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

by Becky Kennedy

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. This is why it’s so critical to separate what a child does (which may be “bad”) from who a child is (good inside); of course we don’t want our kids to hit (behavior), but we do want our kids to have the right to feel angry (feeling). Of course we don’t want our kids to have a meltdown at a store (behavior), but we do want our kids to maintain access to desire and the right to speak up for themselves (feelings). Of course we don’t want our kids to eat only cereal for dinner (behavior), but we do want our kids to believe that they have sovereignty over their bodies and can sense what feels good inside them (feelings). 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.