Good Inside - Becky Kennedy

Part I: Dr. Becky’s Parenting Principles

“Two things are true, sweetie. First, I have decided that you cannot watch that movie. Second, you’re upset and mad at me. Like, really mad. I hear that. I even understand it. You’re allowed to be mad.” You don’t have to choose between firm decisions and loving validation. There’s no trade-off between doing what feels right to you and acknowledging the very real experience of your child. Both can be true.

Children are more able to experience strong feelings than they are to regulate those feelings, and the gap between experiencing strong feelings and regulating those feelings comes out as dysregulated behavior (think hitting, kicking, screaming).

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

One of the primary goals of childhood is to build healthy emotion regulation skills: to develop ways to have feelings and manage them, to learn how to find yourself amid feelings and thoughts and urges, rather than have feelings and thoughts and urges overtake you.

Boundaries show our kids that even the biggest emotions won’t spiral out of control forever. Children need to sense a parent’s boundary— our “I won’t let you” and our stopping them from dangerous action— in order to feel, deep in their bodies, this message: “This feeling might seem as if it will take over and destroy the world, it might seem too much, and yet I am sensing in my parent’s boundary that there is a way to contain

When you look at the family system as a whole, you can see this elegant interplay of jobs: a child can express emotions, and a parent can validate and empathize with them. When those emotions transform into dangerous behavior, we set appropriate boundaries, while still validating and empathizing.

Validation, empathy, boundary.

There is powerful research, because it suggests that a child’s behavior— which is an expression of a child’s emotion regulation patterns— develops in relation to a parent’s emotional maturity.

Here’s what I always tell parents: 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. Our kids’ brains wire in response to our interactions with them.

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.

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.

I don’t know a single parent who doesn’t want the best for their kids. Count me in: I want the best for my kids! And yet, I’m not sure that “the best” for them is to “just be happy.” For me, happiness is much less compelling than resilience. After all, cultivating happiness is dependent on regulating distress. We have to feel safe before we can feel happy.

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. Resilience building happens in the space before a “win” arrives, which is why it can feel so hard to access.

As a parent, I challenge myself to sit with my child in his feeling of distress so he knows he isn’t alone, as opposed to pulling my child out of this moment, which leaves him alone the next time he finds himself there.

Behavior is never “the story,” but rather it’s a clue to the bigger story begging to be addressed.

I think about the term “connection capital” a lot. It refers to the reserve of positive feelings we hopefully build up with our children, which we can pull from in times of struggle or when the relationship between us gets strained.

We don’t want to ‘craft our child’s behavior’ . . . we want to help our son develop into a good person. We want to understand him, to help him with the things that feel bad to him.

The evidence around behavior change can make us lose sight of what actually matters in favor of what is immediately observable.

Kohn urges adults to develop “the ability to look ‘through’ a given action in order that we can understand the motives that gave rise to it as well as figuring out how to have some effect on those motives.”

Here are some questions to get you started, to ask yourself after any tough moment: What is my most generous interpretation (MGI) of my child’s behavior? What was going on for my child in that moment? What was my child feeling right before that behavior emerged? What urge did my child have a hard time regulating?

We have to be willing to pause our agenda, to pause what feels “fair,” when a child is overwhelmed with shame. We have to shift from a goal of correcting behavior to a goal of helping our child feel good inside, showing our child her lovability and worth, affirming our connection. This helps a kid “unstick.”

Telling the truth often involves delivering the simplest, most straightforward version of events. I often have to remind myself: “Only say what happened. Name what’s true, and nothing more complicated.” This allows me to give my child what he needs in the moment: my presence + a story to understand.

Kids who ask questions need answers so they aren’t left alone with the feelings, thoughts, and images that already live inside them.

Part II: Building Connection and Addressing Behaviors

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.

PNP Time is exactly what it sounds like: phone-free playtime. I came up with PNP Time after realizing how distracting it is to have my phone anywhere near me as I try to engage with my child.

And so I created the Fill-Up Game. Every time my son was difficult, instead of reacting, I’d take a deep breath and say, slowly and warmly, “I think you’re trying to tell me that you’re not filled up with Mommy.” My softening led to his softening, and he’d often reply by saying something like, “Yeah . . . I’m only up to here,” and point somewhere on his legs. Then I’d give him giant hugs and squeezes, over and over, until the “Mommy level” moved all the way up to the top of his head, at which point I would give him one more big squeeze so he had “a bit extra Mommy” to get him through the next little while.

Script for “Did I Ever Tell You About the Time . . . ?” Identify the essence of your child’s struggle. (Is it hard for her to feel happy for other people’s accomplishments? Hard to stay engaged when math feels hard and frustrating?) Take on the problem as your own: remember a moment, in the recent past or when you were a child, when you struggled with something similar. Talk to your child not in the heat of the moment but when things are calm, starting with, “Did I ever tell you about the time . . . ?,” and share a story about yourself having a similar struggle. Engage your child in this story, ideally one where you didn’t come up with a quick fix but struggled and just kind of got through it. Do not end your story by directly relating it to your child. There’s no need to spell out, “Isn’t that just like when you . . . ?” Allow the story and moment to stand on their own, trusting that it will reach the part of your child that needed connection.