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

by Becky Kennedy

baseline to-dos: Say you’re sorry, share your reflections with your child—restating your memory of what happened, so your kid knows it wasn’t all in his head—and then say what you wish you had done differently and what you plan to do differently now and in the future.

take ownership over your role (“Mommy was having big feelings that came out in a yelling voice. Those were my feelings and it’s my job to work on managing them better. It’s never your fault when I yell and it’s not your job to figure out how I can stay calmer. I love you”) instead of insinuating that your child “made you” react in a certain way.

Repair can happen ten minutes after a blowup, ten days later, or ten years later. Never ever doubt the power of repair—every time you go back to your child, you allow him to rewire, to rewrite the ending of the story so it concludes in connection and understanding, rather than aloneness and fear. This limits your child’s tendency to self-blame and sets him up for a stronger relationship with you and also healthier adult relationships.

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.

Remind yourself, right now: “Good parents don’t get it right all the time. Good parents repair.”

Whether you’re repairing something big or small, your children will feel that repair in their bodies, and this moment of connection and explanation will soften the initial memory of aloneness and confusion. The big repairs, the small repairs—they all matter. Every little bit counts.

I, for one, don’t think we’re talking about cultivating happiness as much as we’re talking about avoiding fear and distress. Because when we focus on happiness, we ignore all the other emotions that will inevitably come up throughout our kids’ lives, which means we aren’t teaching them how to cope with those emotions.

cultivating happiness is dependent on regulating distress. We have to feel safe before we can feel happy.

stress + coping = internal experience. The good news? Resilience is not a static character trait that children possess or lack; it’s a skill that can be cultivated, and one that, hopefully, parents help instill in their kids from a young age. Because we can’t always change the stressors around us, but we can always work on our ability to access resilience.

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. But that’s also why it’s so worthwhile. The longer we learn to tolerate the challenges of learning, the more we maximize the likelihood of reaching our goals.

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.

As a parent, I challenge myself to sit with my child in his feeling of distress so he knows he isn’t alone, as opposed to pulling my child out of this moment, which leaves him alone the next time he finds himself there.

model a look of curiosity. All of this is designed to connect to my child within the distress.

The goal here is to help my child feel less alone in her distress. Reminding ourselves, “Connect! Connect!”

be present in our child’s experience instead of leading our child out of his own experience.