take a deep breath”). In other words, we are our healthiest selves when we can see that two (or more!) things are true.

And it also allows us to hold on to our own experience as real and valid and worthy of naming and connecting to. It reminds us that logic doesn’t overpower emotion: I may have a valid reason for doing something . . . and also someone else has a valid emotional reaction. Both are true.

When we feel like we’re not being acknowledged, we can’t solve problems. So, in this power-struggle moment, your foremost goal should not be to solve the problem. The first goal is to re-find your “two things are true” mentality, because as soon as we feel truly seen in our experience and our desires, we can let our guard down—after all, as humans, we are less invested in any specific decision than we are in feeling seen. This is almost always what matters most.

hear you. Two things are true: you have to wear a jacket if you’re going outside . . . and also, you’re allowed to be mad at me about it. You don’t have to like wearing it.” Even in my unilateral decision, I acknowledge my child’s experience. I am not trying to convince my child that one thing is true, that it is freezing and that the only thing that “makes sense” is to wear a jacket. I convince myself that the jacket is important to wear, I set a boundary that the jacket has to be worn outside, and then I name my child’s feelings and give permission for them to have them. I made the decision, my child is having their feelings. No one is right. Two things are true.

As always, we have to separate behaviors (what we do) from identity (who we are). This does not mean letting yourself off the hook or making excuses for yourself. It means recognizing that you are good, and that you can do the hard work to improve. So commit this principle to memory and tell yourself, over and over and over again: “Two things are true: I am having a hard time and I am a good parent. I am a good parent having a hard time.”

Family systems (yes, family units are also systems) are no different, and every member of a family has a job. 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. In a family system, some roles are prioritized over others. Safety comes before happiness and before our kids’ being pleased with us. First and foremost, our job is to keep our children safe, physically and psychologically. There’s nothing as scary to a child as noticing when their parent fails at this job (especially when that failure stems from a parent’s fear of their kid’s reaction). The child receives the subconscious message: when you are out of control, there’s no one capable of stepping in and helping you.

this.” If safety is our primary destination, boundaries are the pathway we use to get there.

Our children need us to set firm (that doesn’t have to mean scary!) boundaries, because they need to know that we can keep them safe when they are developmentally incapable of doing so themselves.

children are more able to experience strong feelings than they are to regulate those feelings, and the gap between experiencing strong feelings and regulating those feelings comes out as dysregulated behavior (think hitting, kicking, screaming).

The downstairs brain, marked by intense emotions and sensations, is fully built and functioning in young children. But the upstairs brain is under construction well into a person’s twenties. Talk about lag time! No wonder children often struggle with future planning, self-reflection, and empathy—these are all part of the upstairs brain. It’s important to remember: When kids are overwhelmed with emotion and unable to regulate and make good decisions, this is developmentally normal. Exhausting and totally inconvenient for parents, yes, but normal.

Knowing your job is fundamental to this goal. We want our kids to feel their wide range of feelings and have new experiences, and our job is to help them build resilience by teaching them to cope with whatever the world throws at them. The goal isn’t to shut down their feelings or teach kids to turn away from what they notice. The goal is to teach our kids how to manage all of their feelings and perceptions and thoughts and urges;

we are the primary vehicle for this teaching, not through lectures or logic, but through the experiences our children have with us

Helping our kids regulate their feelings is an important—though perhaps underappreciated—part of keeping them safe. Think of it as containing the emotional fires that are blazing inside your child. If there were a fire in your home, your first job would be to contain it. Yes, you need to fireproof your home better, but that can’t happen until the fire is managed and you feel safe again. When parents struggle to set boundaries or regulate their own strong emotions, it’s as if a fire is burning and...

This is why it’s so important to distinguish behavior from underlying feelings and experience. While it’s important to contain a child who is out of control and exhibiting “bad behavior,” it’s also crucial to recognize that under the behavior is a child (or in IFS language, a part of a child) who is in pain, has an unmet need, and is in desperate need of connection. Children interpret our interactions with them not as a reaction to the specific moment but as a message about who they should be. So when your child says, “I hate my baby brother, send him back to the hospital!” and you yell, “Don’t say that about your brother, you love him!” the lesson they learn isn’t that their words were inappropriate. The lesson they learn is that jealousy and anger are dangerous emotions, ones they shouldn’t have at all.

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.

as adults, we can work on rewiring ourselves and changing the trajectory of our own development. It is not too late.

Parenting is not for the faint of heart. It’s incredibly demanding, but also—and perhaps more important—it requires a huge amount of self-reflection, learning, and evolving.

when we have kids, we are confronted with so many truths about ourselves, our childhoods, and our relationships with our families of origin. And while we can use this information to learn and unlearn, break cycles, and heal, we have to do this work while also caring for our kids, managing tantrums, getting by on limited sleep, and feeling depleted. That’s a lot.

“I am both working on myself and working to take care of my family. I’m trying to rewire the patterns that do not benefit me and I’m trying to wire my kids, from the start, for resilience and feeling at home in themselves. Wow. I am doing so much.”

Psychologist Louis Cozolino established therapy’s role in the neuroplasticity process: a secure attachment with one’s therapist, he discovered, can lead to a rewiring in the brain that results in improved emotion regulation and increased ability to manage stress.

Since parents are the most significant fixture in a child’s environment, perhaps it should come as no surprise that when a parent changes, so too does a child’s wiring. Research has established that, oftentimes, when kids are struggling, it is not therapy for the child himself but coaching or therapy for the parent that leads to the most significant changes in the child. This is powerful research, because it suggests that a child’s behavior—which is an expression of a child’s emotion regulation patterns—develops in relation to a parent’s emotional maturity.

but he’s alone without a trusted adult to help. Children who are left alone with intense distress often rely on one of two coping mechanisms: self-doubt and self-blame. With self-doubt, kids invalidate their own experience in an attempt to feel safe in their environment again.

After all, my mom hasn’t apologized yet or even said anything to me about it, she definitely would say she’s sorry if she said those words.” Kids use self-doubt to protect themselves from the overwhelming feelings that would arise if they accepted the reality of what really just happened. They do this because being alone in their feelings seems like “too much,” and self-doubt offers a way to escape and self-preserve. And yet, a child is wiring herself to believe, “I don’t perceive things accurately. I overreact. I cannot trust how things feel to me. Other people have a better idea of my reality than I do.” This is a scary circuit to build, because it leads to teens and adults who don’t trust themselves and cannot locate intuition. Instead, they use other people’s treatment of them to define who they are and what they deserve.

It’s more comforting for a child to internalize badness (“I am bad inside”), because at least then he can hold on to the idea that the world around him is safe and good.

we can work on our own “stuff” and try to improve our regulation and learn parenting tricks and scripts and strategies . . . but still, the goal is never to get it right all the time. That’s not a thing. I often tell parents that the worthiest goal might be to get really good at repair, which acknowledges the reality that parents will continue to act in ways that don’t always feel great, and there will continue to be hard, misaligned moments. But if we develop the skill of going back, nondefensively, to our kids and showing them that we care about the discomfort they experienced in those “rupture moments,” then we’re tackling the most important parenting work of all.

When we return to a moment that felt bad and add connection and emotional safety, we actually change the memory in the body. The memory no longer has such overwhelming “I’m alone and bad inside” labels. It’s