A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be
Becky Kennedy
Your child is not bad — they are a good person struggling in a hard moment.
Kennedy reframes parenting around one premise: misbehavior is a signal of struggle, not defiance. Children's prefrontal cortex won't fully develop until their mid-twenties — expecting adult-level regulation from a five-year-old is biologically unreasonable.
Everything Kennedy wants you to walk away with
When you distinguish a person from a behavior, you create interventions that preserve your relationship while leading to real change. The most generous interpretation of what just happened will soften your body and transform the interaction.
'I won't let you do that, and I love you' captures the entire model. You don't have to choose between firm decisions and loving validation. Power struggles collapse when you shift from me-versus-you to me-and-you-against-a-problem.
You cannot control someone else, only yourself. Saying 'I will hold you so you stop hitting' is a boundary. Saying 'stop hitting' is a plea. The boundary communicates: I know you're having a hard time. I will be the container you need.
Bad behavior comes from dysregulated feelings we cannot manage. What helps us manage the unmanageable? Connection. When a child receives empathy, it's as if someone is taking on some of their emotional burden. Regulate first, redirect second.
If you don't build positive feelings during earlier years, you have nothing to draw on during adolescence — when sticker charts, rewards, and punishments no longer work because your kids are bigger, more independent, and can rebel against all of it.
Kids won't produce stories about ages zero to three, but the way parents interact with them forms the blueprint they carry into the world. The emotions you connect to tell children those parts of them are manageable and lovable. The ones you shut down say the opposite.
The more we emphasize 'feeling better,' the more we set kids up for adult anxiety. Resilience is staying in a tough moment and finding your goodness even without confirmation of success. Prepare kids to have hard feelings rather than protecting them from having any.
Repair can happen ten minutes, ten days, or ten years later. Solid relationships aren't solid because they lack conflict — they're solid because the people in them can reconnect after disagreements. Your child sees you as a work in progress and learns they can be one too.
Sticker charts and time-outs tell children their behavioral compliance is what matters most. They display indifference to the child's distress and personhood. Connection after difficult moments does not reinforce bad behavior — it addresses the root cause.
Kids who ask about death are already thinking about death. Kids who ask about conception have already considered it. They need answers so they aren't left alone with the feelings and images already living inside them. Empowerment comes from learning to cope, not from avoidance.
These notes are inspired by direct excerpts and woven together into a readable guide you can follow from start to finish.
By Becky Kennedy
You will not see me recommend time-outs, sticker charts, punishments, rewards, or ignoring as a response to challenging behaviors. What do I recommend? First and foremost, an understanding that behaviors are only the tip of the iceberg, and that below the surface is a child’s entire internal world, just begging to be understood.
It turns out, switching our parenting mindset from “consequences” to “connection” does not have to mean ceding family control to our children. While I resist time-outs, punishments, consequences, and ignoring, there’s nothing about my parenting style that’s permissive or fragile. My approach promotes firm boundaries, parental authority, and sturdy leadership, all while maintaining positive relationships, trust, and respect.
Let me share an assumption I have about you and your kids: you are all good inside. When you call your child “a spoiled brat,” you are still good inside. When your child denies knocking down his sister’s block tower (even though you watched it happen), he is still good inside. And when I say “good inside,” I mean that we all, at our core, are compassionate, loving, and generous. The principle of internal goodness drives all of my work—I hold the belief that kids and parents are good inside, which allows me to be curious about the “why” of their bad behaviors.
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.
It’s easy—reflexive, even—to default to a less generous view, for two main reasons: First, we are evolutionarily wired with a negativity bias, meaning we pay closer attention to what’s difficult with our kids (or with ourselves, our partners, even the world at large) than to what is working well. Second, our experiences of our own childhoods influence how we perceive and respond to our kids’ behavior. So many of us had parents who led with judgment rather than curiosity, criticism instead of understanding, punishment instead of discussion.
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. This means that thinking through our answers to those “What happens next?” questions is critical to understanding our body’s circuitry. What do I mean by “circuitry”? Well, in our early years, our body is learning under what conditions we receive love and attention and understanding and affection, and under what conditions we get rejected, punished, and left alone.
Finding the good inside can often come from asking ourselves one simple question: “What is my most generous interpretation of what just happened?” I ask myself this often with my kids and my friends, and I’m working on asking it more in my marriage and with myself. Whenever I utter these words, even internally, I notice my body soften and I find myself interacting with people in a way that feels much better.
Finding the MGI teaches parents to attend to what is going on inside of their child (big feelings, big worries, big urges, big sensations) rather than what is going on outside of their child (big words, or sometimes big actions). And when we put this perspective into practice, we teach our children to do the same. We orient them to their internal experience, which includes thoughts, feelings, sensations, urges, memories, and images. Self-regulation skills rely on the ability to recognize internal experience, so by focusing on what’s inside rather than what’s outside, we are building in our children the foundation of healthy coping.
We don’t have to choose between two supposedly oppositional realities. We can avoid punishment and see improved behavior, we can parent with a firm set of expectations and still be playful, we can create and enforce boundaries and show our love, we can take care of ourselves and our children. And similarly, we can do what’s right for our family and our kids can be upset; we can say no and care about our kids’ disappointment. This idea of multiplicity, the ability to accept multiple realities at once, is critical to healthy relationships. When there are two people in a room, there are also two sets of feelings, thoughts, needs, and perspectives. Our ability to hold on to multiple truths at once (ours and someone else’s) allows two people in a relationship to feel seen and feel real, even if they are in conflict. Multiplicity is what allows two people to get along and feel close, they each know that their experience will be accepted as true and explored as important, even if those experiences are different. 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.
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.
Research on marriage, business, and friendship has shown, time and again, that relationships do better when we are in understanding—“two things are true” mode. For example, a core pillar of the Gottman Method, a research-backed approach to successful marriage developed by psychologists John and Julie Gottman, is accepting that two perspectives are valid. In a study of two types of listening, clinical psychologist Faye Doell demonstrated how people who listen in order to understand versus listen in order to respond have higher across-the-board relationship satisfaction. And neuropsychiatrist Daniel Siegel, coauthor of The Whole-Brain Child, often refers to the critical importance of “feeling felt” in relationships. He describes this as “our minds being held within another’s mind,” but ultimately he’s talking about connecting to someone else’s experience. Studies have even found that the best business leaders listen to and validate their employees more than they talk to them—in other words, they get to know their employees’ truths instead of trying to convince them that management is always right.
On a more micro level, “two things are true” always seems to be the answer to our problems: I can say no to screen time and my child can be upset about it; I can be angry that my child lied and be curious about what felt too scary to tell me; I can see my child’s anxieties as irrational and still be empathic around what she needs. And perhaps most powerful of all: I can yell and be a loving parent, I can mess up and repair, I can regret things I’ve said and do better in the future.
It reminds us that logic doesn’t overpower emotion: I may have a valid reason for doing something … and also someone else has a valid emotional reaction.
Yes, this is a parenting book, but at its core it’s a relationship book. The principles I’m sharing with you apply to your relationship with your kids but also your relationship with your partner, your friends, your family, and perhaps most important … yourself.
When you make a decision you believe in but you know will upset your child, you might say as much to your kid: “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.
Power struggles almost always represent a collapse of the “two things are true” principle. They are me-versus-you moments—you against your child.
Once we return to the idea that two things are true, we can switch from a me-versus-you mentality to a me-and-you-against-a-problem mentality. Ah … This is everything. Now we are on the same team, gazing at a problem, wondering what we can do about it.
Bad behavior comes from dysregulated feelings that we cannot manage. What helps us manage the unmanageable? Connection.
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.
First and foremost, our job is to keep our children safe, physically and psychologically.
We set boundaries out of love for our children, because we want to protect them when they’re unable to make good decisions for themselves. We don’t let our toddlers walk too far from us on the sidewalk, because we know they might not be able to resist the urge to dart toward the street. We don’t let our young kids watch horror movies, because we know they could spark fears our kids can’t yet handle. 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.
Their primary function is to start linking a child’s downstairs brain (overwhelming feelings) to their upstairs brain (self-awareness, regulation, planning, decision-making). Knowing your job is fundamental to this goal. We want our kids to feel their wide range of feelings and have new experiences, and our job is to help them build resilience by teaching them to cope with whatever the world throws at them. The goal isn’t to shut down their feelings or teach kids to turn away from what they notice. The goal is to teach our kids how to manage all of their feelings and perceptions and thoughts and urges; we are the primary vehicle for this teaching, not through lectures or logic, but through the experiences our children have with us.
Boundaries are not what we tell kids not to do; boundaries are what we tell kids we will do.
We cannot tell a child who is hitting someone to stop hitting, or a child who is running to stop running, or a child who is complaining about wanting more TV to stop complaining. Well, we can (I am someone who says all these things too!), but these pleas won’t be successful. Why? Because we cannot control someone else—we can only control ourselves.
It’s a way of saying, “I know you’re good inside and you’re just having a hard, out-of-control time. I will be the container you need, I will stop you from continuing to act in this way, I will protect you from your own dysregulation taking over.” Isn’t this what we all want when we’re out of control? Someone who will stay calm and take charge and help us feel safe again?
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.
Empathy comes from our ability to be curious: it allows us to explore our child’s emotional experience from a place of learning, not judgment. When a child receives empathy—in fact, when any of us receives empathy—it makes them feel like someone is on their team, almost as if that person is taking on some of their emotional burden.
As kids strengthen that ability to regulate their feelings, those feelings are less likely to manifest as behavior: this is the difference between your child’s saying, “I’m so mad at my sister!” (regulating anger) and your child’s hitting her sister (dysregulation);
And yes, kids will “remember” all of these years, including years zero to one, one to two, and two to three. They won’t, of course, remember in the way we typically think about memory—they won’t be able to produce a story with words that connects to an experience from their past. But even if kids can’t remember with their words, they can—and do—remember with something more powerful: their bodies.
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.
Attachment theory suggests that children are wired to seek out and attach to individuals who provide the comfort and security they need to survive.
From their first days of life, our kids learn what leads to closeness and what leads to distance and then adjust their behavior accordingly, all with the goal of establishing a secure attachment.
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 such, he feels capable of exploring, trying new things, taking risks, suffering failures, and being vulnerable. There’s a deep and critical paradox here: The more we can rely on a parent, the more curious and explorative we can be.
Internal family systems (IFS) is a therapeutic model that considers different parts within a person, as opposed to thinking about a person in a singular manner. A basic assumption of IFS is that it’s the nature of the mind to be subdivided into parts or subpersonalities. Consider yourself. Maybe you’re outgoing with people you know well but reserved in new environments. Maybe you stand up for yourself when necessary but can stand back when it’s time for someone else to take the lead. Maybe you’re confident professionally but more reserved in social environments. You have your brave self, your anxious self, your confident self, your deferential self. You are multifaceted, not any one thing.
Because I’ve seen how powerful it can be, I am passionate about using the language of parts with young children, to wire early on the idea of sensations and feelings and thoughts as parts we can relate to, not experiences that take over and consume us.
“Children have a developmental tendency to translate experience into identity: I am not loved becomes I am unlovable, and a bad thing happened to me becomes I am bad.” In other words, kids take experiences with their caregivers and infer larger messages about who they are. The emotions parents connect to—meaning the ones we are interested in and will stay present for—tell children that the parts of them feeling these feelings are manageable, lovable, and worthy; the emotions we shut down, punish, reject, or try to make into something “more pleasant,” well, children learn that the parts of them feeling these feelings are destructive, bad, unlovable, or “too much.”
It is not too late to repair and reconnect with your kids and change the trajectory of their development.
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.
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. Repair can happen ten minutes after a blowup, ten days later, or ten years later. Never ever doubt the power of repair—every time you go back to your child, you allow him to rewire, to rewrite the ending of the story so it concludes in connection and understanding, rather than aloneness and fear.
As we all know, solid relationships aren’t solid because they lack conflict, they’re solid because the people in them possess the ability to reconnect after disagreements and to feel understood again after feeling misunderstood.
Do I want my kids to experience happiness? Without a doubt, yes. I want them to feel happiness as kids and as adults; this is why I’m so focused on building resilience. Resilience, in many ways, is our ability to experience a wide range of emotions and still feel like ourselves. Resilience helps us bounce back from the stress, failure, mistakes, and adversity in our lives.
Developing resilience doesn’t mean we become immune to stress or struggle—these are, of course, unavoidable facts of life—but our resilience determines how we relate to those difficult moments as well as how we experience them.
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.
The more we emphasize our children’s happiness and “feeling better,” the more we set up them up for an adulthood of anxiety. Setting happiness as the goal compels us to solve our kids’ problems rather than equip them to solve their own.
Parents don’t so much need to protect kids from having tough feelings as much as we need to prepare our kids to have those feelings. And the best way to prepare our kids is through honesty and loving presence.
If it were me, I’m pretty sure I would already know that it’s not okay to throw a cereal box; my throwing and yelling was a sign that I was overwhelmed with an emotion, not a sign that I don’t know right from wrong. I wouldn’t need my partner to teach me or lecture me or punish me or shame me in any way. What I would need is to feel safe and good inside again. Then, when I’d cooled down a bit, I would need to reflect on the larger story of how I got to that moment.
The only way I’d be able to change and show up more grounded and less reactive in the future would be to embrace curiosity about what was happening for me underneath the behavior.
When we approach our kids with charts and reinforcement and stickers and time-outs, we essentially tell them that their behavioral compliance is what matters most. We display an indifference to their distress and their personhood (an interest in which is critical to forming human relationships), and our kids can feel that.
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. If we don’t build this up during our children’s earlier years, well, we have nothing to draw on when our kids are adolescents and young adults—years when the behavior modification methods we may have once relied on are no longer at our disposal because our kids are physically bigger, are more independent, and can rebel against our sticker charts, rewards, and punishments.
The evidence around behavior change can make us lose sight of what actually matters in favor of what is immediately observable. And there’s something a little absurd about it too. One of my favorite supervisors once said to me: “I could run a study that shows a one hundred percent reduction in difficult behavior if I wanted! If, every time a young child did something ‘undesirable,’ a parent hit the child or made him sleep on the street for a night … I am pretty sure my study would show that a child would appear more compliant after a few weeks.”
For many parents, a non-punishing approach like this seems worrisome, or at least counterintuitive. They fear that giving “positive attention” to a “misbehaving” child will only encourage that child to keep engaging in the problematic behavior. As one parent recently told me: “I’m no longer punishing my child, but now we’re in a cycle where she does something bad and as a result she gets special time with me. I don’t want her to learn that this is how she gets my attention, but right now it is how she’s getting it! Help!” I understand both of these concerns. But rather than responding by reducing the connection after these behaviors, I’d think about increasing the connection outside of these behaviors. Behavioral issues are often a call for attention or connection—if those needs are met, that cry for help is no longer necessary.
This stuck with me: connection first. 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. Now, to be clear, connection does not mean approval. Approval is usually about a specific behavior; connection is about our relationship with the person underneath the behavior. And that’s another reason why connection with our children in their difficult moments does not “reinforce” bad behavior: shame has never been a motivator of positive behavior change at any time, in any place, for any type of person.
Parents often fear that telling their kids the truth will be too scary or overwhelming, but we tend to have it all wrong when it comes to what scares children. It’s not information so much as feeling confused and alone in the absence of information that terrifies them.
If a child is left alone with the perception of change and the feeling of fear without an explanation of what’s going on? 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.
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. The path to regulation starts with understanding. In other words, watching a parent confront hard truths will help a child learn to regulate his feelings.
If I were able to produce a more complex question, I would be demonstrating an already complex knowledge about the topic. Kids who ask about death are already thinking about death. Kids who ask about the anatomical details of conception have already considered how it all happens. Kids who ask questions need answers so they aren’t left alone with the feelings, thoughts, and images that already live inside them. So try to catch your “My kid isn’t ready for this!” reflex and remind yourself, “Ready or not, the foundation is already there.”
Showing our children that we feel the tough stuff, that we struggle with it and still get through, is truly the best lesson you can give them.
Deep breathing is effective because it regulates a number of important bodily processes, including those involved with lowering stress levels and reducing blood pressure. Diaphragmatic breathing, also known as “belly breathing,” stimulates your vagus nerve, which is the longest and most complex cranial nerve in the body. The vagus nerve is a main component of your parasympathetic nervous system, or your “rest and restore” system (the opposite of your sympathetic or “fight or flight” system), and helps your body access feelings of safety and regulation. That’s just a fancy way of saying that deep belly breathing activates the circuits in our bodies that start the calming-down process.
The next time you find yourself drowning in an emotion you’d rather avoid, remind yourself to acknowledge, validate, permit. If there’s a secret recipe for self-regulation, that’s it.
Acknowledge: Label your feelings. For example: “This moment feels hard!” or “Today was rough!” or “I’m noticing anxiety right now,” or “My chest feels tight and my heart is racing.” Validate: Respect your feelings enough to assume they aren’t lying to you. Now tell yourself a story about why your feelings make sense. This might sound like: “I’m exhausted. Caring for two kids and cooking dinner while they argue with each other … it makes sense that this feels hard.”
Permit: Give yourself permission to have your feeling in whatever way it’s showing up. I know this sounds silly, but it’s so powerful. Tell yourself, out loud or internally, “I have full permission to feel like life is hard,” or “I’m allowed to feel exactly as I do,” or “It’s okay to feel like parenting is totally unenjoyable right now.” Now, remember: we can permit our anger and still remind ourselves to use a calm voice; we can permit our frustration and still remind ourselves to gaze kindly at our kids.
Connection capital flows two ways. Like a bank account, we draw from our connection capital regularly. Parents spend connection capital when we ask kids to clean their rooms, when we tell them we need a few minutes for an unexpected work call, when we say, “Time to leave, sweetie,” or “Screen time is over.” 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.
Our kids want our full attention more than anything else. Our attention communicates that they are safe, important, valuable, loved. And yet, our devices are powerful magnets for our attention, and our kids feel that distraction. To be clear, I’m not arguing against technology or using devices. I’m suggesting that we create boundaries around devices—not only for our kids but for ourselves. We need boundaries around our device use so that we can help ourselves to give our kids our full attention. Not all the time. But definitely some of the time. Spending time with your child when you are fully present is the most powerful way to build connection capital.
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. And did his behavior improve? No. Not right away. This “game” didn’t change things on a dime, but it was absolutely a turning point. It was the first step, because it made concrete exactly what my kid needed: more of his parent.
“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.”
In my practice, I find that an element missing in lots of families is playfulness. Silliness. Ridiculousness. FUN.
Since one of our main jobs as parents is to help our children feel safe, playfulness is one of the most important aspects of parenting; we can’t laugh when we sense danger or threats, so laughing with our kids sends the message
Repair offers us the opportunity to change the ending to the story; instead of a child’s encoding a memory where she felt scared and alone (and remember, even if a child doesn’t bring it up, the memory is stored in the body), she now has a memory of a parent returning and helping her feel safe again.
I often think that healthy relationships are defined not by a lack of rupture but by how well we repair. All relationships have rough patches, and yet, these moments can be the greatest sources of deepening connection. A rupture moment occurs because both people are in their own experience, and they are unable to temporarily put that experience to the side to understand and connect to the other person.
Share that you’ve been reflecting. Acknowledge the other person’s experience. State what you would do differently next time. Connect through curiosity now that things feel safer.
When we say “My kid doesn’t listen,” we’re not really talking about listening. I’ve never heard a parent complain their child doesn’t listen when they say, “Ice-cream sundaes are on the kitchen table!” or “You can start an extra TV show now!” What we’re really talking about in situations like Sonia’s is cooperation. We say “My kid won’t listen,” but what we mean is “My kid won’t cooperate when I want him to do something he doesn’t want to do.” How do we, as adults, behave when someone asks us to do something we don’t want to do? Well, that usually depends on how close we feel, in the moment, to the person making the request. If I’m feeling really good about my marriage and my husband asks me to grab him something on my way home from work, I’ll probably say yes. But if I’ve recently been feeling unappreciated or misunderstood, I’m more likely to tell him I don’t have time. The more connected we feel to someone, the more we want to comply with their requests. Listening is essentially a barometer for the strength of a relationship in any given moment.
When we infuse connection, respect, playfulness, and trust into our asks, exchanges that once felt antagonistic start to be met with cooperation.
The single most important strategy in regard to listening is to connect to your child in their world before you ask them to do something in your world.
If you can give your child the agency to make a choice, they’ll be more likely to cooperate. No one likes feeling dictated to, especially children, who already feel controlled so much of the time. This is a strategy that you can use for kids of all ages; even your two-year-old will be more likely to cooperate for toothbrushing if you give the option of racing to the bathroom or zooming there like a rocket ship. Only offer your child options that you are okay with, and then let them know that you trust them to follow through on that choice.
Humor allows for a change in perspective, which is what we’re looking for when we ask things of our kids. When we infuse playfulness instead of frustration, we join our children in the world they always prefer—one filled with silliness, lightheartedness, and laughter. Frankly, it’s a world we want to be a part of as well. When we bring laughter into the equation, our kids feel more connected to us and are more likely to cooperate.
In the moment of a tantrum, a child is experiencing a feeling, urge, or sensation that overwhelms his capacity to regulate that feeling, urge, or sensation. That’s an important thing to remember: tantrums are biological states of dysregulation, not willful acts of disobedience.
Helping our kids through tantrums relies on our ability to see through the event that set off the “meltdown” and recognize the real, painful feelings underneath. Learning to recognize a tantrum for what it is on the inside rather than reacting to what is happening on the outside is a vital parenting skill.
“Two things are true: I’m in charge of this decision and my answer is no. You’re in charge of your feelings and you’re allowed to be upset.” The words themselves actually matter less than the idea and the tone. The idea is that we are allowed to make decisions and our kids are allowed to have their own feelings. As for the tone? We don’t want to deliver these words with coldness or aloofness, as if to say, “You’re allowed to be upset and I don’t care.” We want to convey true permission and empathy,
The prefrontal cortex of the human brain, which is responsible for the development of language, logic, forward thinking, and perspective (all factors that help us regulate and stay grounded), is extremely underdeveloped in young children. This is why they have such intense emotional explosions.
It’s important to remember, first, that these explosive moments happen because a child is terrified of the sensations, urges, and feelings coursing inside their body. When you think of your child as terrified rather than bad or aggressive, you’ll be more able to give them what they need. Then, remind yourself that your job during these tantrums is the same as your job in less-explosive tantrums: keep your own body calm and keep your child safe. Keeping a child safe in this case means focusing on containment, because a child who is out of control needs a parent to step in firmly, put a stop to the dangerous behavior, and create a safer, more boundaried environment where the child cannot continue to do damage.
These four words—“I won’t let you”—are critical for every parent’s toolbox. “I won’t let you” communicates that a parent is in charge, that a parent will stop a child from continuing to act in a way that is dysregulated and ultimately feels awful.
Having the urge to bite is okay; biting a person is not okay. Having the urge to hit is okay; hitting a person is not okay. Finding safe ways to redirect our children’s urges can be much more successful than trying to shut down the urges themselves. For example, a child who has been biting can be given a chew necklace. When you notice them getting upset, offer the chew necklace in order to interrupt the cycle of discharging the urge on another child. A child who is kicking can be put in a room where they can move their legs and flail and kick, but do it safely, not in a way that connects with another child.
Humanizing the urge and then shifting where we allow a child to discharge it allows the child to gain regulation and, over time, make better decisions.
Pick your child up and carry them into a room that is relatively “safe” (meaning there aren’t dangerous items that will get swept into the emotional storm) and small.
Get into the room, shut the door, sit at the door so your child cannot get out. Will they try? Probably, yes. Luckily, you’re bigger than them. Sit there.
Prevent any physical aggression. To feel safe and to regulate, children need proof that parents can stop them from making bad decisions and that their feelings do not endanger themselves or others.
Don’t try to reason, don’t lecture, don’t punish, don’t say too much at all. Your child is in a threat state; they cannot process any words and is likely to interpret anything you say as additional danger. But they may be able to respond to nonverbal communication such as our body language, tone of voice, and pace.
Wait it out. It may take five minutes; it may take thirty.
Before you talk to your child, find your slow pace and soft tone. Loud, chaotic tantrums need calm, steady voices.
Most of us survive a tantrum and think, “Whew, glad that’s done, let’s move on!” But we can get a big bang for our buck if, once everyone is calm, we connect with our child and review the dysregulated moment. By returning to the scene of the emotional fire and layering on connection, empathy, and understanding, you add key elements of regulation on top of the moment of dysregulation. Then, the next time your child has a hard time, these elements will be easier to access. Telling the story is essentially reviewing a chaotic meltdown moment in order to build coherence. This is a sometimes strategy; you don’t have to review every single meltdown, but it can be helpful to pull out of your toolbox every now and then.
This is when many parents ask, “And then what? What do I do next? Do I tell them how to handle it differently next time?” Nope! The simple act of adding your presence, coherence, and a narrative will change how the experience is stored in a child’s body.
First children often appear self-centered when a new sibling comes into the family, but underneath the “I don’t like her, send her back to the hospital!” or the pleas of “Watch me! Watch me!” is a child whose circuitry is going through a massive shift. Second and third (and fourth, etc.) kids have the opposite wiring: their circuitry is shaped by the presence of someone else constantly in their space, constantly able to do things they cannot (yet) do, constantly competing for time and attention. It’s frustrating to be a second kid. You can’t build a block tower without seeing an older sibling do it more easily, you can’t run in the backyard without seeing a sibling run faster, you can’t work on early reading without seeing your older sibling read effortlessly. There’s no problem to fix here, just a dynamic to understand.
I see so many families set a goal of being “fair” as a method of attempting to decrease conflict, but in fact, making things fair is one of the biggest propellants of conflict. The more we work for fairness, the more we create opportunities for competition.
And there’s a longer-term reason why we don’t want to aim for “fairness” in our families: we want to help our kids orient inward to figure out their needs, not orient outward. When my kids are adults, I don’t want them to think, “What do my friends have? What are their jobs, their homes, their cars? I need what they have.” Talk about a life of anxiety and emptiness.
Here’s how to move away from fair: When your kid screams, “Not fair!,” work to shift his gaze inward. Don’t force this; model it. Instead of making things equal (“You’ll get new shoes soon!”), label what’s happening inside your child: “It’s so hard to see your brother get new shoes. Can you get new ones? Not right now, sweetie. In this family, every kid gets what they need—and your shoes are still in great shape. You’re allowed to be upset. I get it.”
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. The more you allow your kids to feel jealousy, the more you can problem-solve around the moments the feeling comes up; the less you allow jealousy (“Don’t say that about your sister!”), and the fewer skills a child develops for dealing with it when it arises, the more likely it is that jealousy will come out as insults (“Maxie is the worst gymnast here, she sucks!”) or behavior (making loud noises while spectators are supposed to be quiet, running away from you and screaming loudly).
Here’s the catch about venting: I have a zero-tolerance policy for siblings’ insulting each other or calling each other names. In my mind, this is bullying, and it’s something I encourage families to take a hard line about.
Why are you rude to people sometimes? Why would you talk back to or disobey your boss? I come up with the same reason, every time: I feel misunderstood. I am looking to feel seen and don’t. I feel frustrated that someone else isn’t really hearing me, and my relationship with that person isn’t as strong as it could be in that moment. Knowing what would make me act out helps guide my approach to rudeness or defiance in kids.
Let’s imagine on-the-surface rudeness in our own life: You had a rough day, and your partner asks if you’ve unloaded the dishwasher. You react: “I’ve done a million things. No, I didn’t get to the dishwasher. Can you do just one thing by yourself?” Instead of biting back or scolding you for your on-the-surface rudeness, picture your partner saying, “Wow, that was rude. But, sweetie, you must be feeling overwhelmed to have reacted that way. That’s more important than your tone. So let’s start there—what was today like? I want to understand.” How does this feel? Afterward, are you more or less likely to be rude to your partner? And how would you feel if, instead, your partner responded, “I won’t tolerate your rudeness. No TV for you for a week!” I think we all know this scenario doesn’t end well for anyone. The same principle holds true for our kids; meeting their rudeness with empathy and kindness will make them feel seen and help inspire kindness in return.
Responding to your child’s on-the-surface behavior, as if their words are their sole truth, is taking the bait. Seeing your child’s on-the-surface behavior as a sign of something deeper and more vulnerable—seeing the feelings underneath the words, not the words themselves—is not taking the bait. This difference is everything.
Here’s how I see it: children whine when they feel helpless. I often use the formula whining = strong desire + powerlessness.
There’s one final reason kids whine, and it’s an important one: children are often looking for an emotional release, and whining is a sign that everything feels like too much—often it’s an indicator that a child needs to “let it all out.”
The best match for a child’s whining is an adult’s playfulness. When we respond to a whine with silliness or humor, we offer what a child needs the most: connection and hopefulness, both of which are present in lighthearted moments.
It’s certainly fine to occasionally say, “Can you ask me that again without whining?” in a way that doesn’t feel too pedantic or controlling. But sometimes we get into unnecessary power struggles with our kids when we insist they restate requests in a more “appropriate tone,” and all of a sudden a minor moment escalates into an outright battle.
I find that modeling it myself and moving on is both more humane and more effective. What would this look like? When your child says, “Dad, I need my boooooook!” … instead of “I need you to say that again in a stronger voice,” try “Dad, can you please grab me that book? Thank you so much.” Then “switch” and reply, “Oh sure, sweetie, no problem.” Deliver the book, take a deep breath, skip the lecture, trust your child to hear the difference and incorporate the change.
Looking at lying through a lens of being disrespected (“Are you lying to me? Do not disrespect me like that!”) totally misses the point—it pits us against our children and locks us into a parent-child power struggle where nobody wins. The reality is that lying is almost never about being defiant or sneaky or sociopathic (even when you’re only saying that in jest). Like so many of the behaviors addressed in this book, lying is much more about a child’s basic desires and their focus on attachment than it is about being manipulative or “pulling a fast one.” Now, I’m not saying you should “let your kids off the hook” when they lie. But my approach to dealing with lying is not about eliciting a confession in the moment. It’s aimed at getting to the core of what’s driving the lying, so we can address that head-on and create an environment where truth-telling becomes more possible. We cannot change a behavior we don’t understand, and punishment, threats, and rage are never components in environments that foster understanding or change.
When we start to look at lies in the framework of a child’s wish—her desire to retain control and change the ending—we see the lie not for its impact on us but as a sign of her need to feel safe and good inside.
What we see and label as lying is often a child’s body’s way of protecting itself—this is far from “manipulation” but rather a form of self-defense. Finally, it’s worth noting that a third big reason kids lie is to assert their independence. All of us—kids and adults—have a basic human need to feel like we can locate ourselves, that we know who we are, and that we exist in our own right. This is why we hate feeling controlled, because it feels like someone isn’t acknowledging our separate personhood.
When it comes to parenting kids who have a tendency to lie, my approach is designed to increase truth-telling in the future rather than increase “confessions” now. The strategies outlined here won’t end with your child saying to you, “I lied! It’s true!” And that’s not the goal. The goal is to change your home environment so your kids see you as a safe adult who can tolerate a wider range of their experiences. This can require that we all take a deep breath and swallow our pride in the moment of a lie—that we allow the moment to pass without demanding acknowledgment and instead focus on the longer-term, higher-impact goal.
Using the language of wishing in response to a child’s falsehoods changes the direction of the conversation, as it allows for more options than just “telling the truth” and “lying.” Now there’s an in-between place, and your ability to see and vocalize that gray area can soften the intensity of the moment and create a way to connect with your child.
You cannot just “get rid” of anxiety. Anxiety can only be effectively managed by increasing our tolerance for it, allowing it to exist, and understanding its purpose. This makes space for other emotions to emerge, thereby preventing the anxiety from taking over.
We want our children to feel like we are jumping into the hole with them, keeping them company—not trying to pull them out of it.
Believe me, avoidance always increases anxiety. If we aren’t willing to name and discuss a situation that our child feels anxious about, it tells our child that we must be anxious about it as well, and this only adds to his anxiety.
Dry runs can help kids feel more prepared for moments of separation, doctor’s appointments, sports tryouts, playdates, reading aloud in class … actually, as I type, I can’t think of any stressful situation that wouldn’t be improved by a dry run. You can practice dry runs directly with your child or act out the scenario with stuffed animals; using stuffies is especially helpful for younger kids who might not role-play directly, or for kids who are resistant to the idea of rehearsing a scary situation.
For kids who struggle with anxiety, mantras can be very helpful in the moment. Whether spoken out loud or recited internally, a mantra focuses their attention on the calming words rather than the source of distress.
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.
Here’s a powerful phrase to use with your kids: “You’ll know when you’re ready to (blank).” This communicates that you trust your child, which will teach them to trust themself, and self-trust is the essence of confidence. But this phrase also suggests the idea of movement—it implies that your kid will be more comfortable eventually.
There’s so much power in predicting feelings: when you name and recognize them in advance, it’s as if you give your child permission to feel them, which is half the battle when it comes to regulation.
Our kids will always respond to the versions of themselves we reflect back. 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. Instead of labeling, provide a generous interpretation of your child’s behavior, especially if someone else smacks on a label. If a family member says, “Aisha, why are you being so shy?,” take a breath, jump in, and share, “Aisha isn’t shy. Aisha is figuring out what feels comfortable to her, and that’s great. She’ll share more about her school year when she’s ready.”
If we want our kids to develop frustration tolerance, we have to develop tolerance for their frustration.
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.
Beyond any strategy or script I offer in this chapter, the most impactful thing we can do with our kids is to show up in a calm, regulated, non-rushed, non-blaming, non-outcome-focused way—both when they are performing difficult tasks and when they are witnessing us perform difficult tasks.
A growth mindset teaches us that hard work and improvement are in our control, while specific outcomes are not. The bottom line: the less obsessed we are with “success,” the more we’ll be willing to try new things and develop and grow,
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!
In our family, how hard we work is more important than coming up with the right answer.
We love learning new things, so we embrace “I don’t know” moments.
In our family, we try to remember that sticking with something hard makes our brains grow.
When parents around the dinner table start talking about what their kids will or will not eat, what they really seem to be assessing is whether they are doing a good job, whether they are doing enough, whether their kids are willing to “take in” what they want to offer them. Understanding this deeper connection between parenting and feeding is, in fact, the first step to reducing the intensity of mealtime. It helps separate what’s actually happening from the deeper feelings that get evoked in our bodies around this issue, and that helps us intervene in a way that’s based on what’s in front of us, rather than on our fears and insecurities.
Parent’s job: decide what food is offered, where it is offered, when it is offered. Child’s job: decide whether and how much to eat of what’s offered.
Satter says parents should be in charge of the boundaries around eating—this is the what, where, and when. Parents, essentially, come into the picture first. They make the baseline decisions and set the options and limits; after that, a child is in charge. You might even think of parents as a container—they establish the outer edges, but within the container, children are free to explore and express themselves.
Here’s something else I love about Satter’s division of responsibility: it gives parents a way to feel good about their role no matter what their child does or doesn’t eat.
There’s no one right way to do dessert—the key is simply grounding your decision in your role. Remember, you decide all the decisions around dessert: whether it’s served, what it is, at what time it’s offered. After that, it’s your kid’s job. But this means parents shouldn’t link dessert to how much a child eats, because that is the domain of a child, not a parent.
Remind yourself you don’t need agreement: “I don’t need my child to agree with me.”
Give permission for your child to be upset: “You’re allowed to be upset.”
Remind yourself and your child of your job: “My job as a parent is to make decisions that I think are good for you, even when I know you’re not going to like them.”
I recommend all parents strike the following words from their parenting vocabulary (feel free to strike them from all interactions outside of parenting as well!): “dramatic,” “drama queen,” “overly sensitive,” “hysterical,” “disproportionate,” “ridiculous.” These are gaslighting words that tell a child you don’t trust them—which wires them not to trust themself.
Let’s think about fake tears for a moment. What would lead me, an adult, to escalate my expression of emotions? After all, none of us are above this. Well, if I want to have the seriousness of my feelings recognized or my needs known, and I sense that someone is responding to me with disinterest, invalidation, or minimization, then my body would undoubtedly escalate into a more intense expression. I would be desperate to feel seen and understood. When we look at fake tears through this lens, we think less about the on-the-surface expression and more about the underlying unmet needs.
This is an extremely powerful message to your child: sometimes our body knows things that our mind doesn’t yet understand.
Confidence is our ability to feel at home with ourselves in the widest range of feelings possible.
Confidence in this case is about self-trust; it’s our ability to sit in that meeting and say internally, “Hmm. I have no idea what she’s asking me to do right now. I’m totally confused. I trust my feeling and it doesn’t mean anything bad about me,” and then say externally, “Wait a second, I am pretty confused and I want to make sure I get it right. Can we start again, so that we can both be on the same page?” Confidence in that meeting doesn’t come from trying to convince yourself that you’re not confused—it’s from allowing that feeling and owning it.
Building confidence isn’t only about saying the “right” thing when things go “wrong” for our kids. It’s also about what we say when things go “right.” Because there is one type of commentary we often think will build confidence but actually gets in the way, and that’s praise. “Good job, honey!” and “You’re so smart!” and “You’re an amazing artist!”—these well-intentioned phrases build up a child’s reliance on external validation, or approval from other people. Internal validation, on the other hand—which is what we want to encourage in our kids—is the process of seeking approval from oneself. It’s the difference between gazing out for good feelings rather than gazing in.
When we wonder with our kids about the “how” instead of praising the “what,” we help build up their tendency to gaze in and be curious about themselves, and maybe even to marvel at the things they’ve done. After all, nothing feels better than when someone around us expresses interest in how we think about things, how we came up with our ideas, or where we want to go next. When we ask our child, “How’d you think to … ?,” we are letting them know that we’re interested in their process and not just their product; this builds up a self-belief inside them that proclaims, “The things inside me are interesting and valuable.”
In regard to your child’s sports team, for example, inside stuff might be her effort in practice, her attitude when winning and losing, and her willingness to try new things; outside stuff might be her number of goals or home runs, or labels like “most valuable player.” When it comes to academics, inside stuff might be willingness to try a bonus math problem, spending time on studying, and showing enthusiasm about a subject; outside stuff might be a grade, a test score, or a label like “smartest kid in class.” The more our families focus on inside stuff, the more children value inside stuff too—which ultimately translates to valuing who they are over what they do.
Perfectionism steals a child’s (and adult’s) ability to feel good in the process of learning because it dictates that goodness only comes from successful outcomes.
After all, there are components of perfectionism—drive and strong-mindedness and conviction—that can feel really good, and we want to help our kids harness these traits without collapsing under the immense pressure perfectionism can add.
Children associate parental presence with safety, because their bodies tell them: “As long as your parent is near, you have protection.” In moments of separation, children must try to find feelings of security in a new environment or with a new caregiver or teacher, and that’s a tall order. It requires them to hold on to the feelings of safety that come from a parent-child relationship without having that relationship right there in front of them. For separation to feel manageable, children have to internalize—meaning, have within them—the feelings that often come in the presence of a parent, to trust that they are safe in this world even when a parent is not right next to them.
Transitional objects help children with this process; a blanket or stuffed animal or object from home becomes a physical representation of the parent-child bond, reminding a child that parents still exist and are “there” for you even when they are not right in front of you. I always recommend transitional objects to parents whose kids struggle with separation anxiety.
Understanding this will allow parents to project an air of confidence, and that’s really important—our feelings about our kids’ separation has a huge impact on their experience; if our kids sense that we are hesitant or nervous or doubtful, their separation reactions will be more intense, because they will absorb our anxiety, thereby magnifying their own. In moments of separation, our kids are essentially asking us, “Do you think I’ll be okay?” There’s nothing scarier to a child than separating from a parent who exudes fear around the separation; it’s as if the parent is saying, “You aren’t safe here. Goodbye!”
Talk to your child about a separation before it happens. For school drop-off, that might mean that a week before the first day, you discuss all aspects of school: how you’ll get there, the teachers’ names (show pictures if you can!), what the classroom will look like, and what drop-off will look like.
This same strategy can be applied to older kids when you’re preparing for a sleepover at a friend’s house or an overnight school camping trip.
Telling the story reminds a child that the moment of separation was part of a larger story, but it didn’t color their entire experience.
Remember, the attachment system is based in proximity seeking, because children feel safest when their parents are next to them. Nighttime can feel truly dangerous to kids—it means darkness, aloneness, the slowing down of the body and the speeding up of the mind, the emergence of scary thoughts, and even existential worries about permanence (“Are my parents really there when I can’t see them?”). Sleep is also a time when kids might express anxieties and struggles from other parts of their lives.
So … what can we do? I see sleep change as a two-step process: First, we have to help our kids feel safe. We have to help them develop coping skills during the day, when the stakes are lower, before a child will feel safe enough to separate at night.
Think of various ways to infuse your presence into your child’s room and bed area. Maybe you put a family photo next to your child’s sleep area and a photo of your child next to your bed as well. You can introduce this, during the daytime, by saying: “You know what I’ve been thinking about? Sometimes I have a hard time falling asleep and I think of you and miss you! I’d love to have a picture of you right next to my bed. Then I can see you and remind myself that you’re here and I’m safe, and that I’ll see you in the morning!
For children with these more intense emotions, I use the label “Deeply Feeling Kids” (DFKs)—it reflects the way they experience the world and it also explains why these children often feel overwhelmed and enter more easily into a “threat” or “fight or flight” state.
You’re a good parent and you have a good kid, and both of you can have a hard time.
Parents of DFKs have to commit to limiting the damage instead of solving the problem. They need to focus on the larger arc of a child’s struggle rather than fixating on what’s happening on the surface.
When kids are in this state, they need containment first. This requires that a parent take a deep breath and remember that their number one job is to keep their child safe. In times like these, that means removing the child from the current situation, bringing him to a smaller room, sitting with him, and being present for the emotional storm. Now, to be clear, your child won’t like this. He will protest and plead: “Wait, don’t carry me out, no no no no!!! I’ll calm down!” Hear me out: YOU MUST CARRY THROUGH. Not because you want to “win,” not because your child is manipulative, not to “show your child who’s boss.” You must carry through because your child needs to see that you are not overpowered by their dysregulation.
Perhaps more than anything else, DFKs pick up on your perception of them in their difficult moments; DFKs feel so overwhelmed by themselves and terrified of their own badness that they are hypervigilant for any sign from a parent that confirms their deepest fears.
You can tell your kid, “You’re a good kid having a hard time,” during a difficult moment, or you can share this idea in the aftermath of a big tantrum.
Your loving, as-calm-as-possible presence, without any words or fancy scripts, is without a doubt your most important parenting “tool.” Presence communicates goodness. It’s as if, just by being there, you’re saying, “I’m not scared of you, you’re not bad. I’m right next to you and this shows you that you’re good and lovable.” We have to show our kids that they aren’t “too much” for us, that they don’t overpower us.
The next time you’re trying to talk with your child about something feelings related, say, “I want to do something different. Lie down and don’t even look at me! No eye contact at all. I’m going to say some things … if you agree, give me a thumbs-up. If it’s a no, give me a thumbs-down. If something about what I say is kind of right, kind of not, give me a thumbs-to-the-side.”
We have to hold two seemingly oppositional truths at once. I have done things I am not proud of and I am good inside; I feel guilty about my parenting past and hopeful about my parenting future; I’ve been doing the best I can and I want to do better.
Finding your internal goodness doesn’t absolve you from taking responsibility for behavior; by contrast, grounding yourself in your internal goodness allows you to take responsibility for your behavior.