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

by Becky Kennedy

What do I recommend? First and foremost, an understanding that behaviors are only the tip of the iceberg, and that below the surface is a child’s entire internal world, just begging to be understood.

Here’s the thing I realized: these “evidence-based” approaches were built on principles of behaviorism, a theory of learning that focuses on observable actions rather than non-observable mental states like feelings and thoughts and urges.

Behaviorism privileges shaping behavior above understanding behavior. It sees behavior as the whole picture rather than an expression of underlying unmet needs.

It turns out, switching our parenting mindset from “consequences” to “connection” does not have to mean ceding family control to our children.

With the approach offered in this book, parents can do better on the outside and feel better on the inside. They can strengthen their relationship with their child and see improved behavior and cooperation.

And when I say “good inside,” I mean that we all, at our core, are compassionate, loving, and generous. The principle of internal goodness drives all of my work—I hold the belief that kids and parents are good inside, which allows me to be curious about the “why” of their bad behaviors.

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.

And as long as you believe they are capable, you can show them the way. This type of leadership is what every child craves—someone they can trust to steer them down the right path.

It’s easy—reflexive, even—to default to a less generous view, for two main reasons: First, we are evolutionarily wired with a negativity bias, meaning we pay closer attention to what’s difficult with our kids (or with ourselves, our partners, even the world at large) than to what is working well. Second, our experiences of our own childhoods influence how we perceive and respond to our kids’ behavior. So many of us had parents who led with judgment rather than curiosity, criticism instead of understanding, punishment instead of discussion.

What if we saw behavior as an expression of needs, not identity?

maximizing attachment with our caregivers is the primary goal for young, helpless children.

we quickly begin to embrace whatever gets us love and attention, and shut down and label as “bad” any parts that get rejected, criticized, or invalidated.

Underneath “bad behavior” is always a good child. And yet, when parents chronically shut down a behavior harshly without recognizing the good kid underneath, a child internalizes that they are bad.

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.” You are not at fault for your intergenerational patterns.

“What is my most generous interpretation of what just happened?”

Finding the MGI teaches parents to attend to what is going on inside of their child (big feelings, big worries, big urges, big sensations) rather than what is going on outside of their child (big words, or sometimes big actions).

We orient them to their internal experience, which includes thoughts, feelings, sensations, urges, memories, and images. Self-regulation skills rely on the ability to recognize internal experience, so by focusing on what’s inside rather than what’s outside, we are building in our children the foundation of healthy coping.

you are framing their behavior in a way that will help them build critical emotion regulation skills for their future—and you’re preserving your connection and close relationship along the way.

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.

There’s nothing more valuable than learning to find our goodness under our struggles, because this leads to an increased capacity to reflect and change.

All good decisions start with feeling secure in ourselves and in our environment, and nothing feels more secure than being recognized for the good people we truly are.

This idea of multiplicity—the ability to accept multiple realities at once—is critical to healthy relationships.

Building strong connections relies on the assumption that no one is right in the absolute, because understanding, not convincing, is what makes people feel secure in a relationship.

When we approach someone with the goal of understanding, we accept that there isn’t one correct interpretation of a set of facts, but rather multiple experiences and viewpoints. Understanding has one goal: connection.

What’s the opposite of understanding? For this argument’s sake, it’s convincing. Convincing is the attempt to prove a singular reality—to prove that “only one thing is true.” Convincing is an attempt to be “right” and, as a result, make the other person “wrong.”

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.

By contrast, when we’re in “two things are true” mode, we are curious about and accepting of someone else’s experience, and it feels like an opportunity to get to know someone better. We approach others with openness, and so they put down their defenses. Both parties feel seen and heard, and we have an opportunity to deepen connection.

Our ability to experience many seemingly oppositional thoughts and feelings at once—to know that you can experience several truths simultaneously—is key to our mental health.

“Health is the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them—the capacity to feel like one self while being many.”

At our core, we all want someone else to acknowledge our experience, our feelings, and our truths. When we feel seen by others, we can manage our disappointment, and we feel safe and good enough inside to consider someone else’s perspective.

I may have a valid reason for doing something . . . and also someone else has a valid emotional reaction. Both are true.

You don’t have to choose between firm decisions and loving validation.

There’s no trade-off between doing what feels right to you and acknowledging the very real experience of your child. Both can be true.

once we return to the idea that two things are true, we can switch from a me-versus-you mentality to a me-and-you-against-a-problem mentality.

systems break down when members are confused about their roles or when they start impinging on other people’s functions.

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.

Our children need us to set firm (that doesn’t have to mean scary!) boundaries, because they need to know that we can keep them safe when they are developmentally incapable of doing so themselves.

children are more able to experience strong feelings than they are to regulate those feelings, and the gap between experiencing strong feelings and regulating those feelings comes out as dysregulated behavior (think hitting, kicking, screaming).

When kids are overwhelmed with emotion and unable to regulate and make good decisions, this is developmentally normal.

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.

When parents struggle to set boundaries or regulate their own strong emotions, it’s as if a fire is burning and we’ve opened up all the doors, poured on extra fuel, and spread the fire through the house. Containment first. Boundaries first.

Boundaries are not what we tell kids not to do; boundaries are what we tell kids we will do.

Boundaries embody your authority as a parent and don’t require your child to do anything.

we cannot control someone else—we can only control ourselves. And when we ask our child to do our job for us, they are more likely to get further dysregulated, because we are essentially saying, “I see that you’re out of control.

I don’t know what to do here, so I’m going to put you in charge and ask you to get yourself back in control.” This is terrifying for a child, because when she is out of control, she needs an adult who can provide a safe, sturdy, firm boundary; this boundary is a form of love. It’s a way of saying, “I know you’re good inside and you’re just having a hard, out-of-control time. I will be the container you need, I will stop you from continuing to act in this way, I will protect you from your own dysregulation taking over.”

Validation is the process of seeing someone else’s emotional experience as real and true, rather than seeing someone else’s emotional experience as something we want to convince them out of or logic them away from.

Empathy, the second part of a parent’s emotional caretaking job, refers to our ability to understand and relate to the feelings of another person, and our desire to do that comes from the assumption that someone else’s feelings are in fact valid. So, validation comes first (“My child is having a real emotional experience”) and empathy second (“I can try to understand and connect with these feelings in my child, not make them go away”).

While empathy and validation certainly make kids feel good inside, their functions actually go much deeper. One of the primary goals of childhood is to build healthy emotion regulation skills: to develop ways to have feelings and manage them, to learn how to find yourself amid feelings and thoughts and urges, rather than have feelings and thoughts and urges overtake you.

Boundaries show our kids that even the biggest emotions won’t spiral out of control forever. 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.