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

by Becky Kennedy

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.

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.

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.

When kids are overwhelmed with emotion and unable to regulate and make good decisions, this is developmentally normal. Exhausting and totally inconvenient for parents, yes, but normal.

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. Said another way: dependence and independence are not necessarily opposites, but rather, each force allows for the other—two things are true! The more children feel they can depend on a parent, the more independent they can be.

But for now, I want to offer 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.

So if our general goal is to support and not solve, or tolerate and not escape, then to build resilience in our kids, we should be guided by one question: 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.

the more we emphasize our children’s happiness and “feeling better,” the more we set up them up for an adulthood of anxiety.

It would be pretty wonderful if parenting was driven by this one goal: “I want my child to be able to cope with whatever the world throws her way. I want her to feel supported in distress when she’s younger so she can support herself when she’s older.”

When we sacrifice relationship building in favor of control tactics, our children may age, but in many ways, they developmentally remain toddlers, because they miss out on years of building the emotion regulation, coping skills, intrinsic motivation, and inhibition of desires that are necessary for life success. When we are busy exerting extrinsic control over our children’s external behavior, we sacrifice teaching these critical internal skills.

It’s time to change this pattern—but we can only do that when we accept that we cannot avoid someone else’s inconvenience or distress; it’s not our job to make sure someone else is happy, and it’s not someone else’s job to cheerlead us as we assert ourselves. We need cooperation from others, but not approval. I regularly remind myself that in order to get what I need, someone else might have to be inconvenienced or annoyed, and this is okay. Someone else’s distress shouldn’t be a reason why I can’t meet my own needs.

Taking a breath and remembering that often the only way we get our needs met is by simultaneously tolerating others’ distress helps prevent us from losing ourselves.

As I explained to my clients, 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.

Having a healthy amount of connection capital leads kids to feel confident, capable, safe, and worthy. And these positive feelings on the inside lead to “good” behavior on the outside—behavior like cooperation, flexibility, and regulation. So in order to create positive change, we have to first build connection, which will lead kids to feel better, which will then lead them to behave better.

Parents are big connection capital spenders, because we often have to ask kids to do things they don’t want to do and to respect our rules when they’d rather not. This means that parents need to be even bigger connection-builders. We need a strong reserve to draw from so that we don’t run out of funds.

Scripts for Sitting on Your Child’s Feeling Bench

“That sounds really hard.” “That stinks. It really does.” “I’m so glad you’re talking to me about this.” “I believe you.” “Being a kid right now . . . ugh, it feels so so hard. I get that.” “You’re really sad about that. You’re allowed to be, sweetie.” “I’m right here with you. I’m so glad we’re together talking about this.” “Sometimes we don’t have a way to feel better right away. Sometimes when things feel tough, the best we can do is talk nicely to ourselves and talk to people who understand.” “I love you. I love you the same no matter how you’re feeling and no matter what is happening in your life.”

Remember: our feelings are forces; the feelings we don’t permit ourselves to have are more likely to catapult out of our bodies as behavior.

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.

Sometimes, when my child is really struggling with something, I remind myself that she’s looking at me and absorbing my relationship with her frustration, and this forms the foundation for her own relationship with her frustration.

What makes tolerating frustration so hard is that it requires us to let go of our need to finish and be quick and be right and have things done; frustration tolerance requires us to ground ourselves in what is happening in the moment, to feel okay even when we don’t know how to do something, and to focus on effort instead of outcome.

The bottom line: the less obsessed we are with “success,” the more we’ll be willing to try new things and develop and grow, which of course are key elements in all types of success.

I often remind myself that my job as a parent is not to help my kids get out of the learning space and into knowing . . . but rather to help my kids learn to stay in that learning space and tolerate not being in knowing! So rather than solving children’s problems for them, belittling their struggles, or losing patience with their efforts to understand that which might seem simple to an adult, we have to allow our kids to do the work on their own.

“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. I don’t have to teach my child how to get the math problem correct, I need to teach my child how to regulate her body while working on the math problem.”

Yet the more a child feels controlled, the more she will cling to rejection or boundary-pushing in order to assert her independence, which leads to increased parental desperation, intensified power struggles, and frustration for everyone.