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.

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?”

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.

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.

When children feel seen and sense their parent is a teammate and not an adversary, and when they’re asked to collaborate in problem-solving . . .

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.

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).

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

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.

the way parents interact with kids in their early years forms the blueprint they take with them into the world.

Psychologist John Bowlby, who formulated attachment theory in the 1970s, described attachment as a system of proximity: children who figured out how to keep an attachment figure nearby—literally, physically close to them—were more likely to receive comfort and protection, which meant they were more likely to survive, while children who had more distance from an attachment figure were less likely to receive comfort and protection, and thus were less likely to survive.

Our confidence and sturdiness and sense of self depend on our ability to understand this. When we feel overwhelmed and become reactive, it’s almost always because one part of us has essentially taken over; we lose track of our identity and instead “become” these feelings.

“Which parts of me get connection, attention, understanding, and acceptance? I should do more of that, because it maximizes attachment and therefore maximizes survival!

Kids use self-doubt to protect themselves from the overwhelming feelings that would arise if they accepted the reality of what really just happened. They do this because being alone in their feelings seems like “too much,” and self-doubt offers a way to escape and self-preserve. And yet, a child is wiring herself to believe, “I don’t perceive things accurately. I overreact.

Psychiatrist Ronald Fairbairn may have said it best when he wrote, regarding children and child development, “It is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the Devil.”*

Regulation first, happiness second. And this translates into our parenting: the wider the range of feelings we can name and tolerate in our kids (again, this doesn’t mean behaviors), the wider the range of feelings they will be able to manage safely, affording them an increased ability to feel at home with themselves.

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.

while reinforcing our kid’s people-pleasing tendencies can be “convenient” in childhood, it can lead to major problems—a reluctance to say no, an inability to assert or even locate one’s own needs, a prioritization of other people’s wellness to the detriment of one’s own—later on.

Connection is the opposite of shame. It is the antidote to shame. Shame is a warning sign of aloneness, danger, and badness; connection is a sign of presence, safety, and goodness.

Kids don’t want to feel that their leader is someone who cannot be located, who is easily overrun by others, who is . . . lost.

Why do siblings argue so much? Well, let’s start with a brilliant analogy from Elaine Mazlish and Adele Faber, authors of one of my favorite parenting books, Siblings Without Rivalry. They remind us that when a child gets a sibling, it feels to them similar to how it would feel for you if your partner got a second spouse. Imagine your partner comes home and says, “Amazing news! We’re getting a second wife! You’re going to be a big wife and now we’ll have a little wife and we’re going to be one big happy family!”

The more we work for fairness, the more we create opportunities for competition.

whining = strong desire + powerlessness.

His whining and unreasonableness are his ways of saying to me, ‘Mommy, be firm, provide a sturdy container for me. I need a good cry.’” I stopped trying to make things better and just said, “Nothing feels good, huh? Nothing feels like you want it to. I get that, sweetie. Some moments are like that.”

“growth mindset”—the belief that abilities can be cultivated through effort, study, and persistence and that failures and struggles are not enemies of learning but rather key elements on the pathway to learning. Growth mindset, a concept first introduced by psychologist Carol Dweck, provides a framework to embrace challenges and build frustration tolerance in kids. It says that anybody can improve at something if they work at it, and that they should do so even in the face of setbacks.

Do you know that sometimes our body knows things before our brain does? My body must have been thinking of something important.

confidence is not about feeling “good,” it’s about believing, “I really know what I feel right now. Yes, this feeling is real, and yes, it’s allowed to be there, and yes, I am a good person while I am feeling this way.” Confidence is our ability to feel at home with ourselves in the widest range of feelings possible, and it’s built from the belief that it’s okay to be who you are no matter what you’re feeling.

“One–nothing!” She looked at me, confused, and I explained, “Not knowing something means I can learn, and learning new things is awesome. I learned one thing just now so I get one point!”

Understanding DFKs requires going all the way back to evolution. For these children, vulnerability sits right next to shame; remember, shame puts humans into a primal defense state, one in which we are taken over by the need to protect ourselves. And we do that by shutting down, attacking others, or closing people out.