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

by Becky Kennedy

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

I often remind myself that kids respond to the version of themselves that parents reflect back to them and act accordingly. When we tell our kids that they’re selfish, they act in their own interest. When we tell our son that his sister has much better manners than he does, guess what? The rudeness continues. But the opposite is true as well. When we tell our kids, “You’re a good kid having a hard time . . . I’m here, I’m right here with you,” they are more likely to have empathy for their own struggles, which helps them regulate and make better decisions.

This idea underlies so much of my parenting advice: We don’t have to choose between two supposedly oppositional realities. We can avoid punishment and see improved behavior, we can parent with a firm set of expectations and still be playful, we can create and enforce boundaries and show our love, we can take care of ourselves and our children. And similarly, we can do what’s right for our family and our kids can be upset; we can say no and care about our kids’ disappointment.

Well, to put it simply: 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).

In this two-story-house analogy, the parent is, basically, a staircase. Their primary function is to start linking a child’s downstairs brain (overwhelming feelings) to their upstairs brain (self-awareness, regulation, planning, decision-making). Knowing your job is fundamental to this goal. 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.

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. In the case of Reina and Kai, a productive intervention might have looked like their mother stepping between them, moving the figures from Reina’s reach, and saying, “I won’t let you throw these toys.”

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. Validation sounds like this: “You’re upset, that’s real, I see that.” Invalidation, or the act of dismissing someone else’s experience or truth, would sound like this: “There’s no reason to be so upset, you’re so sensitive, come on!”

When we receive validation from others, we start to regulate our own experience because we “borrow” someone’s communication of realness; when we receive invalidation, we almost always get further dysregulated and escalated, because now we have the experience of being told we are not real inside. Very few things feel as awful as this.

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”).

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.

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.

As we know, we have to feel good inside in order to change. 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.

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.

Furthermore, a 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. Early childhood experiences dictate what feelings are manageable and permissible, versus which are “too much” or “wrong.”

The type of attachment that is formed impacts that child’s internal working model—the thoughts, memories, beliefs, expectations, emotions, and behaviors that influence how they interact with themselves and others, and what types of relationships they seek out in later years. Internal working models are based on what a child learns, through personal interactions, about their caregiver’s responsiveness, availability, consistency, repair, and reactivity. Children filter our interactions with them based on a handful of questions: Am I lovable and good and desirable to be around? Will I be seen and heard? What can I expect of others when I am upset? What can I expect of others when I am overwhelmed? What can I expect of others when we disagree?

“I don’t have to teach my kid how to put his shirt on smoothly . . . I need to teach my kid how to tolerate when it doesn’t go on right.