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

by Becky Kennedy

Behavior is never “the story,” but rather it’s a clue to the bigger story begging to be addressed.

his insecurity in his world and his fear that the important things in his life may suddenly be taken from him. When this happens, we intervene differently. We may still remove the toy from our child and return it to the baby, but then we’ll connect with this child, saying something like, “Ugh, it’s so hard to have a new baby in the family!” And now that we understand what’s going on beneath the surface, we can give our child more one-on-one time or explore these themes in pretend play. (“Dump Truck wants to go grab that toy from his new sister Bulldozer! Hmm . . . I wonder what we can do here . . . Let’s help Dump make a better decision.”) After all, this was never about the toy at all—it was about your son’s massive world shift and his need for his parents to affirm his safety.

Now, sixteen years later, this couple’s son was essentially saying: “I don’t care about your sticker charts and your punishments. I’m bigger now, and you can’t throw me in a time-out. I’m no longer scared of you, and you have no leverage because there is nothing connecting us.”

“connection capital” a lot. It refers to the reserve of positive feelings we hopefully build up with our children, which we can pull from in times of struggle or when the relationship between us gets strained.

“I wish I had thought of all this earlier,” the father told me about a year into our work together. “So many professionals advised us to use the system of time-outs and punishments and rewards, and it all seemed so logical. And they quoted impressive data, like a ninety percent reduction in difficult behavior. Who wouldn’t want that? But I didn’t see the bigger picture. We don’t want to ‘craft our child’s behavior’ . . . we want to help our son develop into a good person. We want to understand him, to help him with the things that feel bad to him. It never occurred to me that our earlier approach was actually making our problems worse. This is so important for parents to know.”

If your child has stopped snatching toys but still worries that his baby sister is going to upend his whole world, you haven’t really helped him, you’ve only helped yourself—and only temporarily, until the feelings that motivated the behavior, now larger because they haven’t been seen or helped, pop up somewhere else.

Here are some questions to get you started, to ask yourself after any tough moment:

What is my most generous interpretation (MGI) of my child’s behavior? What was going on for my child in that moment? What was my child feeling right before that behavior emerged? What urge did my child have a hard time regulating?

What is a parallel situation in my life? And if I did something similar, what might I have been struggling with in that moment? What does my child feel I don’t understand about them? If I remember that my child is a good kid having a hard time . . . what are they having a hard t...

You’ve just told your four-year-old son that you need him to be quiet while you finish a work call. But instead of being quiet, he’s throwing items from your desk and screaming. When your work call ends, instead of reprimanding your son, you remind yourself that his behavior is a window and come up with your MGI: your child really wanted your attention, felt unseen, and couldn’t manage these feelings in his young body. You reflect on a time you wanted your partner’s attention when he was scrolling on his phone, and how annoyed you felt and how you ended up screaming at him—not entirely different from what happened between you and your child! After coming to this realization, you say to your son, “It was really hard to stay quiet while I was on my call. I know it feels bad when we’re playing and suddenly I have to get on the phone. I understand that. In a little bit, let’s practice this moment again, and maybe we can come up with a secret handshake for when I have to pick up a call so you know I’m still paying attention to you.”

But rather than responding by reducing the connection after these behaviors, I’d think about increasing the connection outside of these behaviors. Behavioral issues are often a call for attention or connection—if those needs are met, that cry for help is no longer necessary. This is why a bad behavior is rarely “fixed” in that behavior’s immediate aftermath. It takes ongoing connection to really move the needle, and kids in difficult behavioral cycles need more proactive attention, more one-on-one time, more assurance that they are seen and valued and have an identity outside of their acting out. Increased connection might mean scheduling ten minutes of distraction-free time every day (I call this Play No Phone, or PNP, Time—more on that in a bit) or a “Hey, want to grab some ice cream? We could use a special treat!”

What’s happening here? Is there a common underlying struggle for each of these kids? It may not seem immediately obvious, but in each of these scenarios—the refusal to apologize, the stubbornness, the lying—I see a child who is shutting down. These children are struggling to live in their painful realities—the reality of having stolen a sister’s lovie, the reality of struggling at math, the reality of wanting something for herself and not getting it. In each scenario, the parent described a child who felt guilty or humiliated or bad about something and then reacted in a dysregulated way in an attempt to avoid dealing with the guilt or bad feeling. This is the essence of shame—the experience of “I can’t be me right now, I can’t be feeling this way.”

shame activates the ultimate fear for a child, the idea “I am bad inside, I am unworthy, I am unlovable, I am unattachable . . . I will be all alone.”

But here’s what’s critical to understand about shame: it is an evolutionarily adaptive feeling. Being alone as a child is synonymous with being in danger, so shame works, within the attachment system, as a signal to a child to hide the part of them that does not successfully gain attachment. Shame feels so awful because it awakens our body to a painful but important piece of information: You will not get your needs met if you keep on being who you are right now. Instead, you will be met with rejection—often in the form of judgment, invalidation, ignoring, punishment, scolding, or time-outs—that feels like abandonment. Shame says: you must change course so you can feel safe and secure.

shame makes any situation more combustible. The next time you’re in a power struggle with your child, or you’re thinking, “I know parenting is hard, but does it have to be this explosive?” pay attention: shame is often what adds fuel to the fire.

Our goal as parents should be to notice when shame arises in our child, understand what situations bring it up, and see how it presents behaviorally. After that, we want to develop shame reduction, which enables us to help our children feel safe and secure again. Detect first, reduce second.

Let’s revisit the situation with the child who hid her sister’s lovie and refused to own up to it or apologize despite her sister’s obvious distress. Refusal to apologize is a classic example of shame: it presents as cold and unempathic when, in fact, in these moments, a child is overwhelmed with “badness” and freezes up. She cannot apologize because to do so she’d have to “see” herself as the person who just did something awful, and she’d have to face the unwanted feeling of being unlovable to others. (“No one would want to love or take care of a kid who is so awful....

Whenever your child seems “stuck,” consider that she might be in a moment of shame, and when you see that shame pop up, when you detect it, the key is to take pause. When a child is overwhelmed with shame, we must be willing to put our original “goal”—to elicit an apology, to inspire gratitude, to prompt an honest answer—to the side and instead focus solely on reducing the shame.

Here’s an intervention that doesn’t help to reduce shame: “Irha, you have to say sorry. It’s a simple word! You’re making the situation worse! How could you care so little about your sister? COME ON!” Here, Irha is put in the “bad kid” role and spirals further into her badness, and further into her frozen shame state.

Here’s an intervention that’s aimed at shame detection and reduction: “Hmm . . . it’s hard to find your ‘I’m sorry’ voice. I have times like that too. I’ll use it for you before you find it again.” Then you, the parent, go to your other child and say, “I’m sorry I took your lovie. I know that was upsetting. Is there anything I can do to make it better?” And then—and this is key—no dart eyes, no lecture, no “See, that was easy!” Just trust—yes, TRUST—that this sank in and move on. Maybe later in the day, when you see that shame is no longer present (you’ll notice because your child is back to her playful self), you can say something like, “Apologizing is hard. It’s e...

Then pause and see what your daughter says. But note that none of this reflection or learning or growth is possible when shame is present. We have to be willing to pause our agenda, to pause what feels “fair,” when a child is overwhelmed with shame. We have to shift from a goal of correcting behavior to a goal of helping our child feel good inside, showing our child her lovability and worth, affirming ...

We don’t have to train them to be kind. We have to help them manage some of the barriers to kindness that can look, on the surface, like harsh behavior but that, in reality, emerge to protect a child. Working to reduce shame and, in this situation, modeling (and definitely not forcing) an apology isn’t an intervention I recommend because it “feels better” to a child; it’s an intervention I recommend because it gives a child the highest likelihood of eventually reflecting on wrongdoing and producing an apology on her own.

But the good news is that the more you work to reduce shame and increase connection where you can, the more your child will be equipped to handle those shaming moments that are outside your sphere of influence.

What parts of you did you have to learn to “put away”? How does this impact you now? How does your child trigger this shutdown response in you? What parts of you, still to this day, need recognition, compassion, and permission to exist?

“It seems that the underlying theme of everything you talk about is connection. Connection first, everything else second. My son says, ‘I hate you!’—I can still connect first to what’s happening inside. My daughter isn’t listening to me—I can connect with her having a hard time listening instead of trying to force her to comply, which of course never works anyway. Even my husband, when he is mad at me about something, I can connect to what he’s saying before defending myself. And with myself! No matter what I’m feeling or thinking, it never becomes bad or overwhelming if I can add my own connection or connection with others to it. ‘Connection first’ has helped me in every area of my family life.”

Connection is the opposite of shame. It is the antidote to shame. Shame is a warning sign of aloneness, danger, and badness; connection is a sign of presence, safety, and goodness. Now, to be clear, connection does not mean approval. Approval is usually about a specific behavior; connection is about our relationship with the person underneath the behavior. And that’s another reason why connection with our children in their difficult moments does not “reinforce” bad behavior: shame has never been a motivator of positive behavior change at any time, in any place, for any type of person.

Shame is sticky; it stagnates us. Connection...

allows for mo...

“unformulated experience.”* It’s basically the feeling that something’s not right, without a clear explanation of what’s happening. Unformulated experience is terrifying to a child, because that “something’s not right” feeling free-floats around the body without an anchor of safety. Plus, when kids are left to make sense of a scary change on their own, they usually rely on the methods that give them control: self-blame (“I must have done something to cause this. I’m bad, I’m too much”) and self-doubt (“I must have misunderstood the tension around me. I am not such a good feeler of things. If something really was different, my parents would explain it to me”).

When I find myself in a “tell the truth” situation with my own kids, I often start with these words: “________ happened. You were right to notice that.” This is critical. Our children are deep sensors and perceivers of their environment.

This approach is equally important in situations a child might not visibly react to. Imagine you and your partner are arguing in the kitchen while your child is eating lunch. Things escalate to the point of loud voices, nasty words, and visibly angry facial expressions. Naming what’s true might sound like, “Papa and I just used very loud voices. You were right to notice that.” Would I say this even if my child kept eating his lunch, looking as if he didn’t need an explanation? I absolutely would. I know that children are wired to notice and perceive, so I would assume that even if my child appeared calm, feelings of fear would be living inside his body and I wouldn’t want him to be alone with them. Keep in mind, the beginning of my “loud voices” explanation was quite simple—I mentioned the voices and I validated my child’s perceptions. This is really important. Telling the truth often involves delivering the simplest, most straightforward version of events. I often have to remind myself: “Only say what happened. Name what’s true, and nothing more complicated.” This allows me to give my child what he needs in the moment: my presence + a story to understand. From there, depending on the situation, I might do more. I might assure my child that he wasn’t at fault (especially powerful when kids notice your big emotions or an argument between adults) or brainstorm a mantra to speak to my child’s worry (this might be useful in the vacuum example: “That is loud, I am safe. That is...

One reason why it’s so necessary to confirm our children’s perceptions is that when we don’t name what’s true, when we assume, “That wasn’t a big deal,” or “He’s so young, I’m sure he didn’t even notice,” our children learn to doubt their perceptions. They might think, “Huh, I guess there wasn’t anything that changed in my environment, I guess I was wrong,” and, over time, that message sticks. It’s as if we’re training our kids to tune out what’s happening around them, and that training will stick with them into adolescence and adulthood. Want your son to stand up to his friends and resist peer pressure? In order to say, “Hey, guys, this doesn’t feel right. I’m not doing this,” a child needs to believe in his perceptions of his environment and in his own feelings. Want your daughter to stand up for herself when she’s uncomfortable in a hookup or dating scenario? If, when she was a child, her parents validated her perceptions and wired her for self-trust, she’ll be more inclined to say, “No, I’m not comfortable with that,” or “Stop. I don’t like that.”

When I don’t have clear answers, I often use a “Here’s what I don’t know and here’s what I do know” formula.

This might sound like, “You’re worried about getting your blood drawn today. Exactly how long it will take and how much it will hurt, I don’t know. What I do know is that it will hurt, and then it will stop hurting at some point. I will be with you the whole time, and we’ll get through it together.” Let’s take something bigger. Maybe you tell your child that his grandmother has cancer. He asks, “But is she going to be okay? Is she going to get all better?” Telling the truth about “I don’t know” would sound like this: “What a great question. I hope she gets better, sweetie. And the truth is that . . . we don’t know. We don’t know if she will get better. What I do know is that I will tell you the truth, even if it feels uncomfortable, and that I am here for you with all the feelings you have about this.”

In reality, however, selfless parenting doesn’t help anyone—it doesn’t help the parents, who become depleted and resentful when they give so much of themselves without filling their own cups, and it doesn’t help kids, who absolutely notice their parents’ depletion and resentment and might feel guilty, anxious, or insecure in response.

“Over the course of my earlier years, it must have been adaptive to be vigilant about the needs of others, and this vigilance overpowered my attunement to my own needs.”

Remember, we cannot pour energy into our kids if we have no energy to give. We cannot exude patience if we don’t show ourselves patience. We cannot change externally until we have rewired internally. The quality of our relationships with others is only as good as the quality of the relationship we have with ourselves.

Sit comfortably on a chair with your legs uncrossed, your feet on the ground, and your back upright. Close your eyes or focus softly on a spot on the ground. Place one hand on your belly and the other on your chest. Imagine a cup of hot cocoa in front of you. Breathe in slowly to smell your hot chocolate. Breathe out so slowly that you don’t blow off any marshmallows. You might imagine that you’re holding a straw between your upper and lower lip; this helps us slow down the out-breath. Long out-breaths are key to calming down. Repeat five to ten times. It’s normal for your thoughts to distract you. Label the thoughts as they come—say to yourself, “Hi, thought,” or “Hi, worry,” or “Hi, planning”—and then return to your next in-breath.

Acknowledge: Label your feelings. For example: “This moment feels hard!” or “Today was rough!” or “I’m noticing anxiety right now,” or “My chest feels tight and my heart is racing.” Validate: Respect your feelings enough to assume they aren’t lying to you. Now tell yourself a story about why your feelings make sense. This might sound like: “I’m exhausted. Caring for two kids and cooking dinner while they argue with each other . . . it makes sense that this feels hard.” Or, “My boss yelled at me and then my friend canceled on dinner plans; it makes sense this day feels rough.” Or, “I have so much going on, so much to do, and my brain is overloaded with tasks. It makes sense my body feels anxious and uptight.” Reminding ourselves that our sensations and experiences “make sense” helps us feel more at home in our own bodies, so try using this phrase in your self-talk. Permit: Give yourself permission to have your feeling in whatever way it’s showing up. I know this sounds silly, but it’s so powerful. Tell yourself, out loud or internally, “I have full permission to feel like life is hard,” or “I’m allowed to feel exactly as I do,” or “It’s okay to feel like parenting is totally unenjoyable right now.” Now, remember: we can permit our anger and still remind ourselves to use a calm voice; we can permit our frustration and still remind ourselves to gaze kindly at our kids.

“I am allowed to have things for myself even if they inconvenience others.”

We need cooperation from others, but not approval.

Someone else’s distress shouldn’t be a reason why I can’t meet my own needs. Understanding and accepting this allows me to, say, go for a walk on my own without guilt. If my partner seems annoyed, I try to greet that feeling with an “Ugh, I know, it’s hard to be with the kids on your own, I hear that,” and still walk out the door.

often the only way we get our needs met is by simultaneously tolerating others’ distress

Here’s a list of small self-care activities to get you started: Drink one glass of water in the morning Meditate for two minutes Drink your coffee while it’s hot Cook yourself a legitimate breakfast Listen to calming music Read a few pages of a book Have a good cry Take five hot cocoa breaths while seated Rest in child’s pose Color Talk to a friend Brush your hair

Journal Doing one thing for ourselves often depends on our ability to say no to others who are, at that exact moment, asking us for something. Below are some scripts for saying no that will make your “one thing for myself” time more successful: “Ah . . . no, that doesn’t work for me.” “No, I can’t.” “I appreciate your asking me. No, I’m not free.” “I am doing something for myself right now, so you have to wait a few moments.” “No, I cannot come right now. I know waiting is hard and I know you can figure out something to do before I get there.”

“Dr. Becky, we don’t know where to start,” they said. “Our house is a mess. There’s so much yelling, and we’re always making empty threats because we don’t know what else to do. Our kids don’t listen to us, and it feels like we’re in an endless cycle of tantrums with our four-year-old and rudeness with our seven-year-old. Heston, our oldest, is suddenly saying he’s stupid and has no friends, and whenever we try to talk to him about it he says we don’t understand and slams his bedroom door. Izzy, our four-year-old, is hysterical every morning when we drop her at preschool. It’s so draining and such an awful way to start the day. PLEASE HELP!” I took a breath. “First of all, I’m so glad you’re here,” I said. “Second of all, I am going to solve all of that. Every single thing.” They laughed. I smiled. I started again. “Okay, that’s not true. We aren’t going to solve any of it, at least not today. Here’s the thing: we can’t change behavior until we build connection, so our first interventions need to focus on that. The real problem here isn’t any of the specific issues you named—it’s not the tantrums or the back talk or the door slamming or drop-off crying. The real problem, it seems, is that your family system is out of balance. No one feels secure or safe.”

It’s also important to keep in mind that connection capital flows two ways. Like a bank account, we draw from our connection capital regularly. Parents spend connection capital when we ask kids to clean their rooms, when we tell them we need a few minutes for an unexpected work call, when we say, “Time to leave, sweetie,” or “Screen time is over.” Parents are big connection capital spenders, because we often have to ask kids to do things they don’t want to do and to respect our rules when they’d rather not. This means that parents need to be even bigger connection-builders. We need a strong reserve to draw from so that we don’t run out of funds.

Trying to connect in the heat of the moment is not especially effective, because our bodies don’t learn well when they’re in fight-or-flight mode.

Play No Phone (PNP) Time is the parenting strategy I recommend most often. When it comes to bang for your buck, nothing else even comes close.

Our kids want our full attention more than anything else. Our attention communicates that they are safe, important, valuable, loved. And yet, our devices are powerful magnets for our attention, and our kids feel that distraction. To be clear, I’m not arguing against technology or using devices. I’m suggesting that we create boundaries around devices—not only for our kids but for ourselves. We need boundaries around our device use so that we can help ourselves to give our kids our full attention. Not all the time. But definitely some of the time.