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

by Becky Kennedy

“I won’t let you hit your brother” as you walk between your daughter and her brother and position your body in a way so the hitting doesn’t happen again. “I know you’re frustrated! Having a brother who can crawl and get into all of your stuff is so hard. I’m here. I’ll help you figure out how to keep your block structure safe.” “I won’t let you run with scissors” as you hold your child—gently and firmly—in place. “I know, you want to run run run! You can put those scissors down and run or finish your project and run around later. Which would you rather? Oh . . . you want to do both? I know, sweetie. I won’t let you do anything dangerous, even when you’re mad at me about it. I love you that much. You’re allowed to be upset; I get it.” “Screen time is over now. I’m going to turn off the TV.” You turn off the TV and place the remote somewhere it cannot be reached by your child. “You wish you could watch another show. I know! Stopping TV time is so hard for me too. Want to tell me the name of the one you want to watch tomorrow? I’ll write it down for us so we don’t forget.”

Children need to sense a parent’s boundary—our “I won’t let you” and our stopping them from dangerous action—in order to feel, deep in their bodies, this message: “This feeling might seem as if it will take over and destroy the world, it might seem too much, and yet I am sensing in my parent’s boundary that there is a way to contain it. This feeling feels scary and overwhelming to me, but I can see it’s not scary or overwhelming to my parent.” Over time, children absorb this containment and can access it on their own.

It’s common to think, “I need to change, and once I do I will feel worthy and lovable!” But the directionality is precisely the opposite. Our goodness is what grounds us and allows us to experience difficult emotions without having them take over or become our identity. And

when parents get in the habit of validating a child’s experience and empathizing with it, they are essentially saying to that child, “You are real. You are lovable. You are good.”

A child’s

job in a family system is to explore and learn, through experiencing and expressing their emotions and wants. Kids need to learn what they are capable of, what is safe, what their role in the family is, how much autonomy they have, and what happens when they try new things. They do this by exploring—testing out boundaries, experimenting with new skills, playing with others—but also by challenging their parents, asking for what they want, and, sometimes, “acting out.” When you look at the family system as a whole, you can see this elegant interplay of jobs: a child can express emotions, and a parent can validate and empathize with them. When those emotions transform into dangerous behavior, we set appropriate boundaries, while still validating and empathizing.

Once you understand the roles of a family system, you can reframe how you think about your child’s difficult moments. Viewing their struggles as job fulfillment will help you remember that these are good kids doing their jobs, not bad kids doing bad things. I know that thinking about family jobs helps me evaluate the moments in my own house that feel hard. When I tell my son that I have to start work and then hear him screaming for me, I can think...

Then I review: I said to my son in the time before separation, “Sweetie, I know it’s so hard for you when Mommy has to do work. That makes sense; you love being by Mommy’s side! You will be with Daddy, and I will see you for lunch. Mommy always comes back.” I se...

words and empathy with my tone. My son protested. And screamed. And cried. He did his job: he experienced and expressed feelings. In response, I said, “I know it’s so hard, sweetie. You’re allowed to be upset. I love you,” and then left. Validation, empat...

the way parents interact with kids in their early years forms the blueprint they take with them into the world.

Say hello to the guilt, and then remind yourself that you are a good parent working on yourself and your relationships, and this is, actually, the best any of us can do.

Behavior: A child is crying when his parent drops him off at school. Parent Response #1: “Stop being such a baby!” Attachment Lesson #1: When I feel vulnerable, I am ridiculed and unseen. Keep my vulnerability out of close relationships. It’s not safe there. Parent Response #2: “It’s hard to say goodbye today. I get that. Some days are like that. I know you’re safe here at school and we both know that Papa always comes back. I’ll see you at pickup.” Attachment Lesson #2: I can expect others to take my feelings seriously. When I feel vulnerable and upset, I get validation and support. Vulnerability is safe within close relationships.

Behavior: A child is tantrumming about wanting ice cream for breakfast. Parent Response #1: “I won’t talk to you while you have a fit. Go to your room and come out when you’re being reasonable!” Attachment Lesson #1: When I want something, I push people away, I become bad, I am left abandoned and alone. People only want to be around me when I’m easy and compliant. Parent Response #2: “I know, sweetie. You wish you could have ice cream for breakfast. That’s not an option right now. You’re allowed to be upset about it.” Attachment Lesson #2: I am allowed to want things for myself. Wanting things for myself is allowed in close relationships. 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.

Now, to be clear, these second parent responses won’t lead to instant resolution. There will be no sudden end to the tears or screams. However, two things will happen: You will notice a short-term benefit, because your child will build regulation skills that may soon lead to an ability to manage disappointment. And you will, without a

doubt, notice a longer-term gain, because you are helping your child build self-trust, acceptance, and openness with others, rather than shame, self-loathing, and defensiveness.

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.

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.

The language of “parts” allows us to articulate, internally and externally, our conflicting—or at least coexisting—emotions: to feel grounded while experiencing distress, to feel centered while also being conflicted, to have angry thoughts while knowing we are a good person. Over and over in my private practice, I notice how the language of parts gives adults freedom, compassion, relief, and the ability to regulate tough experiences. And because I’ve seen how powerful it can be, I am passionate about using the language of parts with young children, to wire early on the idea of sensations and feelings and thoughts as parts we can relate to, not experiences that take over and consume us.

Kids learn these “lessons” based on interactions with parents—not by words, of course, but rather by experiences. They take in what gets a parent’s smiles and questions and hugs and presence (i.e., “You’re allowed to feel that way. Tell me more about that, I’m right here, I’m listening”) and what gets a parent’s punishments and rejection and criticism and distancing (i.e., “Go to your room this instant! I will not be around you when you are like this!”). As psychologist Richard Schwartz, the creator of IFS, writes, “Children have a developmental tendency to translate experience into identity: I am not loved becomes I am unlovable, and a bad thing happened to me becomes I am bad.” In other words, kids take experiences with their caregivers and infer larger messages about who they are. The emotions parents connect to—meaning the ones we are interested in and will stay present for—tell children that the parts of them feeling these feelings are manageable, lovable, and worthy; the emotions we shut down, punish, reject, or try to make into something “more pleasant,” well, children learn that the parts of them feeling these feelings are destructive, bad, unlovable, or “too much.”

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.

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. I often think that parenting is really an exercise in our own development and growth; 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. Maybe we can all take a moment, right now, to acknowledge this incredible challenge. Place your hand on your heart and say these words: “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.”

When parents are willing to change, when they are willing to repair and reflect together, nondefensively, about moments in the past that felt bad to kids . . . the child’s brain can rewire.

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.

“Wow, this is amazing. If I can work on some of my own emotion regulation abilities—which will feel good for me anyway!—my child will change in response. How empowering!”

Let’s say you’ve had a rough day, your child is protesting your no-snacks-right-now decision, and you end up yelling, “You make everything difficult! You’re an ungrateful spoiled child and I don’t even know what to do with you!” In response, your child runs to his room screaming, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”

Now your child is alone in his room. What’s going on for him? Mostly, intense distress. Your child is dysregulated, which means he’s feeling overwhelmed by the sensations in his body and he’s in a state of physiological threat (“This feeling is too much, I don’t feel safe”). His body has to figure out how to feel safe and secure again . . . 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. They might tell themselves, “Wait . . . my mom didn’t actually say those awful words to me, that couldn’t have happened, no way . . . Yeah, no, I must have remembered that wrong. 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.

Self-blame is another common coping mechanism for kids whose parents don’t attempt reconnection after tough moments. Self-blame allows a child to feel in control, because as long as he convinces himself that he’s a bad kid doing bad things, and that if he was better he would feel more secure . . . well, then he has a viable option to change. Psychiatrist Ronald Fairbairn may have said it best when he wrote, regarding children and chi...

If children couldn’t ...

adult to come help them, to be there, to repair and reconnect in difficult moments . . . well, then, the world would feel pretty unsafe. It’s more comforting for a child to internalize badness (“I am bad inside”), because at least then he ca...

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 now more nuanced, as we layer on support after criticism, softness after yelling, understanding after misunderstanding. The ability to transform the body’s memory is pretty amazing, and it’s what always motivates me to repair with my own kids.

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. It’s important to 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.

And remember: 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.

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 i...

“Good parents don’t get it right all the time. Good parents repair.”

cultivating happiness is dependent on regulating distress. We have to feel safe before we can feel happy. Why do we have to learn to regulate the tough stuff first? Why can’t happiness just “win” and “beat” all other emotions? That certainly would be easier! Unfortunately, in parenting, just like in life, the things that matter most take hard work and time; helping your child build resilience certainly isn’t easy, but I promise it’s worth it.

Picture your body as a large jar. Floating around are all the different emotions you could possibly feel. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say there are two major categories of emotions: ones that feel upsetting and ones that feel “happier.” In our emotion jar, we have every single feeling under the sun. The size of each emotion—and therefore the space it takes up in the jar at any given moment—is constantly changing. Now, remember: our bodies have an innate alarm system and are constantly scanning for danger before anything else. When we aren’t able to cope with emotions like disappointment, frustration, envy, and sadness—when they take up all the space in the emotion jar—our bodies initiate a stress response.

And it’s not just the difficult feelings themselves that prompt our bodies to feel unsafe. We also feel distress over having distress, or experience fear of fear. In other words (assuming there’s no actual physical threat, but simply the “threat” of uncomfortable, overwhelming emotions), as we start thinking, “Ah! I need to make this feeling go away right now,” the distress grows and grows, not as a reaction to the original experience, but because we believe these negative emotions are wrong, bad, scary, or too much. Ultimately, this is how anxiety takes hold within a person. Anxiety is the intolerance of discomfort. It’s the experience of not wanting to be in your body, the idea that you should be feeling differently in that specific moment. And this isn’t a product of “being a downer” or “seeing the glass as half-empty”; i...

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.

stress + coping = internal experience

But in reality, resilience has nothing to do with successful outcomes. If we all knew we’d be successful, there’d be no need to flex our “Come on, I can stick with it!” muscles. 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.

But for me, more powerful than knowing exactly what to say to my kids in a difficult moment is coming back to a general goal or principle. So if our general goal is to support and not solve, or tolerate and not escape, then to build resilience in our kids, we should be guided by one question: am I helping my kid tolerate and work through this distress, or am I encouraging my child to avoid and beeline out of the distress? We want the first, not the second.

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.

the more we emphasize our children’s happiness and “feeling better,” the more we set up them up for an adulthood of anxiety. Setting happiness as the goal compels us to solve our kids’ problems rather than equip them to solve their own. We live in a goal-oriented society, so in order to make our kids happy and encourage their “success,” we often minimize or eliminate their disappointments in favor of providing immediate wins. We take them out of struggle and place them into triumph, out of an uncomfortable feeling and into a more pleasant one.

When we tell our kids, “I just want you to be happy,” we are telling them they need to get out of distress and into comfort. When our daughter says, “All the other kids run faster than me,” we remind her that she is excellent at math; when our son seems sad and says, “I wasn’t invited to Anuj’s birthday party,” we convince him that the party had to be small and that Anuj does, in fact, really like him. We think we are helping, but what our child hears is, “I should not feel upset. When I feel uncomfortable, my job is to make my way into comfort as soon as possible.”

You are the architect of your child’s resilience, and that is the ultimate gift you can give them. After all, successfully managing life’s many challenges is a person’s most reliable path to happiness.