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

by Becky Kennedy

Behaviorism privileges shaping behavior above understanding behavior. It sees behavior as the whole picture rather than an expression of underlying unmet needs. This is why, I realized, these “evidence-based” approaches felt so bad to me—they confused the signal (what was really going on for a child) with the noise (behavior). After all, our goal is not to shape behavior. Our goal is to raise humans.

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.

because 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.

Place your hand on your heart and deliver yourself this important message: “I am here because I want to change. I want to be the pivot point in my intergenerational family patterns. I want to start something different: 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.”

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

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.

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.”

The first goal is to re-find your “two things are true” mentality, because as soon as we feel truly seen in our experience and our desires, we can let our guard down—after all, as humans, we are less invested in any specific decision than we are in feeling seen. This is almost always what matters most.

Parent: Takes a deep breath. Says to self, “My child is upset inside. His outside behavior is not a true indication of how he feels about me. He’s a good kid having a hard time.” Then says aloud: “I do not appreciate that language . . . you must be really upset, maybe about some other things too, to be talking to me like this. I need a moment to calm my body . . . maybe you do too . . . then let’s talk.”

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.

Their primary function is to start linking a child’s downstairs brain (overwhelming feelings) to their upstairs brain (self-awareness, regulation, planning, decision-making).

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

these pleas won’t be successful. Why? Because we cannot control someone else—we can only control ourselves.

feelings come out in behavior only when those feelings are unmanageable inside, when they are too big to regulate and contain.

Before they can talk, children learn, based on interactions with their parents, what feels acceptable or shameful, manageable or overwhelming. In this way, our “memories” from early childhood are in fact more powerful than the memories we form in our later years; the way parents interact with kids in their early years forms the blueprint they take with them into the world.

The first years of life set the stage for the next hundred.

We may think we’re asking our kids to end screen time or saying no to a later bedtime, but children don’t take in these specifics; they take in whether it’s safe, in any given relationship, to have the desires and feelings that lead to difficult moments.

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 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.”