Good Inside

We must separate the child from the behavior. Often, when a child’s behavior appears as “bad”, it’s really the child having a big emotion that they can’t regulate in a controlled way. Offers helpful tips on every day parenting struggles. Another parenting book that will give you a good frame of mind when thinking about your kids, but as I put this to practice, there are still challenging times where I have no idea what I am doing as a parent.

Summary and Highlights

“What is my child struggling with and what’s my role in helping them?”

Move from a place of “What’s wrong with my child and can you fix them?” to “What is my child struggling with and what’s my role in helping them?” And hopefully also, “What’s coming up for ME about this situation?”

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.

Practical, solution-based strategies can also promote deeper healing.

You can be firm and warm, boundaried and validating, focused on connection while acting as a sturdy authority.

Seeing your child as good inside does not excuse bad behavior or lead to permissive parenting.

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.

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.

When parents chronically shut down a behavior harshly without recognizing the good kid underneath, a child internalizes that they are bad.

Finding the good inside can often come from asking ourselves one simple question: “What is my most generous interpretation of what just happened?”

Focusing on a child’s impact on us sets the stage for codependence, not regulation or empathy.

Finding the MGI (Most Generous Interpretation) 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).

At all times, but especially when our kids are dysregulated—meaning their emotions overwhelm their current coping skills—they look to their parents to understand, “Who am I right now? Am I a bad kid doing bad things . . . or am I a good kid having a hard time?” Our kids form their own self-view by taking in their parents’ answers to these questions.

If we want our kids to have true self-confidence and to feel good about themselves, we need to reflect back to our kids that they are good inside, even as they struggle on the outside.

In a family system, some roles are prioritized over others. Safety comes before happiness and before our kids’ being pleased with us. First and foremost, our job is to keep our children safe, physically and psychologically.

There’s nothing scary to a child as noticing when their parent fails at this job (especially when that failure stems from a parent’s fear of their kid’s reaction).

The child receives the subconscious message: when you are out of control, there’s no one capable of stepping in and helping you.

Of course, your kid won’t thank you for stepping in and keeping them safe, but I promise you, that’s what they’re looking for, because it’s what allows them to build the emotion regulation skills they need to grow into a healthy adult.

In this two-story-house analogy, the parent is, basically, a staircase. Their primary function is to start linking a child’s downstairs brain (overwhelming feelings) to their upstairs brain (self-awareness, regulation, planning, decision-making).

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

Validation is the process of seeing someone else’s emotional experience as real and true, rather than seeing someone else’s emotional experience as something we want to convince them out of or logic them away from.

Two psychological models that address the relationship between parent and child: attachment theory and internal family systems.

Attachment Theory

Children who figured out how to keep an attachment figure nearby—literally, physically close to them—were more likely to receive comfort and protection, which meant they were more likely to survive, while children who had more distance from an attachment figure were less likely to receive comfort and protection, and thus were less likely to survive.

Children create different types of attachment based on their early experiences with caregivers. The type of attachment that is formed impacts that child’s internal working model—the thoughts, memories, beliefs, expectations, emotions, and behaviors that influence how they interact with themselves and others, and what types of relationships they seek out in later years.

Internal working models are based on what a child learns, through personal interactions, about their caregiver’s responsiveness, availability, consistency, repair, and reactivity.

Children filter our interactions with them based on a handful of questions: Am I lovable and good and desirable to be around? Will I be seen and heard? What can I expect of others when I am upset? What can I expect of others when I am overwhelmed? What can I expect of others when we disagree?

They take the answers to these questions and make generalizations about who they are allowed to be and how the world works.

A child learns that certain feelings are threatening to attachment.

That child will then seek to shut down these experiences, likely through the mechanism of shame or self-blame, as his survival literally depends on it.

His feelings are real and valid and can be held within close relationships.

Now, relationships with parents that include responsiveness, warmth, predictability, and repair when things feel bad set a child up to have a secure base.

The more children feel they can depend on a parent, the more independent they can be.

Internal family systems (IFS)

Therapeutic model that considers different parts within a person, as opposed to thinking about a person in a singular manner.

The language of “parts” allows us to articulate, internally and externally, our conflicting—or at least coexisting—emotions:

Sensations and feelings and thoughts as parts we can relate to, not experiences that take over and consume us.

Under the behavior is a child (or in IFS language, a part of a child) who is in pain, has an unmet need, and is in desperate need of connection.

The development of the middle prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain involved with emotion regulation, cognitive flexibility, empathy, and connectedness—is influenced by the attachment relationship with a caregiver.

Destiny—an individual wired for insecure attachment can rewire for secure attachment.

Destiny—an individual wired for insecure attachment can rewire for secure attachment.

When parents are willing to change, when they are willing to repair and reflect together, nondefensively, about moments in the past that felt bad to kids . . . the child’s brain can rewire.

A child’s behavior—which is an expression of a child’s emotion regulation patterns—develops in relation to a parent’s emotional maturity.

Children who are left alone with intense distress often rely on one of two coping mechanisms: self-doubt and self-blame.

With self-doubt, kids invalidate their own experience in an attempt to feel safe in their environment again.

It leads to teens and adults who don’t trust themselves and cannot locate intuition. Instead, they use other people’s treatment of them to define who they are and what they deserve.

Self-blame

Allows a child to feel in control, because as long as he convinces himself that he’s a bad kid doing bad things, and that if he was better he would feel more secure . . . well, then he has a viable option to change.

Say you’re sorry, share your reflections with your child—restating your memory of what happened, so your kid knows it wasn’t all in his head—and then say what you wish you had done differently and what you plan to do differently now and in the future.

(“Mommy was having big feelings that came out in a yelling voice. Those were my feelings and it’s my job to work on managing them better. It’s never your fault when I yell and it’s not your job to figure out how I can stay calmer. I love you”)

Instead of insinuating that your child “made you” react in a certain way.

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.

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.

“Good parents don’t get it right all the time. Good parents repair.”

Whether you’re repairing something big or small, your children will feel that repair in their bodies, and this moment of connection and explanation will soften the initial memory of aloneness and confusion. The big repairs, the small repairs—they all matter. Every little bit counts.

Resillience > Happiness

Cultivating happiness is dependent on regulating distress.

We have to feel safe before we can feel happy.

The wider the range of feelings we can regulate—if we can manage the frustration, disappointment, envy, and sadness—the more space we have to cultivate happiness.

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

Resilience, in many ways, is our ability to experience a wide range of emotions and still feel like ourselves.

Helps us bounce back from the stress, failure, mistakes, and adversity in our lives.

Our resilience determines how we relate to those difficult moments as well as how we experience them.

stress + coping = internal experience.

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 qualities children most need from their parents in order to develop resilience include: empathy, listening, accepting them for who they are, providing a safe and consistent presence, identifying their strengths, allowing for mistakes, helping them develop responsibility, and building problem-solving skills.

Am I helping my kid tolerate and work through this distress, or am I encouraging my child to avoid and beeline out of the distress?

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.

Behavior is a Window

When we focus too much on judging and changing a specific behavior, we get in the way of that behavior actually changing, because we miss the core struggle that motivated it in the first place.

By understanding what motivates behavior, we can help kids build resilience and regulate emotions, which will inevitably lead to behavioral changes.

When we address the behavior first, we miss the opportunity to help our children build skills, and beyond this, we miss the opportunity to see our kids as people rather than a collection of behaviors.

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),

When we sacrifice relationship building in favor of control tactics, our children may age, but in many ways, they developmentally remain toddlers, because they miss out on years of building the emotion regulation, coping skills, intrinsic motivation, and inhibition of desires that are necessary

When our kids get older and bigger, methods of behavior control stop working. Children simply aren’t motivated anymore by our rewards, and they’re too physically big for us to enforce punishments and consequences.

When we sacrifice relationship building in favor of control tactics, our children may age, but in many ways, they developmentally remain toddlers, because they miss out on years of building the emotion regulation, coping skills, intrinsic motivation, and inhibition of desires that are necessary for life success.

When we are busy exerting extrinsic control over our children’s external behavior, we sacrifice teaching these critical internal skills.

If we don’t build a sturdy foundation with our kids—one based in trust, understanding, and curiosity—then we have nothing keeping them attached to us.

connection capital

The reserve of positive feelings we hopefully build up with our children, which we can pull from in times of struggle or when the relationship between us gets strained.

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

Some questions to get you started, to ask yourself after any tough moment: What is my most generous interpretation (MGI) of my child’s behavior?

What was going on for my child that moment? What was my child feeling right before that behavior emerged? What urge did my child have a hard time regulating? What is a parallel situation in my life? And if I did something similar, what might I have been struggling with in that moment? What does my child feel I don’t understand about them? If I remember that my child is a good kid having a hard time . . . what are they having a hard time with? What deeper themes are being displayed underneath this behavior?

Reduce Shame, Increase Connection

A numb, glazed-over child tends to infuriate a parent, because we think our child is ignoring us, or we misinterpret their behavior as rudeness or apathy.

As a result, rather than recognize or address the shame, we yell or get into a power struggle with our kid or send him away to his room—all approaches that escalate the shame and continue the cycle.

Our goal as parents should be to notice when shame arises in our child, understand what situations bring it up, and see how it presents behaviorally.

After that, we want to develop shame reduction, which enables us to help our children feel safe and secure again. Detect first, reduce second. So how do we do that?

Develop shame reduction, which enables us to help our children feel safe and secure again. Detect first, reduce second.

Refusal to apologize is a classic example of shame: it presents as cold and unempathic when, in fact, in these moments, a child is overwhelmed with “badness” and freezes up.

When a child is overwhelmed with shame, we must be willing to put our original “goal”—to elicit an apology, to inspire gratitude, to prompt an honest answer—to the side and instead focus solely on reducing the shame.

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.

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. Shame is sticky; it stagnates us. Connection is opening; it allows for movement. Connection is when we show our kids, “It’s okay to be you right now. Even when you’re struggling, it’s okay to be you. I am here with you, as you are.”

The more we get to know our own circuitry, learn to tolerate and explore our own distress, and build coping skills for hard feelings, the more present we can be for our children.

Tell the Truth

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.

When kids are left to make sense of a scary change on their own, they usually rely on the methods that give them control: self-blame (“I must have done something to cause this. I’m bad, I’m too much”) and self-doubt (“I must have misunderstood the tension around me.")

Watching a parent confront hard truths will help a child learn to regulate his feelings.

Confirming Perceptions

“________ happened. You were right to notice that.”

Children are wired to notice and perceive, so I would assume that even if my child appeared calm, feelings of fear would be living inside his body.

Confirming our children’s perceptions sets them up to recognize when things don’t feel right later, and it will empower them to trust themselves enough to speak up.

You won’t always have answers, but you can always work on feeling safe and competent in the present moment.

Self-Care

Kids actually feel comforted when parents set firm boundaries around self-care. Parents, after all, are the leaders of the family, and children want a sense of sturdiness and self-assurance in their leaders.

“I have an opportunity. I can heal things within myself at the same time as I parent my kids in a way I feel proud of. I can do both at the same time.”

Long out-breaths are key to calming down.

Acknowledge, Validate, Permit (AVP)

The more energy we use to push emotions like anxiety or anger or sadness away, the more powerfully those emotions spring back up.

Rather than avoiding emotions we’d rather not face, we need to make a shift. We need to say to ourselves, “[Anxiety/anger/sadness] is not my enemy. My [anxiety/anger/sadness] is allowed to be here. I can tolerate my discomfort.”

Acknowledge: Label your feelings.

Validate: Respect your feelings enough to assume they aren’t lying to you. Now tell yourself a story about why your feelings make sense.

Permit: Give yourself permission to have your feeling in whatever way it’s showing up.

We need cooperation from others, but not approval.

You are not defined by your reactivity or your moments of depletion or your latest behavior. You are a parent who is good inside, and you are working on yourself at the same time as you are giving to your kids.

Building Connection Capital

When parents struggle with their kids, it almost always boils down to one of two problems: children don’t feel as connected to their parents as they want to, or children have some struggle or unmet need they feel alone with.

Having a healthy amount of connection capital leads kids to feel confident, capable, safe, and worthy. And these positive feelings on the inside lead to “good” behavior on the outside—behavior like cooperation, flexibility, and regulation.

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.

PNP Time Give it a name to indicate that this time is special. Limit time to ten to fifteen minutes. No phones, no screens, no siblings, no distractions. Let your child pick the play. This is key. Allow your child to be in the spotlight; your job is only to notice, imitate, reflect, and describe what they’re doing.

Fill-Up Game. Offer the idea that your child’s defiant behavior is the result of not being filled up with Mommy (or Daddy), and so it must be time to get a big dose. Add silliness and laughter.

Emotional vaccination

We connect with our kids, discuss and validate the challenge they might soon face, and verbalize or even rehearse how we might handle it—all before it happens.

Visualize a situation that might be tough for you today. Now, direct inward caring, understanding, and allowing in advance: “I am allowed to feel this way. I am going to take a deep breath now, in anticipation . . . and maybe I’ll find that deep-breath-and-compassion circuit when the moment itself comes.”

Emotional Vaccination = Connection + Validation + A Story to Understand

Carried out before the “main event.”

The Feeling Bench

“Hey! You’re feeling [sad/scared/angry/left out]. That’s okay. I’m here. Tell me more,”

Sit down on this bench without making any attempt to pull him off. “This is how I am building connection with him and resilience inside of him.”

Words:

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

Sit on the couch or the bed with your child as they talk to you. Say very little as they talk. Nod. Look sympathetic. Offer your child a hug while they’re upset. Breathe deeply together.

Playfulness

Suggestions for playfulness: Silly dance parties. “Talent Show”—everyone Making up songs or rhymes. Family karaoke.

Playing dress-up, playing house, or other fantasy play. Building a fort. Use playfulness as a first response to missed manners, not listening, or whining.

“Did I Ever Tell You About the Time . . . ?”

involves the parent’s relating to the child’s struggle from a personal perspective—builds connection, acknowledges a child’s good-inside-ness, and teaches problem-solving skills, all without talking about the problem directly, which can feel too intense for a kid in the moment.

Identify the essence of your child’s struggle.

Take on the problem as your own:

Talk to your child not in the heat of the moment but when things are calm, starting with, “Did I ever tell you about the time . . . ?,” and share a story about yourself having a similar struggle. Engage your child in this story, ideally one where you didn’t come up with a quick fix but struggled and just kind of got through it.

Do not end your story by directly relating it to your child.

You’re connecting deeply, because you’re showing your child your vulnerabilities.

The gap between a child’s world of struggle and a parent’s world of capability is intimidating for kids, and it can be (unintentionally) shame inducing.

Two things can be true: you can be good and you can struggle . . . just like me.”

Change the Ending

Repair offers us the opportunity to change the ending to the story.

Difference between repairing and apologizing. Oftentimes, apologies attempt to shut down a conversation (“I’m sorry I yelled. Okay, can we move on?”), but a good repair opens one up. A repair goes further than an apology, because it looks to reestablish a close connection after a moment when someone feels hurt, misunderstood, or alone.

Script for Changing the Ending:

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.

Love to listen and understand [curiosity].”

When someone reflects with you (“I’ve been thinking about . . .”) and acknowledges your feelings (“You must have been upset to have . . .” or “That must have felt scary when I . . .”), they make it clear they they’re considering your state of mind instead of just your surface-level behavior.

Take ownership and tell your kids that they aren’t responsible for causing your feelings or fixing your reactions.

And remember: nothing feels as awful to kids as the painful feelings they are left alone with; repair replaces this aloneness with connection, and this should be the ultimate trade-up for all of us.

Not Listening

When we say “My kid doesn’t listen,” we’re not really talking about listening.

What we mean is “My kid won’t cooperate when I want him to do something he doesn’t want to do.”

The more connected we feel to someone, the more we want to comply with their requests.

So when our kids aren’t listening to us, it’s critical to frame the struggle not as a child problem but as a relationship problem.

Consider what’s going on for that child, what must feel hard or frustrating, and why my child might be feeling “unseen” or pushed to the side.

We ask our kids to do something they “have to do” but don’t want to do—something that is a priority for us but not for them. It’s reasonable to struggle with cooperation in these scenarios.

Yelling, for example, is not an effective way to inspire cooperation. In fact, it’s counterproductive.

When we yell, our kids’ bodies enter into threat mode—they perceive danger from a parent’s aggressive tone, volume, and body language, and they cannot even process what the parent is saying because their energy is focused only on surviving the moment.

Connect Before You Ask.

Give Your Child a Choice.

Humor

When we infuse playfulness instead of frustration, we join our children in the world they always prefer—one filled with silliness, lightheartedness, and laughter.

Close Your Eyes Hack

“I am going to close my eyes”—then place your hands over your eyes—“and all I’m saying is that if there is a child with his shoes on when I open my eyes . . . oh my goodness, if there is a child all Velcroed up . . . I just don’t know what I am going to do! I am going to be so confused! I may even—oh no oh no—have to do a silly jumpy dance and wiggle all around and I may even fall on the floor!” Then pause. Wait.

Role-Reversal Game

The more we help a child, in general, feel seen, independent, trustworthy, and in control, the more willing they will be to listen to our requests.

“I know being a kid is tough. There are so many things that parents ask of you! So let’s play a game. For the next five minutes, you’re the adult and I’m the kid.

I have to do what you say, assuming it’s safe.”

Does not involve food or gifts.

While you play the game, exaggerate how hard it is to listen to your “parent”; voice things like, “Ughhhhhh, really? I have to clean up the Magna-Tiles? I don’t waaaaaaant to.”

Emotional Tantrums

When children seem to “lose it”—are a sign of one thing and one thing only: that a child cannot manage the emotional demands of a situation.

Tantrums are biological states of dysregulation, not willful acts of disobedience.

But we cannot encourage subservience and compliance in our kids when they’re young and expect confidence and assertiveness when they’re older.

When our intention is simply to stop the yelling or crying, kids feel it and learn only one lesson: “The feelings that overwhelm me also overwhelm my parent. My parent is trying to end this, which means my emotions truly are as bad as they feel.”

Strategies:

Remind Yourself of Your Own Goodness

“Nothing is wrong with me. Nothing is wrong with my child. I can cope with this.”

Two Things Are True

“I get why you feel this way,” or “It feels so bad, I know!” or “Being a kid can be so hard.”

We are not in charge of our children’s feelings, our kids don’t need to say “Sure, no problem!” when we make decisions, and communicating that we are okay with our children’s feelings will teach them to be okay with having big feelings, which is critical to developing emotion regulation.

Name the Wish

Say out loud what your child is wishing for that they aren’t getting.

Validate the Magnitude

When we validate the intensity of their feelings, we help to reframe a confusing mass of emotion into something concrete and easier to understand.

You might say: “You want those crayons . . . You want them SO big . . . as big as this room! Or no . . . as big as this whole house! What? Oh wow. As big as this whole neighborhood!”

Aggresive Tantrums

Even these tantrums are normal.

These types of tantrums—ones that involve boundary violations (contacting someone else’s body and aggressive behavior)—are a signal that a child’s frontal lobe, the part of the brain responsible for executive functioning, including controlling impulses, is totally offline and that he is physiologically flooded and in a “threat” state.

These explosive moments happen because a child is terrified of the sensations, urges, and feelings coursing inside their body.

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.

Don’t try to teach or lecture or build new skills with your kid in these explosive moments; containment is the only goal.

Strategies

“I Won’t Let You”

These four words—“I won’t let you”—are critical for every parent’s toolbox.

Communicates that a parent is in charge.

Differentiate Urge from Action

Finding safe ways to redirect our children’s urges can be much more successful than trying to shut down the urges themselves.

Contain the Fire

“My number one job is to keep you safe, and right now safety means carrying you to your room and sitting with you there.

You’re not in trouble. I love you. I’m here.”

Get into the room, shut the door, sit at the door so your child cannot get out.

Prevent any physical aggression.

Focus on your own deep breaths.

If they can feel your regulation, even in their state of such major dysregulation, you are helping them calm down.

Don’t try to reason, don’t lecture, don’t punish, don’t say too much at all.

Likely to interpret anything you say as additional danger.

Loud, chaotic tantrums need calm, steady voices.

“You’re a good kid having a hard time. I’m here. I love you. Do your thing. You’re allowed to feel this way.”

Personify the Feelings

Kids can say some nasty things: “I hate you!” or “Leave me alone!” or “I hope you die!”.

Your child is saying these words aloud and seems to be throwing them in your direction, but consider your child is actually talking to the overwhelming, terrifying, threatening feelings inside his body.

When you reframe kids’ words in this way, you’ll find it much easier to stay present and grounded. You’ll see that your child feels terrified and under attack and clearly needs you there.

Telling the Story

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.

Remember that the key element is the connection and storytelling, not the solution.

Sibling Rivalry

When kids are going at it with each other, they’re “telling” their parents that they feel unsettled, that their sibling feels like a threat to their essential need to feel secure in the family.

The more we connect with our kids about how they feel—in this case maybe jealous or angry toward a sibling—the less likely they are to explode in the form of behavior: insults, hitting, mockery, put-downs.

Strategies

PNP Time

Dedicated alone time for each child to spend with a parent.

Making things fair is one of the biggest propellants of conflict. The more we work for fairness, the more we create opportunities for competition.

We want to help our kids orient inward to figure out their needs, not orient outward.

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.”

Allow Venting (but Only to You)

When your children know they can talk to you honestly about their feelings toward their sibling(s), they become much less likely to take out their feelings on their brother or sister.

Name-calling is not innocent teasing; it’s one way a kid can chip away at another kid’s confidence, especially when parents don’t step in to stop it.

Step In When There’s Danger, Slow Down and Narrate When There’s Not

We want to teach our kids to problem-solve with each other, not rely on us to judge who is right and who is wrong, who goes first and who goes second.

We must step in to protect both kids: the kid who is being threatened and the kid who is out of control. Both kids need our help.

Step In (Dangerous Situations)

Slow Down and Narrate (Not Dangerous “I won’t let you” situations may also include nasty words or taunting or teasing; this is another reason why a parent might step in and separate their kids, to protect one child from bullying and to protect the other from continuing to take on the role of bully. Both kids need our help.

Slow Down (Not Dangerous Situations)

Slow things down but not solve.

Helping each of them narrate their perspective without taking sides or making someone the “bad kid” or the “good kid.”

Slow down the situation so your kids can regulate their bodies and have access to their own problem-solving skills.

Rudeness and Defiance

Strategies

Don’t Take the Bait

Deeper and more vulnerable—seeing the feelings underneath the words.

*Put a boundary around your child’s behavior (“I won’t allow . . .” or “I won’t let you . . .”).

Provide a generous interpretation

Embody Your Authority—Without Punishing or Being Scary

Take deep breaths.

Consider whether there’s a way to sublimate the urge.

Reflect and act later.

State the Truth

The next time you’re setting a rule you know your child won’t like, say as much. When you do this, you establish your connection by validating her experience and you provide an opportunity to brainstorm and cope in advance.

Connect and Build Regulation When Everyone Is Calm

Kids also whine when they’re looking for connection, to indicate that they feel alone and unseen in their desires.

Children are often looking for an emotional release, and whining is a sign that everything feels like too much.

Channel Your Own Inner Whiner

Strategies

Humor

Restate the Request in Your Own Voice and Move On

See the Need

When kids are whining, they are asking for some combination of more attention, more connection, more warmth, more empathy, and more validation.

Lying

Child may be coping with her guilt, or her fear of disappointing or enraging you in that moment, by entering into fantasy.

Kids, of all ages, need to have some part of their lives that is separate from their parents, to access feelings of ownership and sovereignty. For some kids, lying becomes a core strategy to achieve this basic human need.

Strategies

Reframe the Lie as a Wish

“You wish that tower was still up . . . ,”

Wait and Provide an Opening Later

“If It Did Happen . . .”

When a child is stuck in a lie, I find it effective to walk through how I would respond if she shared the truth.

Asking a Child What He Needs to Be Honest

I realize there must be things you need from me in order to tell me the truth.

There must be things I’m doing that make truth-telling scary for you,

Not to change the feeling itself but to be curious about their children’s anxiety and to help them feel at home with themselves when that anxiety emerges.

Fears and Anxiety

Jump into the Hole with Them

“When you go to bed, you have a big worry that I won’t be there in the morning, huh? Ugh, that is such a scary thought . . .”

(Pulling out might have sounded like, “Sweetie. There’s nothing to worry about, I have never left without telling you!”)

Dry Runs

Practice dry runs directly with your child or act out the scenario with stuffed animals.

Script for Addressing Specific Fears

STEP 1: Talk to your child about his fear, aiming only to collect information and build understanding.

Ask more, and tell less—no convincing or explaining, just information gathering. Then restate what you’ve learned to see if you “have it right.”

STEP 2: Validate that your child’s fear “makes sense.”

STEP 3: Tell your child how glad you are that you talked about this fear. Use the word “important.”

STEP 4: Engage your child to problem-solve with you.

STEP 5: Create a mantra.

STEP 6: Share a “slowly coping with a fear” story.

Hesitation and Shyness

Confidence is the experience of knowing how you feel and believing it’s okay to be yourself, in that feeling, in that moment.

Confidence-building for hesitant kids comes from having caregivers who say, “I’m here. Take your time.”

These messages communicate an understanding that a child knows their feelings better than we do.

Strategies

Check In with Yourself

“Noticing how I feel doesn’t make me a bad parent. All feelings are allowed, just like I tell my kids. Knowing my own trigger will help me separate my experience from my child’s.”

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.

Validate + “You’ll Know When You’re Ready”

Validating the feeling rather than trying to convince him out of the feeling.

“You’ll know when you’re ready to ___.”

Preparation

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.

Kids who feel hesitant do well with preparation for what’s to come, in terms of both logistics and emotions. Before you go to, say, a family gathering, share details with your child.

Avoid Labeling

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.

Frustration Intolerance

The more we embrace not-knowing and mistakes and struggles, the more we set the stage for growth, success, and achievement.

If we want our kids to develop frustration tolerance, we have to develop tolerance for their frustration.

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.

Requires us to let go of our need to finish and be quick and be right and have things done.

Frustration tolerance requires us to ground ourselves in what is happening in the moment, to feel okay even when we don’t know how to do something, and to focus on effort instead of outcome.

This is a lot easier to do when we navigate the world with a “growth mindset”—the belief that abilities can be cultivated through effort, study, and persistence and that failures and struggles are not enemies of learning but rather key elements on the pathway to learning.

People with a “fixed mindset,” on the other hand, believe that abilities are innate—you can either do something or you can’t, and if you fail at that thing, it’s an indication that you’ll never be able to do it.

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!

Strategies

Deep Breaths

When you notice your child getting frustrated, instead of telling them, “Take a deep breath,” model it yourself.

Our kids learn to self-regulate through our co-regulation; taking a deep breath allows your child to see that there can be safety and calm around frustration.

Not to mention, our deep breathing grounds us, which means we are less likely to react with our own annoyance or reactivity.

Mantras

Take moments or emotions that feel big and overwhelming—like episodes of frustration—and give us something small and manageable to focus on.

‘This feels hard because it is hard, not because I’m doing something wrong.’

Try framing it as something you learned that you just happen to be passing along.

For younger kids, a mantra might be “I can do it” or “I like to be challenged” or “I can do hard things” or “This is tricky and I can stay with it.”

Frame Frustration as a Sign of Learning, Not a Sign of Failure

Here’s something I start saying to my kids early on: “Did you know that learning is hard? I mean it! Every single time any of us learns something—me, you, everyone—it feels frustrating!”

“And also, listen to this, because this is weird . . . Frustration, that feeling of ‘Ugh, I can’t do it’ or ‘Ugh, I want to just be done already!’ . . . that’s a feeling that tries to trick our brain into telling us we’re doing something wrong, but actually, this feeling is a sign that we’re learning and doing something right! It’s such a tricky thing. Let’s be on the lookout for that feeling so we can remind ourselves we are learning and that learning is supposed to feel this way.”

“Oh, you’re about to get dressed, huh? Let’s get ready for that frustrating feeling.

Growth Mindset Family Values

In our family, we love to be challenged.

In our family, how hard we work is more important than coming up with the right answer.

In our family, we know that not-knowing sits next to learning something new. 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. And we’re big into brain growth.

Think in Terms of Coping, Not Success

Build our child’s skills for coping with hard feelings rather than building skills for finding success.

Emotional Vaccination, Dry Runs, and “Did I Ever Tell You About the Time . . . ?”

Food and Eating Habits

“Division of Responsibility” around eating.

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.

Minimizing anxiety around food is more important than consumption of food.

Strategies

Mantra

You might try saying, “My only jobs are the what-when-where. I can do that. I can do that.” Or, “What my child eats is not most important. I am doing a good job. My child is going to be okay.” Or maybe, “What my child eats is not a barometer of my parenting.”

Explain Roles

Dessert-Specific Strategies

Parents shouldn’t link dessert to how much a child eats, because that is the domain of a child, not a parent.

Serving dessert with dinner makes dessert less exciting. It exudes a message of trusting your child and sets him up to be less dessert focused over time.

Other families I’ve worked with serve a “dessert” as an afternoon snack so that dinner isn’t linked with dessert at all.

Snack-Specific Strategies

Tolerate Pushback

If you want to make a change, it’s critical to remind yourself that your job is the “what, when, where”—you don’t have to ask your kids’ permission, you just need to announce the change and allow them to have their reactions and feelings.

After knowing our role, we have to be willing to fulfill it, and that relies on our ability to handle our child’s not being happy with us.

Consent

“I am in charge of my body. I am in charge of my body boundaries. I am in charge of who touches me, for how long, and at what times.

I can like something one day and not want it another day. I can be comfortable touching some people and not others. I am the only person who can make these decisions.”

“There will be times when I assert myself based on what feels right to me and other people won’t like it. They will push back. They will talk about what they want from me instead of honoring what I’m telling them feels comfortable to me. It’s not my job to make other people happy. Their discomfort is a feeling in their body, and it’s not my fault or my responsibility to make this feeling go away.”

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.

Strategies

“I Believe You”

“There’s Something About . . .”

Use the phrase “There’s something about . . .” It says you believe your child and you validated their experience, even if you don’t understand what exactly is happening.

“You’re the only one in your body, so only you could know what you like.”

Socratic Questioning

kids learn best when they are encouraged to think and consider, which comes from asking questions.

The next time you have an “opening” with your child—a nice quiet moment when you’re getting along—explore the topics of decision-making, asserting one’s wants and needs, and tolerating other people’s distress.

• What’s more important, doing something that feels right to you or making other people happy? What if you can’t do both?
• When does making someone else happy, instead of doing something that feels right, feel okay to you?
• When would it be extra-important to choose doing what feels right, even if someone else is super unhappy?
• What if you do something that you want and someone else gets mad at you . . . does this mean you’re a bad person? Why or why not?”

Start with, “Oooooh, I have an interesting question . . . ,”

Tears

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.

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.

Words like “I can tell something important is happening for you. I care about that. I’m here,” or “I can see how upset you are. I believe you. I really do,” are powerful scripts for your toolbox in these moments.

Strategies

Talk About Tears

Talk about crying with your child outside of the moment your child is crying.

Here, we are de-shaming the crying experience; after all, when you explicitly share with your child that you have cried, even over seemingly “small” things, your child feels less alone with their tears.

Connect Tears with Importance

“Tears tell us something important is happening in our body.”

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

Socratic Questioning

Take some time to wonder aloud with your kids about tears, encouraging them to think deeply and question the common narrative that tears are a sign of weakness.

• What do you think tears tell us?
• Are tears good, or bad, or neither good nor bad—maybe they just are?
• Did you know that tears release stress from our bodies? Isn’t that interesting?
• There are some people who don’t like to cry. I wonder why?
• Can boys and girls cry?
• Can adults and kids cry?
• Can men and women cry?
• Is it more okay for girls or boys to cry or okay for both? Why? How did you learn that?”

Building Confidence

Confidence is not about feeling “good,” it’s about believing, “I really know what I feel right now.”

Confidence is our ability to feel at home with ourselves in the widest range of feelings possible, and it’s built from the belief that it’s okay to be who you are no matter what you’re feeling.

“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.

We all seek external validation, and we all like external validation. This is okay. The goal isn’t to make a child impervious to other people’s approval or input, but rather to build up a child’s interiority—meaning who they are on the inside—so that they don’t feel empty and confused in the absence of outside input.

Commenting on what’s happening inside a child, or a child’s process and not product, orients a child to gaze back in instead of out.

• “You’re working so hard on that project,”
• “I notice you’re using different colors in this drawing, tell me about this,”
• “How’d you think to make that?”

Lead with Validation

When we name feelings and validate them, we show a child that those feelings are okay.

How’d You Think to . . . ?

• “How’d you think to draw that?”
• “How’d you think to start your story that way?”
• “How’d you think to solve that math problem?”
• “How’d you think to use those materials together?”

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.

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.

Inside Stuff over Outside Stuff

Circuitry for self-confidence depends on a child’s ability to locate identity over observable behavior; this comes from growing up in a family that focuses more on what’s “inside” a child (enduring qualities, feelings, ideas) than what is “outside” (accomplishments, outcomes, labels).

Valuing who they are over what they do.

“You Really Know How You’re Feeling”/“It’s Okay to Feel This Way”

Phrases like “You really know how you’re feeling right now,” or “Wow, you really know yourself”—these responses teach a child to look inward with openness, not judgment.

Perfectionism

To help kids with perfectionistic tendencies, then, we want to show them how to separate what they are doing from who they are.

Parents should aim to help their kids see their perfectionism, not get rid of it.

Strategies

Make Your Own Mistakes

“Oh no! I sent an important email to my boss with so many typos!

“I am okay even when I make a mistake. I am safe. I am good inside even when I make a mistake on the outside.”

Tell the Story of the Feeling Under the Perfectionism

Take your child’s focus on perfection and shift it to the feelings inside his body; this builds self-awareness of one’s experience, which is the foundation for regulation.

“Sometimes one tricky thing feels like it can suck all the fun out of something, huh? It’s almost like nothing at the playground feels like it would be fun if you don’t feel good at every single part.”

Stuffed Animal Play

Using stuffed animals or trucks or whatever your child likes to play with, act out a scene involving a perfectionistic character.

Introduce the Perfect Voice

In a calm moment, introduce the idea of you and your child both having a “Perfect Kid” or “Perfect Girl” or “Perfect Boy” inside.

Identifying the different “parts” of us speaks to how our mind is organized, and kids often take to this framework because it resonates with what actually goes on inside their bodies.

Teaching your child how to relate to her perfectionism rather than reject it.

“Do you know that I have a Perfect Girl in me? Yes! She often tells me things have to be perfect or else they’re not worth doing!

Do a 180 on Perfectionism

“Not knowing something means I can learn, and learning new things is awesome. I learned one thing just now so I get one point!”

This game, “winning” isn’t equated with being “perfect” or already knowing something, but instead with the process of learning.

Separation Anxiety

Transitional objects help children with this process; a blanket or stuffed animal or object from home becomes a physical representation of parent-child bond, reminding a child that parents still exist and are “there” for you even when they are not right in front of them.

A vital part of separation is a parent’s ability to believe that their kids can cope.

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.

Strategies

Check In with Your Own Anxiety

Talk About Separation and Feelings

Talk about the separation in advance—show pictures of where your child is going, and anticipate feelings that may come up.

Routine + Practice

Come up with a routine that is easy to practice and repeat—something short and sweet. Maybe you say, “When we say goodbye, I’ll give you one hug, say ‘See ya later, alligator!’

Practice will make the whole routine feel more familiar, and eventually lead to mastery, which helps separation feel safer.

Transitional Object

Consider involving your child in a transitional object choice. (Object that reminds them of you.)

Telling the Story

We can ease separation anxiety by talking about the separation after we pick up our child at the end of the day or at the moment of reunion.

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.

Sleep

Sleep struggles are ultimately separation struggles, because during the night children are tasked with being alone for ten(ish) hours and also with feeling safe enough that their body is able to drift off to sleep.

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?”).

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.

Then, and only then, can we implement strategies to create a smoother bedtime experience.

Kids who struggle to separate have trouble internalizing the soothing aspects of a parent-child relationship—they feel safe in a parent’s presence but, often, terrified in a parent’s absence.

Separation starts to feel more manageable when we close this gap, when we help a child take in the parts of the parent-child relationship that provide security so that they can access feelings of safety, security, and trust, all of which are necessary for sleep.

If we can help infuse a parent’s presence into a child’s environment, then he can access the soothing function of the parent-child relationship even when the parent isn’t right there.

Strategies

“Where Is Everyone?”

To help your kids understand, talk to them, during the daytime, about where you spend your evening.

Examine Your Daytime Separation Routine

Before tackling nighttime separation struggles (i.e., sleep struggles!), work on these dynamics during the day; nighttime can be filled with extra anxiety, so we need to build separation skills when our bodies are less activated and more receptive to learning.

Role-Play

Get out the stuffed animals, trucks, dolls, or whatever your child likes to play with. Use them to act out a bedtime routine, reviewing feelings that come up and strategies that help with the soothing process.

Infuse Your Presence

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.

Tell your child you’ll write them a note or create a drawing with their name on it after they fall asleep and put it next to their bed;

Mantras for You and Your Child

‘Mommy is near, Nahid is safe, my bed is cozy.’

The Safe Distance Method

This method operates on the principles of attachment theory, respecting that children need to feel proximal to parents in order to feel safe. Start out in a child’s room, staying close by, then—over the course of many nights—increase the distance until you are farther and farther away (and eventually out of the room).

The Comfort Button

Get a recordable button with at least thirty seconds of recordable space. Then, in your regulated, soothing voice, record a message for your child about bedtime.

Deeply Feeling Kids

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.

One of the core fears for DFKs is that the feelings that overwhelm them will overwhelm others—that things that feel so bad and unmanageable actually are bad and unmanageable.

Parents of DFKs have to practice “holding space”—meaning literally staying present around the child and taking up space, so that the child sees her overwhelming feelings aren’t taking over the world around her and leaving her all alone.

Parents of DFKs have to commit to limiting the damage instead of solving the problem.

Strategies

Move from Blame to Curiosity

Curiosity, on the other hand, sounds like: “I wonder what’s going on for my child?” or “My child feels inside the way they’re acting on the outside . . . wow, my child feels so out of control and so ‘bad’! What’s going on there? What does she need?”

Containment First

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.

“You’re a Good Kid Having a Hard Time”

Reminding ourselves that we have a good kid having a hard time activates our desire to help, while “bad kid doing bad things” mode makes us want to judge or punish.

You might say, “Earlier today was tough. I know. You’re a good kid and you were having a hard time. I know that. I love you. I always will.”

Be Present and Wait It Out

Nothing is as powerful as your presence. Your loving, as-calm-as-possible presence, without any words or fancy scripts.

Without a doubt your most important parenting “tool.”

We have to show our kids that they aren’t “too much” for us, that they don’t overpower us.

Presence doesn’t mean we allow ourselves to be hit or put into danger. And it doesn’t mean you can’t take time-outs for yourself.

Thumbs Up/Down/to the Side

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.”

The key to change lies in learning to tolerate the guilt or shame that comes up for us—seeing these feelings as part of the change process, not an enemy of the change process.

Two things are true

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.

Books and Authors mentioned:

Book: Psychologists Robert Brooks and Sam Goldstein, authors of The Handbook of Resilience in Children

Book: Beyond Discipline: From Compliance to Community, author Alfie Kohn

Book: Siblings Without Rivalry

Author: Ellyn Satter