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

by Becky Kennedy

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.

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.

“I am here because I want to change. I want to be the pivot point in my intergenerational family patterns. 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. My goodness has always been there.”

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 on the outside.

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.

“Two things are true” is a foundational parenting principle because it reminds us to see our child’s experience, or a coparent’s experience, as real and valid and worthy of naming and connecting

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.

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.

Why do boundaries, validation, and empathy help a child build regulation skills? Boundaries show our kids that even the biggest emotions won’t spiral out of control forever.

Parenting matters. And yes, kids will “remember” all of these years, including years zero to one, one to two, and two to three. They won’t, of course, remember in the way we typically think about memory—they won’t be able to produce a story with words that connects to an experience from their past. But even if kids can’t remember with their words, they can—and do—remember with something more powerful: their bodies. Before they can talk, children learn, based on interactions with their parents, what feels acceptable or shameful, manageable or overwhelming. In this way, our “memories” from early childhood are in fact more powerful than the memories we form in our later years; the way parents interact with kids in their early years forms the blueprint they take with them into the world.

our earliest relationships influence what parts of us feel lovable, what parts we look to shut down, and what parts we feel ashamed of.

child’s early years form the foundation for emotion regulation, which, as we know, is a person’s ability to manage and respond to feelings and urges that arise.

Here’s the big takeaway: kids wire themselves to adapt to their early environment, forming expectations about the world based on the data they take in; that early wiring impacts how they think about themselves and others long after childhood.

Behavior: A child is hesitant to join a birthday party, clinging to his mom. Parent Response #1: “You know everyone here. Come on! There’s nothing to be worried about!” Attachment Lesson #1: I can’t trust my feelings because they’re ridiculous and overblown. Other people know better than I do how I should feel. Parent Response #2: “Something about this feels tricky. I believe you. Take your time. You’ll know when you’re ready.” Attachment Lesson #2: I can trust my feelings. I’m allowed to feel cautious. I know what I am feeling and I can expect other people to respect and support me.

So how do we create secure attachments with our children now in order to promote their secure attachments with others later on? Generally speaking, relationships with parents that include responsiveness, warmth, predictability, and repair when things feel bad set a child up to have a secure base. A child who sees a parent as his secure base feels a sense of safety in the world, a sense of “someone will be there for me and comfort me if things go wrong.” As such, he feels capable of exploring, trying new things, taking risks, suffering failures, and being vulnerable. There’s a deep and critical paradox here: The more we can rely on a parent, the more curious and explorative we can be. The more we trust in our secure relationship with our parent, the more secure we are with ourselves. Said another way: 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. Our confidence that someone will understand us, not judge us, and support us, comfort us when things go wrong—this is what allows kids to develop into adults who are assertive, confident, and brave.

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.

Here’s what I always tell parents: It’s not your fault that your child is struggling. But it is your responsibility, as the adults in the family system, to change the environment so that your child can learn and grow and thrive.

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.

as a parent, you are your child’s role model. 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.

helping your child build resilience certainly isn’t easy, but I promise it’s worth it.

Do I want my kids to experience happiness? Without a doubt, yes. I want them to feel happiness as kids and as adults; this is why I’m so focused on building resilience. Resilience, in many ways, is our ability to experience a wide range of emotions and still feel like ourselves. Resilience helps us bounce back from the stress, failure, mistakes, and adversity in our lives. 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. But that’s also why it’s so worthwhile.

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. For example, when my child says, “Ugh, the block tower keeps falling! Help me!,” instead of saying, “Here, let me build you a sturdy base,” in order to help him out of the hard moment, I might say, “Ugh, how annoying!” Then I’ll take a few audible deep breaths and say, “Hmm . . . I wonder what we could do to make it sturdier . . . ,” and model a look of curiosity. All of this is designed to connect to my child within the distress. When my child says, “Everyone in my class lost a tooth, I’m the only one who didn’t!” I don’t say, “Sweetie, you will soon, and you’re one of the kids who can read chapter books!” in order to distract him from his disappointment. Instead, I might say, “Everyone else lost one already, huh? You wish you lost a tooth, I get that. I remember feeling something really similar in kindergarten . . .” The goal here is to help my child feel less alone in her distress. Reminding ourselves, “Connect! Connect!” encourages us to first be present in our child’s experience instead of leading our child out of his own experience.

Setting happiness as the goal compels us to solve our kids’ problems rather than equip them to solve their own.

The larger lesson we are teaching our kids is that distress is a part of life and when upsetting things happen, we can talk about them and get through them with the people we love.

while reinforcing our kid’s people-pleasing tendencies can be “convenient” in childhood, it can lead to major problems—a reluctance to say no, an inability to assert or even locate one’s own needs, a prioritization of other people’s wellness to the detriment of one’s own—later on. And for non-people-pleasing kids? Well, these methods often intensify challenging behavior, not help it. Because when we are not heard or seen on the inside, we escalate our expressions on the outside, in hopes of being taken seriously and getting our needs met. In short: when we see behavior as “the main event” instead of as a window into an unmet need, we may “successfully” shut down the behavior, but the underlying need remains, and it will pop up again, Whack-a-Mole style.

The other problem with behavioral control methods is right there in the label: control. Prioritizing control over relationship building is a dangerous trade-off. If all you want is to change your child’s behavior, then sure, sticker charts and time-outs may be “successful” when your kids are young. But as they get older and the gold stars lose their power, the result can be downright scary.