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

by Becky Kennedy

There is nothing in this book as important as this principle—it is the foundation for all that’s to come, because as soon as we tell ourselves, “Okay, slow down . . . I’m good inside . . . my kid is good inside too . . . ,” we intervene differently than we would if we allowed our frustration and anger to dictate our decisions.

let me be clear: seeing your child as good inside does not excuse bad behavior or lead to permissive parenting.

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.

Assuming goodness enables you to be the sturdy leader of your family, because when you’re confident in your child’s goodness, you believe in their ability to behave “well” and do the right thing.

many parents see behavior as the measure of who our kids are, rather than using behavior as a clue to what our kids might need.

how we talk to ourselves when we are struggling inside—the self-talk of “Don’t be so sensitive” or “I’m overreacting” or “I’m so dumb,” or, alternatively, “I’m trying my best” or “I simply want to feel seen”—is based on how our parents spoke to or treated us in our times of struggle.

Finding the good inside can often come from asking ourselves one simple question: “What is my most generous interpretation of what just happened?”

“Wow, those are big words, let me take a breath . . . I hear how upset you are. Tell me more.” I like option 4, because it’s the intervention that makes sense after considering the most generous interpretation of my child’s behavior.

focusing on a child’s impact on us sets the stage for codependence, not regulation or empathy.)

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.

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. And when it comes to jobs, we all have to stay in our lanes. Our kids should not dictate our boundaries and we should not dictate their feelings.

remind yourself: “I am doing my job of keeping my child safe. My child is doing their job of expressing feelings. We are both doing what we need to do. I can handle this.”

Empathy comes from our ability to be curious: it allows us to explore our child’s emotional experience from a place of learning, not judgment.

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. There’s a deep and critical paradox here: The more we can rely on a parent, the more curious and explorative we can be. The more we trust in our secure relationship with our parent, the more secure we are with ourselves.

The more children feel they can depend on a parent, the more independent they can be.

One recent study confirmed this effect in the context of parenting: it examined the impact of parenting programs aimed at two-year-olds through eleven-year-olds, and found that as long as the interventions were adapted to the age of the particular child, parenting programs had equal effectiveness. They were just as impactful in building new skills for older children as they were for toddlers. It’s an incredibly hopeful conclusion, and a good one to hold on to when we worry about the “damage” we’ve caused.

two ways to interpret this data. The first is, “Oh no, I’m messing up my kid because I’m messed up. I’m the worst!” But there’s another, more optimistic and encouraging interpretation: “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!”

It’s not your fault that your child is struggling. But it is your responsibility, as the adults in the family system, to change the environment so that your child can learn and grow and thrive.

The key element is connection after disconnection—a parent’s calm and compassionate presence after a moment marked by dysregulated reactivity.

some baseline to-dos: 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.

when we focus on happiness, we ignore all the other emotions that will inevitably come up throughout our kids’ lives, which means we aren’t teaching them how to cope with those emotions. And, again, how we teach our kids—through our interactions with them—to relate to pain or hardship will impact how they think about themselves and their troubles for decades to come.

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.

So how do we develop resilience in our kids? Psychologists Robert Brooks and Sam Goldstein, authors of The Handbook of Resilience in Children, found that the qualities children most need from their parents in order to develop resilience include: empathy, listening, accepting them for who they are, providing a safe and consistent presence, identifying their strengths, allowing for mistakes, helping them develop responsibility, and building problem-solving skills.

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.

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 even hard for me and I’m an adult!”

inherent goodness: remember, our kids are good inside. 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.

Connection First

Connection is opening; it allows for movement. Connection is when we show our kids, “It’s okay to be you right now. Even when you’re struggling, it’s okay to be you. I am here with you, as you are.”

Our ability to talk with our kids about important, vulnerable, hard truths is dependent on our ability to tolerate the emotions that come up for us during these moments. Which is only one more reason why working on ourselves, as parents, is more critical than any single parenting intervention; the more we get to know our own circuitry, learn to tolerate and explore our own distress, and build coping skills for hard feelings, the more present we can be for our children.

Well, there’s a fancy term for this: “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.

Describe: “You’re building a tower,” or “You’re coloring with a red crayon.” Mimic: If your child is drawing a flower, grab your own piece of paper, sit near her, and draw your own flower. No need for any words. When you mirror, you show your child that you’re paying full attention and they are valuable and interesting to you. Reflective listening: When your child says, “I want to play trucks!” respond with, “You want to play trucks!” If your child says, “The pig wants to come into the barn,” say back, “That pig wants to go into the barn, huh?”

even if a child doesn’t bring it up, the memory is stored in the body), she now has a memory of a parent returning and helping her feel safe again. This is everything.

My oldest son made this point once: “Parents are always asking kids to stop doing something fun to do something less fun. That’s why kids don’t listen.” I think he’s right.

Imagine your child is twenty-five years old. Do you want your child to be able to say, “No, that’s not okay with me,” when someone asks her an inappropriate question? Do you want her to be able to ask for a raise? To be able to tell her partner, “I need you to talk to me more respectfully”? If we want our kids to be able to recognize their wants and needs as adults, then we need to start seeing tantrums as an essential part of their development.

These four words—“I won’t let you”—are critical for every parent’s toolbox. “I won’t let you” communicates that a parent is in charge, that a parent will stop a child from continuing to act in a way that is dysregulated and ultimately feels awful. Because we often forget, kids don’t feel good when they are out of control. They don’t enjoy experiencing their body as unable to make good and safe decisions, just as adults don’t enjoy watching ourselves behave in awful ways.

“We Don’t Do Fair, We Do Individual Needs”

when you ask your child if she broke the lamp, knowing full well that she was the one who tipped it over, and she says, “No, I was playing in my room,” your child may be coping with her guilt, or her fear of disappointing or enraging you in that moment, by entering into fantasy. We can look at this in two ways: that a child is “avoiding telling the truth” or that telling the truth feels so hard and scary that she slips into a world of pretend where she has control and can dictate an ending that feels better to her.

Now visualize your child in a small hole in the ground, with that hole representing the anxiety. Your child is in that discomfort. We want our children to feel like we are jumping into the hole with them, keeping them company—not trying to pull them out of it. When we jump into the hole with our kid, two powerful things happen: our child no longer feels alone and we show our child that this thing that feels so awful to them doesn’t feel so awful to us, because we are willing to join them.

Step 5: Create a mantra. For kids who struggle with anxiety, mantras can be very helpful in the moment. Whether spoken out loud or recited internally, a mantra focuses their attention on the calming words rather than the source of distress. Examples of mantras include, “It’s okay to be nervous. I can get through this,” “I can feel scared and brave at the same time,” and “I’m safe, my parents are near.” Work with your child to develop a mantra that feels good to them and encourage them to repeat it during scary moments.

parenting is an exercise in patience. It’s about seeing our kids for who they are and what they need as separate from who we are and what we need.

If you notice that your child’s shyness or hesitation or clinginess bothers you, remind yourself that a child’s willingness to not join the crowd is probably a trait you’ll value in her later on. Try to do a 180 on your interpretation of shyness, and experiment with telling yourself: “My child knows who he is and what is and isn’t comfortable, even in the face of others’ acting differently. How bold, how awesome, how confident!”

If we want our kids to develop frustration tolerance, we have to develop tolerance for their frustration. It’s an inconvenient truth, I know.

the most impactful thing we can do with our kids is to show up in a calm, regulated, non-rushed, non-blaming, non-outcome-focused way—both when they are performing difficult tasks and when they are witnessing us perform difficult tasks.

Here’s a quick summary of Satter’s framework: Parent’s job: decide what food is offered, where it is offered, when it is offered Child’s job: decide whether and how much to eat of what’s offered

Here’s what I believe is the most important idea around kids and food: minimizing anxiety around food is more important than consumption of food.

Serving dessert with dinner makes dessert less exciting. It exudes a message of trusting your child and sets him up to be less dessert focused over time. Other families I’ve worked with serve a “dessert” as an afternoon snack so that dinner isn’t linked with dessert at all.

Comments like, “You’re working so hard on that project,” or “I notice you’re using different colors in this drawing, tell me about this,” or “How’d you think to make that?”—these support the development of confidence, because instead of teaching your child to crave positive words from others, we teach them to notice what they’re doing and learn more about themself.

You can tell your kid, “You’re a good kid having a hard time,” during a difficult moment, or you can share this idea in the aftermath of a big tantrum. You might say, “Earlier today was tough. I know. You’re a good kid and you were having a hard time. I know that. I love you. I always will.”

You can also use this as a mantra for yourself, to stay calm when your child is struggling. “I have a good kid having a hard time, I have a good kid having a hard time.” Sometimes this is the best thing we can do for our kids—look at them lovingly and know we will help them through their struggles.