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 find recommendations for time-outs, sticker charts, punishments, rewards, or ignoring in this guide. Instead, the starting point is an understanding that behaviors are only the tip of the iceberg—beneath the surface is a child’s entire internal world, just begging to be understood.
Switching your parenting mindset from “consequences” to “connection” does not mean ceding family control to your children. This approach resists time-outs, punishments, consequences, and ignoring, yet there is nothing permissive or fragile about it. It promotes firm boundaries, parental authority, and sturdy leadership—all while maintaining positive relationships, trust, and respect.
The foundational assumption of this work is that you and your kids are good inside. Even when you call your child “a spoiled brat,” you are still good inside. Even when your child denies knocking down his sister’s block tower—though you watched it happen—he is still good inside. “Good inside” means that at our core, we are all compassionate, loving, and generous. Holding this belief is what allows you to be curious about the why behind bad behaviors instead of simply reacting to them.
Key Insight
Understanding that we’re all good inside 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 is easy—reflexive, even—to default to a less generous view, for two main reasons. First, we are evolutionarily wired with a negativity bias, paying closer attention to what’s difficult with our kids than to what is working well. Second, our experiences of our own childhoods influence how we perceive and respond to our kids’ behavior. Many of us had parents who led with judgment rather than curiosity, criticism instead of understanding, punishment instead of discussion.
How you talk to yourself when struggling—“Don’t be so sensitive,” “I’m overreacting,” “I’m so dumb,” or alternatively “I’m trying my best,” “I simply want to feel seen”—is based on how your parents spoke to or treated you in your times of struggle. In our early years, our body learns under what conditions we receive love and attention and understanding, and under what conditions we get rejected, punished, and left alone. This is what “circuitry” means: the patterns wired into your body from those earliest experiences.
Definition
Most Generous Interpretation (MGI): Ask yourself, “What is my most generous interpretation of what just happened?” This simple question can soften your body and shift how you interact with others—your kids, your partner, your friends. It teaches you to attend to what is going on inside your child (big feelings, worries, urges, sensations) rather than what is going on outside (big words or actions).
When you put the MGI into practice, you teach your children to do the same. You orient them to their internal experience—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, you are building in your children the foundation of healthy coping.
You don’t have to choose between two supposedly oppositional realities. You can avoid punishment and see improved behavior, parent with firm expectations and still be playful, create and enforce boundaries while showing love, take care of yourself and your children. You can do what’s right for your family and your kids can be upset. You can say no and care about your kids’ disappointment.
Principle
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. Holding on to multiple truths at once—yours and someone else’s—allows both people to feel seen and real, even in conflict. 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.
Convincing is an attempt to be “right,” which makes the other person “wrong.” It rests on the assumption that there is only one correct viewpoint. When you seek to convince someone, you essentially say: “You are mis-perceiving, mis-remembering, mis-feeling. Let me explain why I am correct.” The unfortunate consequence of being right is that the other person feels unseen and unheard—at which point most people become infuriated and combative, because it feels as if you do not accept their realness or worth.
Research on marriage, business, and friendship has shown repeatedly that relationships do better in “two things are true” mode. A core pillar of the Gottman Method is accepting that two perspectives are valid. Clinical psychologist Faye Doell demonstrated that people who listen to understand—versus listen to respond—have higher relationship satisfaction across the board. Neuropsychiatrist Daniel Siegel describes the critical importance of “feeling felt” in relationships: 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.
On a practical level, “two things are true” always seems to be the answer: you can say no to screen time and your child can be upset; you can be angry your child lied and curious about what felt too scary to tell you; you can see your child’s anxieties as irrational and still be empathic. Perhaps most powerfully: you can yell and be a loving parent, you can mess up and repair, you can regret things you’ve said and do better in the future. Logic doesn’t overpower emotion—you may have a valid reason for doing something, and also someone else has a valid emotional reaction.
In Practice
When you make a decision you believe in but know will upset your child, say as much: “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. Once you return to multiplicity, you can switch from a me-versus-you mentality to a me-and-you-against-a-problem mentality. Now you are on the same team, gazing at a problem together, wondering what you can do about it.
While this is a parenting book at its surface, at its core it is a relationship book. These principles apply to your relationship with your kids, your partner, your friends, your family, and perhaps most importantly, yourself. Bad behavior comes from dysregulated feelings we cannot manage—and what helps us manage the unmanageable is connection.
Principle
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, your job is to keep your children safe—physically and psychologically. You set boundaries out of love, because you want to protect them when they are unable to make good decisions for themselves. You don’t let toddlers walk too far from you on the sidewalk because they might dart toward the street. You don’t let young kids watch horror movies because the fears could be more than they can handle. Children need firm boundaries (firm doesn’t have to mean scary) because they need to know you can keep them safe when they are developmentally incapable of doing so themselves.
Key Insight
Boundaries are not what you tell kids not to do; boundaries are what you tell kids you will do. You cannot tell a child who is hitting to stop hitting or a child who is running to stop running and expect success—because you cannot control someone else. You can only control yourself.
Your job is to start linking a child’s downstairs brain (overwhelming feelings) to their upstairs brain (self-awareness, regulation, planning, decision-making). You want your kids to feel their wide range of feelings and have new experiences, and your role 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 feelings or teach kids to turn away from what they notice—it is to teach them how to manage all their feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and urges. You are the primary vehicle for this teaching, not through lectures or logic, but through the experiences your children have with you.
When you set a boundary during a child’s out-of-control moment, you are 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 this way. I will protect you from your own dysregulation taking over.” This is what we all want when we’re out of control—someone who will stay calm, take charge, and help us feel safe again.
All human beings—kids and adults—have a profound need to feel seen in who they are, and who we are at any given moment is related to what we are feeling inside. Empathy comes from your ability to be curious: it allows you to explore your child’s emotional experience from a place of learning, not judgment. When a child receives empathy, it makes them feel like someone is on their team, as if that person is taking on some of their emotional burden.
As kids strengthen their ability to regulate their feelings, those feelings are less likely to manifest as behavior. This is the difference between your child saying “I’m so mad at my sister!” (regulating anger) and your child hitting her sister (dysregulation).
Kids will “remember” their earliest years—including ages zero to three. They won’t remember in the way we typically think about memory; they won’t produce a story with words that connects to a past experience. But even if kids can’t remember with their words, they remember with something more powerful: their bodies. In this way, memories from early childhood are in fact more powerful than those formed in later years—the way parents interact with kids in their early years forms the blueprint they take with them into the world.
Definition
Attachment Theory: 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, kids learn what leads to closeness and what leads to distance, then adjust their behavior accordingly—all with the goal of establishing a secure attachment.
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 a 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 a result, the child feels capable of exploring, trying new things, taking risks, suffering failures, and being vulnerable. There is a deep and critical paradox here: the more a child can rely on a parent, the more curious and explorative they can be.
Definition
Internal Family Systems (IFS): A therapeutic model that considers different parts within a person, rather than thinking about a person in a singular manner. A basic assumption of IFS is that the mind is naturally subdivided into parts or subpersonalities. You might be outgoing with people you know well but reserved in new environments, or confident professionally but more reserved socially. You have your brave self, your anxious self, your confident self, your deferential self—you are multifaceted, not any one thing.
Using the language of “parts” with young children is powerful: it wires early the idea that sensations, feelings, and thoughts are parts we can relate to, not experiences that take over and consume us.
Key Insight
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.” Kids take experiences with their caregivers and infer larger messages about who they are. The emotions parents connect to—the ones you are interested in and will stay present for—tell children that the parts of them feeling those feelings are manageable, lovable, and worthy. The emotions you shut down, punish, reject, or try to make “more pleasant” teach children that those parts of them 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. It’s not your fault that your child is struggling—but it is your responsibility, as the adult in the family system, to change the environment so that your child can learn, grow, and thrive.
Key Insight
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. 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.
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.
Of course you want your kids to experience happiness—as children and as adults. That is precisely why the focus should be on building resilience. Resilience is, in many ways, your ability to experience a wide range of emotions and still feel like yourself. It helps you bounce back from the stress, failure, mistakes, and adversity in life.
Developing resilience doesn’t mean becoming immune to stress or struggle—these are unavoidable facts of life. Resilience determines how you relate to difficult moments and how you experience them.
Principle
Building resilience is about developing the capacity to tolerate distress, to stay in and with a tough, challenging moment, and to find your footing and goodness even when you don’t have confirmation of achievement or pending success.
The more you emphasize your children’s happiness and “feeling better,” the more you set them up for an adulthood of anxiety. Setting happiness as the goal compels you to solve your kids’ problems rather than equip them to solve their own. You don’t so much need to protect kids from having tough feelings as you need to prepare them to have those feelings. The best way to prepare them is through honesty and loving presence.
Consider a moment when you’re overwhelmed—throwing something or yelling is a sign that you were overwhelmed with emotion, not a sign that you don’t know right from wrong. You wouldn’t need someone to lecture, punish, or shame you. What you would need is to feel safe and good inside again. Then, when you’d cooled down, you would need to reflect on the larger story of how you got to that moment. The only way you’d be able to change and show up more grounded in the future would be to embrace curiosity about what was happening underneath the behavior.
Key Insight
When you approach kids with charts, reinforcement, stickers, and time-outs, you essentially tell them that their behavioral compliance is what matters most. You display an indifference to their distress and personhood—an interest in which is critical to forming human relationships—and your kids can feel that.
Definition
Connection Capital: The reserve of positive feelings you build up with your children, which you can draw on in times of struggle or when the relationship gets strained. If you don’t build this during the earlier years, you have nothing to draw on when your kids are adolescents and young adults—years when behavior modification methods are no longer at your disposal because your kids are physically bigger, more independent, and can rebel against sticker charts, rewards, and punishments.
The evidence around behavior change can make you lose sight of what actually matters in favor of what is immediately observable. As one clinical supervisor put it: “I could run a study showing a one hundred percent reduction in difficult behavior—if, every time a child did something ‘undesirable,’ a parent hit the child or made him sleep on the street for a night, I’m pretty sure my study would show compliance after a few weeks.” Evidence of compliance is not evidence of well-being.
For many parents, a non-punishing approach seems worrisome or counterintuitive. They fear that giving “positive attention” to a “misbehaving” child will only encourage the behavior. But rather than reducing connection after difficult behaviors, think about increasing connection outside of them. Behavioral issues are often a call for attention or connection—if those needs are met proactively, that cry for help becomes unnecessary.
Principle
Connection first. Connection is the opposite of shame and its antidote. Shame is a warning sign of aloneness, danger, and badness; connection is a sign of presence, safety, and goodness.
Connection does not mean approval. Approval is usually about a specific behavior; connection is about your relationship with the person underneath the behavior. This is another reason why connection with your 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 kids the truth will be too scary or overwhelming, but we tend to have it all wrong when it comes to what actually scares children. It’s not information that terrifies them—it’s feeling confused and alone in the absence of information.
Definition
Unformulated Experience: The feeling that something’s not right, without a clear explanation of what’s happening. When a child is left alone with the perception of change and the feeling of fear but receives no explanation, the confusion itself becomes the source of distress.
This is not about unnecessarily scaring children. It is about empowering them—and empowerment often comes from learning how to cope with stress. This requires a parent who is willing to approach rather than avoid the truth. The path to regulation starts with understanding: watching a parent confront hard truths helps a child learn to regulate their own feelings.
Key Insight
If a child were able to produce a complex question, they would already be demonstrating complex knowledge about the topic. Kids who ask about death are already thinking about death. Kids who ask about anatomical details 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 already living inside them. Try to catch your “My kid isn’t ready for this!” reflex and remind yourself: “Ready or not, the foundation is already there.”
Showing your children that you feel the tough stuff, that you struggle with it and still get through, is truly the best lesson you can give them.
Deep breathing is effective because it regulates important bodily processes, including those involved with lowering stress and reducing blood pressure. Diaphragmatic breathing, also known as “belly breathing,” stimulates your vagus nerve—the longest and most complex cranial nerve in the body. The vagus nerve is a main component of your parasympathetic nervous system, your “rest and restore” system (the opposite of the “fight or flight” system), and helps your body access feelings of safety and regulation. In short, deep belly breathing activates the circuits in your body that start the calming-down process.
Action: Acknowledge, Validate, Permit
The next time you find yourself drowning in an emotion you’d rather avoid, follow this sequence:
Connection capital flows two ways, like a bank account. Parents are big connection capital spenders—you spend it every time you ask kids to clean their rooms, tell them you need a few minutes for an unexpected work call, say “Time to leave, sweetie” or “Screen time is over.” Because you so often have to ask kids to do things they don’t want to do and to respect rules they’d rather not, you need to be an even bigger connection-builder. You need a strong reserve so you don’t run out of funds.
Your kids want your full attention more than anything else. Your attention communicates that they are safe, important, valuable, loved. Devices are powerful magnets for attention, and kids feel that distraction. This isn’t an argument against technology—it’s a suggestion to create boundaries around device use for yourself, so that you can give your kids your 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.
An element missing in many families is playfulness—silliness, ridiculousness, fun. Since one of your main jobs is to help your 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 your kids sends the message that they are safe.
Key Insight
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, unable to temporarily put that aside to understand and connect to the other person.
Repair offers the opportunity to change the ending to the story: instead of a child 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.
Action: How to Repair
When a child acts difficult, instead of reacting, try softening: take a deep breath and say slowly and warmly, “I think you’re trying to tell me that you’re not filled up with me.” Your softening leads to their softening. This won’t change things on a dime, but it can be a turning point—because it makes concrete exactly what your kid needs: more of their parent. And sometimes there isn’t an immediate fix. As you can tell your child: “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.”
When you say “My kid doesn’t listen,” you’re not really talking about listening—no parent complains their child doesn’t listen when told “Ice-cream sundaes are on the table!” What you’re really talking about is cooperation: your child won’t cooperate when you want him to do something he doesn’t want to do.
How do adults behave when asked to do something they don’t want to do? It usually depends on how close you feel, in that moment, to the person making the request. If you’re feeling good about your marriage and your partner asks a favor, you’ll probably say yes. But if you’ve been feeling unappreciated, you’re more likely to refuse. 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.
Principle
The single most important strategy for getting kids to listen is to connect to your child in their world before you ask them to do something in your world.
When you infuse connection, respect, playfulness, and trust into your asks, exchanges that once felt antagonistic start to be met with cooperation. 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. 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 options you are okay with, then let your child know you trust them to follow through.
Humor allows for a change in perspective. When you infuse playfulness instead of frustration, you join your children in the world they always prefer—one filled with silliness, lightheartedness, and laughter. When you bring laughter into the equation, your kids feel more connected and are more likely to cooperate.
Definition
In the moment of a tantrum, a child is experiencing a feeling, urge, or sensation that overwhelms their capacity to regulate. Tantrums are biological states of dysregulation, not willful acts of disobedience.
Helping your kids through tantrums relies on your 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.
You can say: “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 matter less than the idea and the tone. The idea is that you are allowed to make decisions and your kids are allowed to have their own feelings. As for tone: don’t deliver these words with coldness or aloofness, as if to say “You’re allowed to be upset and I don’t care.” You want to convey true permission and empathy.
The prefrontal cortex—responsible for language, logic, forward thinking, and perspective—is extremely underdeveloped in young children. This is why they have such intense emotional explosions. 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.
Your job during these tantrums is the same as in less-explosive ones: keep your own body calm and keep your child safe. Keeping a child safe here means focusing on containment—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.
Key Insight
“I won’t let you”—these four words are critical for every parent’s toolbox. They communicate 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. Having the urge to hit is okay; hitting a person is not. Finding safe ways to redirect urges can be much more successful than trying to shut them down. A child who has been biting can be given a chew necklace. A child who is kicking can be put in a room where they can move their legs and flail safely. Humanizing the urge and then shifting where you allow a child to discharge it allows the child to gain regulation and, over time, make better decisions.
Action: During an Aggressive Tantrum
Most of us survive a tantrum and think, “Whew, glad that’s done, let’s move on!” But once everyone is calm, you can get a big return by connecting with your child and reviewing 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. 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 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 every now and then.
Many parents then ask, “Do I tell them how to handle it differently next time?” No. 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 arrives, but underneath the “I don’t like her, send her back!” or the pleas of “Watch me!” is a child whose circuitry is going through a massive shift. Second and later children have opposite wiring: their circuitry is shaped by the constant presence of someone who can do things they cannot yet do, constantly competing for time and attention. You can’t build a block tower without seeing an older sibling do it more easily, can’t run without seeing a sibling run faster. There’s no problem to fix here—just a dynamic to understand.
Key Insight
Many families set a goal of being “fair” to decrease conflict, but making things fair is actually one of the biggest propellants of conflict. The more you work for fairness, the more you create opportunities for competition. Long-term, you want to help your kids orient inward to figure out their needs, not orient outward. You don’t want them as adults thinking, “What do my friends have? I need what they have”—that’s a life of anxiety and emptiness.
To move away from fair: when your kid screams “Not fair!”, work to shift their 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: feelings are forces. The feelings you don’t permit are more likely to catapult out as behavior. The more you allow your kids to feel jealousy, the more you can problem-solve around it; the less you allow jealousy (“Don’t say that about your sister!”), the fewer skills a child develops for dealing with it, and the more likely it is that jealousy will come out as insults or disruptive behavior.
Principle
Maintain a zero-tolerance policy for siblings insulting each other or calling each other names. This is bullying, and families should take a hard line about it. Venting feelings is allowed; targeting a sibling with insults is not.
Why are you rude to people sometimes? Why would you talk back to or disobey your boss? The reason is almost always the same: you feel misunderstood. You are looking to feel seen and don’t. You feel frustrated that someone isn’t really hearing you, and your relationship with that person isn’t as strong as it could be in that moment. Knowing what would make you act out helps guide your approach to rudeness or defiance in kids.
Imagine you had a rough day, and your partner asks about the dishwasher. You snap back rudely. Now 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 that feel? Afterward, are you more or less likely to be rude? Now compare that to: “I won’t tolerate your rudeness. No TV for you for a week!” The same principle holds for kids—meeting their rudeness with empathy and kindness will make them feel seen and help inspire kindness in return.
Key Insight
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.
Definition
Whining = strong desire + powerlessness. Children whine when they feel helpless. Additionally, whining is often a sign that everything feels like too much—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 you respond to a whine with silliness or humor, you offer what a child needs most: connection and hopefulness, both of which are present in lighthearted moments.
It’s 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 insisting a child restate a request in a more “appropriate tone” creates unnecessary power struggles, and a minor moment escalates into an outright battle. Modeling the better approach and moving on is both more humane and more effective. When your child says, “Dad, I need my boooooook!” instead of demanding a do-over, try saying the request yourself in a stronger voice: “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, and trust your child to hear the difference.
Looking at lying through a lens of being disrespected totally misses the point—it pits you against your child and locks you into a power struggle where nobody wins. Lying is almost never about being defiant, sneaky, or sociopathic. Like so many behaviors in this book, lying is much more about a child’s basic desires and their focus on attachment than about being manipulative. This doesn’t mean you “let your kids off the hook”—but the approach to 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 you can address it head-on and create an environment where truth-telling becomes more possible. You cannot change a behavior you don’t understand, and punishment, threats, and rage are never components of environments that foster understanding or change.
Key Insight
When you look at lies in the framework of a child’s wish—their desire to retain control and change the ending—you see the lie not for its impact on you but as a sign of their need to feel safe and good inside. What we label as lying is often a child’s body’s way of protecting itself—far from “manipulation,” it is a form of self-defense. A third big reason kids lie is to assert their independence: all of us have a basic need to feel like we know who we are and exist in our own right.
The goal is to increase truth-telling in the future rather than increase “confessions” now. These strategies won’t end with your child saying “I lied! It’s true!” 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 requires taking a deep breath and swallowing your pride in the moment of a lie—allowing the moment to pass without demanding acknowledgment and focusing 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. It allows for more options than just “telling the truth” and “lying”—now there’s an in-between place. Your ability to see and vocalize that gray area can soften the intensity and create a way to connect.
Principle
You cannot just “get rid” of anxiety. Anxiety can only be effectively managed by increasing your tolerance for it, allowing it to exist, and understanding its purpose. This makes space for other emotions to emerge, preventing anxiety from taking over.
You want your children to feel like you are jumping into the hole with them, keeping them company—not trying to pull them out of it. Avoidance always increases anxiety. If you aren’t willing to name and discuss a situation your child feels anxious about, it tells your child that you must be anxious about it too, which only adds to their anxiety.
Dry runs can help kids feel more prepared for moments of separation, doctor’s appointments, sports tryouts, playdates, reading aloud in class—virtually any stressful situation would be improved by a dry run. You can practice directly with your child or act out the scenario with stuffed animals, which is especially helpful for younger kids or those resistant to rehearsing a scary situation.
For kids who struggle with anxiety, mantras can be very helpful in the moment. Whether spoken aloud or recited internally, a mantra focuses attention on calming words rather than the source of distress.
If 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 them later on.
Key Insight
“You’ll know when you’re ready to ___.” This phrase communicates that you trust your child, which teaches them to trust themselves—and self-trust is the essence of confidence. It also implies movement: your kid will be more comfortable eventually.
There’s great 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.
Your kids will always respond to the versions of themselves you reflect back. When you label kids—“Oh, she’s shy” or “He never likes to talk to grown-ups”—you lock them into roles with a rigidity that makes growth difficult. Instead of labeling, provide a generous interpretation of your child’s behavior, especially if someone else applies 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 when she’s ready.”
Principle
If you want your kids to develop frustration tolerance, you have to develop tolerance for their frustration. When your child is struggling, they are looking at you and absorbing your relationship with their frustration—and this forms the foundation for their own relationship with frustration.
Beyond any strategy or script, the most impactful thing you can do is show up in a calm, regulated, non-rushed, non-blaming, non-outcome-focused way—both when your kids are performing difficult tasks and when they are witnessing you perform difficult tasks.
A growth mindset teaches that hard work and improvement are in your control, while specific outcomes are not. The less obsessed you are with “success,” the more willing you’ll be to try new things and develop and grow. Your job as a parent is not to help kids get out of the learning space and into knowing—it’s to help them learn to stay in that learning space and tolerate not being in knowing.
Action: Family Mantras for Frustration
When parents talk about what their kids will or will not eat, what they’re really assessing is whether they are doing a good job, whether their kids are willing to “take in” what they want to offer. Understanding this deeper connection between parenting and feeding is the first step to reducing mealtime intensity. It helps separate what’s actually happening from the deeper feelings that get evoked, so you can intervene based on what’s in front of you rather than on fears and insecurities.
Definition
Division of Responsibility (Ellyn Satter): Parent’s job is to decide what food is offered, where it is offered, and when it is offered. Child’s job is to decide whether and how much to eat of what’s offered. Parents establish the outer edges (the container); within that container, children are free to explore and express themselves.
This division gives parents a way to feel good about their role no matter what their child does or doesn’t eat. It also means parents shouldn’t link dessert to how much a child eats, because that crosses into the child’s domain. There’s no one right way to do dessert—the key is grounding your decision in your role: you decide whether it’s served, what it is, and when it’s offered. After that, it’s your kid’s job.
Action: Mealtime Reminders
Principle
Strike the following words from your parenting vocabulary: “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 themselves.
What would lead you, an adult, to escalate your expression of emotions? If you want the seriousness of your feelings recognized or your needs known, and you sense that someone is responding with disinterest, invalidation, or minimization, your body would undoubtedly escalate into a more intense expression. You would be desperate to feel seen and understood. When you look at “fake tears” through this lens, you think less about the on-the-surface expression and more about the underlying unmet needs.
Key Insight
This is an extremely powerful message to give your child: sometimes our body knows things that our mind doesn’t yet understand.
Definition
Confidence is your ability to feel at home with yourself in the widest range of feelings possible. Confidence doesn’t come from convincing yourself you’re not confused or scared—it comes from allowing that feeling and owning it. It’s the ability to say, “I’m totally confused and I trust my feeling and it doesn’t mean anything bad about me.”
Building confidence isn’t only about saying the “right” thing when things go “wrong.” It’s also about what you say when things go “right”—because there is one type of commentary that seems like it should build confidence but actually gets in the way: praise. “Good job!” and “You’re so smart!” and “You’re an amazing artist!” build up a child’s reliance on external validation—approval from other people. Internal validation, which is what you want to encourage, is the process of seeking approval from oneself. It’s the difference between gazing out for good feelings rather than gazing in.
Key Insight
When you wonder with your kids about the how instead of praising the what, you build up their tendency to gaze inward and be curious about themselves. Asking “How’d you think to do that?” lets your child know you’re interested in their process, not just their product—this builds a self-belief that proclaims, “The things inside me are interesting and valuable.”
| Domain | Inside Stuff | Outside Stuff |
|---|---|---|
| Sports | Practice effort, coachability, resilience, trying new skills | Goals, wins, status labels, trophies |
| Academics | Study habits, curiosity, persistence with hard problems | Grades, test scores, class rankings |
In sports, “inside stuff” is effort in practice, attitude when winning and losing, willingness to try new things; “outside stuff” is number of goals, home runs, or labels like “most valuable player.” In academics, inside stuff is willingness to try a bonus problem, time spent studying, enthusiasm about a subject; outside stuff is a grade, a test score, or a label like “smartest kid in class.” The more your family focuses on inside stuff, the more children value inside stuff—which ultimately translates to valuing who they are over what they do.
Perfectionism steals a child’s (and an adult’s) ability to feel good in the process of learning because it dictates that goodness only comes from successful outcomes. There are components of perfectionism—drive, strong-mindedness, conviction—that can feel really good. The goal is to help your 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 find feelings of security in a new environment or with a new caregiver, and that’s a tall order. It requires them to hold on to the feelings of safety from the parent-child relationship without having it 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, trusting they are safe even when a parent is not right next to them.
Key Insight
Transitional objects help children with this process. A blanket, 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 them even when not in front of them.
Your feelings about your child’s separation have a huge impact on their experience. If your kids sense that you are hesitant, nervous, or doubtful, their separation reactions will be more intense because they absorb your anxiety, magnifying their own. In moments of separation, your kids are essentially asking, “Do you think I’ll be okay?” There’s nothing scarier to a child than separating from a parent who exudes fear—it’s as if the parent is saying, “You aren’t safe here. Goodbye!”
Action: Preparing for Separation
The attachment system is based in proximity seeking—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.
Sleep change is a two-step process. First, you have to help your kids feel safe. You 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.
Action: Infusing Presence at Bedtime
Think of ways to infuse your presence into your child’s room and bed area. Put a family photo next to your child’s sleep area and a photo of your child next to your bed. Introduce this during the daytime: “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!”
Definition
Deeply Feeling Kids (DFKs): Children with more intense emotions who experience the world in a heightened way. This label reflects how they experience the world and explains why they 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, and focus on the larger arc of a child’s struggle rather than fixating on what’s happening on the surface.
When kids are in a dysregulated state, they need containment first. Take a deep breath and remember that your number one job is to keep your child safe. That means removing the child from the current situation, bringing them to a smaller room, sitting with them, and being present for the emotional storm. Your child won’t like this—they will protest and plead: “Wait, don’t carry me out, I’ll calm down!” You must carry through. Not to “win,” not because your child is manipulative, not to “show who’s boss”—but because your child needs to see that you are not overpowered by their dysregulation.
Key Insight
Perhaps more than anything else, DFKs pick up on your perception of them in their difficult moments. They 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 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. 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.” You have to show your kids that they aren’t “too much” for you, that they don’t overpower you.
Action: The No-Eye-Contact Check-In
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 is kind of right, kind of not, give me a thumbs-to-the-side.”
You have to hold two seemingly oppositional truths at once: you have done things you are not proud of and you are good inside; you feel guilty about your parenting past and hopeful about your parenting future; you’ve been doing the best you can and you 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 is what allows you to take responsibility for your behavior.