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

by Becky Kennedy

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.