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

by Becky Kennedy

“What’s wrong with my child and can you fix them?” to “What is my child struggling with and what’s my role in helping them?”

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.

It turns out, switching our parenting

mindset from “consequences” to “connection” does not have to mean ceding family control to our children.

Providing a safe space to try and fail without worrying they’ll be seen as “bad” is what will allow your children to learn and grow, and to ultimately feel more connected to you.

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?”

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

Choosing the most generous interpretation of your child’s behavior does not mean you are “being easy” on them, but rather 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.

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.” It rests on the assumption that there is only one correct viewpoint. When we seek to convince someone, we essentially say, “You’re wrong. You are mis-perceiving, mis-remembering, mis-feeling, mis-experiencing. Let me explain to you why I am correct and then you’ll see the light and come around.” 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.

When you’re in “one thing is true” mode, you’re judgmental of and reactive to someone else’s experience, because it feels like an assault on your own truth. As a result, you will seek to prove your own point of view, which in turn makes the other person defensive, because they need to uphold the realness of their experience.

Multiplicity is what allows a person to recognize that I can love my kids and crave alone time; I can be grateful to have a roof over my head and feel jealous of those who have more childcare support; I can be a good parent and yell at my kid sometimes.

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.

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.

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

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!” Remember, all human beings—kids and adults—have a profound need to feel seen in who they are, and at any given moment, who we are is related to what we are feeling inside. 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.

And as kids strengthen that ability to regulate their feelings, those feelings are less likely to manifest as behavior:

If, for example, a young girl is constantly told to “not be so sensitive,” she will learn early on that her feelings are “wrong” and push people away. If a father repeatedly tells his son to stop crying, that son will associate vulnerability with rejection, even if, later in life, he can’t explicitly recall those memories. Furthermore,

Behavior: A child is hesitant to join a birthday party, clinging to his mom. Parent Response #1: “You know everyone here. Come on! There’s nothing to be worried about!” Attachment Lesson #1: I can’t trust my feelings because they’re ridiculous and overblown. Other people know better than I do how I should feel. Parent Response #2: “Something about this feels tricky. I believe you. Take your time. You’ll know when you’re ready.” Attachment Lesson #2: I can trust my feelings. I’m allowed to feel cautious. I know what I am feeling and I can expect other people to respect and support me.

Generally speaking, relationships with parents that include responsiveness, warmth, predictability, and repair when things feel bad set a child up to have a secure base. 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

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

In doing so, we miss something critical: that we can always layer on a new experience, and that new experience will change the ending to that chapter.

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

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”)

“Good parents don’t get it right all the time. Good parents repair.”

Resilience, in many ways, is our ability to experience a wide range of emotions and still feel like ourselves. Resilience

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.

am I helping my kid tolerate and work through this distress, or am I encouraging my child to avoid and beeline out of the distress? We want the first, not the second.

For years, most parents have been fed a model of parenting that is very behavior-first. Sticker charts, rewards, praise, ignoring, time-outs . . . these are all behavior modification methods that focus on the question “How do we change behavior?”

we miss the opportunity to see our kids as people rather than a collection of behaviors.

The behavior is only what’s on the surface; what matters is the person who does the behaving . . . and why she does so.”

Traditional discipline, he explains, can temporarily “change behavior, but [it] cannot help people to grow.”

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.

Now, please note: I am not a proponent of unnecessarily scaring children. Quite the opposite. I’m a proponent of empowering children, and empowerment often comes from learning how to cope with stress. This requires having a parent who is willing to approach rather than avoid the truth.

when parents struggle with their kids, it almost always boils down to one of two problems: children don’t feel as connected to their parents as they want to, or children have some struggle or unmet need they feel alone with.

But note, behavior comes last. We cannot start there. We must start with connection.

But we cannot encourage subservience and compliance in our kids when they’re young and expect confidence and assertiveness when they’re older.

“My job is to keep my body calm and my child safe . . . not to end the tantrum.”

Don’t try to teach or lecture or build new skills with your kid in these explosive moments; containment is the only goal.

Remind yourself, your job is to slow down the situation so your kids can regulate their bodies and have access to their own problem-solving skills; your job isn’t to solve this as quickly as possible.

Seeing the lie as a wish allows us to feel on the same team as our child instead of seeing them as the enemy.

Anxiety can only be effectively managed by increasing our tolerance for it, allowing it to exist, and understanding its purpose.

Let’s say your child worries at night that you won’t be there in the morning, despite the fact that you’ve never left him without notice. Put logic to the side and “jump in”: say something like, “When you go to bed, you have a big worry that I won’t be there in the morning, huh? Ugh, that is such a scary thought . . .” (Pulling out might have sounded like, “Sweetie. There’s nothing to worry about, I have never left without telling you!”)

When we label kids, saying things like “Oh, she’s shy” or “He never likes to talk to grown-ups, he’s really reserved,” we lock them into roles with a type of rigidity that makes growth difficult.

Tears operate in our attachment system as a signal that we need emotional support and connection from others.