During our sessions, parents and I start by unpacking a problem behavior together. Behavior is a clue to what a child—and, often, an entire family system—is struggling with. As we investigate behaviors, we get to know the child better, we learn about what this child needs and what skills they’re missing, we uncover a parent’s triggers and areas for growth, and we 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?” (Location 436)
Yes, these systems made logical sense, but they focused on eradicating “bad” behaviors and enforcing compliance at the expense of the parent-child relationship. Time-outs, for example, were encouraged to change behavior…but what about the fact that they sent kids away at the exact moments they needed their parents the most? Where was … well … the humanity? Here’s the thing I realized: these “evidence-based” approaches were built on principles of behaviorism, a theory of learning that focuses on observable actions rather than non-observable mental states like feelings and thoughts and urges. Behaviorism privileges shaping behavior above understanding behavior. It sees behavior as the whole picture rather than an expression of underlying unmet needs. This is why, I realized, these “evidence-based” approaches felt so bad to me—they confused the signal (what was really going on for a child) with the noise (behavior). After all, our goal is not to shape behavior. Our goal is to raise humans. (Location 460)
It turns out, switching our parenting mindset from “consequences” to “connection” does not have to mean ceding family control to our children. While I resist time-outs, punishments, consequences, and ignoring, there’s nothing about my parenting style that’s permissive or fragile. My approach promotes firm boundaries, parental authority, and sturdy leadership, all while maintaining positive relationships, trust, and respect. (Location 472)
Chapter 1 Good Inside
Let me share an assumption I have about you and your kids: you are all good inside. When you call your child “a spoiled brat,” you are still good inside. When your child denies knocking down his sister’s block tower (even though you watched it happen), he is still good inside. And when I say “good inside,” I mean that we all, at our core, are compassionate, loving, and generous. The principle of internal goodness drives all of my work—I hold the belief that kids and parents are good inside, which allows me to be curious about the “why” of their bad behaviors. (Location 509)
Plenty of parenting advice relies on perpetuating this assumption of badness, focusing on controlling kids rather than trusting them, sending them to their rooms instead of embracing them, labeling them as manipulative rather than in need. (Location 523)
But operating from a “good inside” perspective can be harder than it seems, especially in difficult or highly charged moments. It’s easy—reflexive, even—to default to a less generous view, for two main reasons: First, we are evolutionarily wired with a negativity bias, meaning we pay closer attention to what’s difficult with our kids (or with ourselves, our partners, even the world at large) than to what is working well. Second, our experiences of our own childhoods influence how we perceive and respond to our kids’ behavior. So many of us had parents who led with judgment rather than curiosity, criticism instead of understanding, punishment instead of discussion. (I’d guess they had parents who treated them the same way.) And, in the absence of intentional effort to course correct, history repeats itself. As a result, many parents see behavior as the measure of who our kids are, rather than using behavior as a clue to what our kids might need. What if we saw behavior as an expression of needs, not identity? Then, (Location 538)
Rewiring the Circuit
Well, in our early years, our body is learning under what conditions we receive love and attention and understanding and affection, and under what conditions we get rejected, punished, and left alone; the “data” it collects along those lines is critical to our survival, because maximizing attachment with our caregivers is the primary goal for young, helpless children. These learnings impact our development, because we quickly begin to embrace whatever gets us love and attention, and shut down and label as “bad” any parts that get rejected, criticized, or invalidated. (Location 564)
Underneath “bad behavior” is always a good child. And yet, when parents chronically shut down a behavior harshly without recognizing the good kid underneath, a child internalizes that they are bad. And badness has to be shut down at all costs, so a child develops methods, including harsh self-talk, to chastise himself, as a way of killing off the “bad kid” parts and instead finding the “good kid” ones—meaning the parts that get approval and connection. (Location 571)
How our caregivers responded to us becomes how we in turn respond to ourselves, and this sets the stage for how we respond to our children. This is why it’s so easy to create an intergenerational legacy of “internal badness”: my parents reacted to my struggles with harshness and criticism → I learned to doubt my goodness when I am having a hard time → I now, as an adult, meet my own struggles with self-blame and self-criticism → my child, when he acts out, activates this same circuitry in my body → I am compelled to react with harshness to my child’s… (Location 578)
Place your hand on your heart and deliver yourself this important message: “I am here because I want to change. I want to be the pivot point in my intergenerational family patterns. I want to start something different: I want my children to feel good inside, to feel valuable and lovable and worthy, even when they struggle. And this starts … with re-accessing my own goodness. My goodness has always been there.” You are not at fault for your intergenerational patterns. Quite the opposite—if you’re reading this book, that tells me that you’re taking on the role of cycle-breaker, the person who says that certain damaging patterns STOP with you. You are willing to take on the weight of the generations before you and change the direction for the… (Location 584)
The Most Generous Interpretation
Finding the good inside can often come from asking ourselves one simple question: “What is my most generous interpretation of what just happened?” I ask myself this often with my kids and my friends, and I’m working on asking it more in my marriage and with myself. Whenever I utter these words, even internally, I notice my… (Location 592)
And when we put this perspective into practice, we teach our children to do the same. We orient them to their internal experience, which includes thoughts, feelings, sensations, urges, memories, and images. Self-regulation skills rely on the ability to recognize internal experience, so by focusing on what’s inside rather than what’s outside, we are building in our children the foundation of healthy coping. Choosing the most generous interpretation of your child’s behavior does not mean you are “being easy” on them, but rather you are framing their behavior in a way that will help them build critical emotion regulation skills for their future—and you’re preserving your connection and close relationship along the way. (Location 613)
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. (Location 619)
I often remind myself that kids respond to the version of themselves that parents reflect back to them and act accordingly. When we tell our kids that they’re selfish, they act in their own interest. (Location 623)
Chapter 2 Two Things Are True
We don’t have to choose between two supposedly oppositional realities. We can avoid punishment and see improved behavior, we can parent with a firm set of expectations and still be playful, we can create and enforce boundaries and show our love, we can take care of ourselves and our children. And similarly, we can do what’s right for our family and our kids can be upset; we can say no and care about our kids’ disappointment. (Location 645)
Our ability to hold on to multiple truths at once—ours and someone else’s—allows two people in a relationship to feel seen and feel real, even if they are in conflict. Multiplicity is what allows two people to get along and feel close—they each know that their experience will be accepted as true and explored as important, even if those experiences are different. Building strong connections relies on the assumption that no one is right in the absolute, because understanding, not convincing, is what makes people feel secure in a relationship. (Location 650)
And here’s the unfortunate consequence of being right: the other person feels unseen and unheard, at which point most people become infuriated and combative, because it feels as if the other person does not accept your realness or worth. Feeling unseen and unheard makes connection impossible. (Location 666)
a powerful first step in any interaction is to notice which mode you’re in. When you’re in “one thing is true” mode, you’re judgmental of and reactive to someone else’s experience, because it feels like an assault on your own truth. As a result, you will seek to prove your own point of view, which in turn makes the other person defensive, because they need to uphold the realness of their experience. In “one thing is true” mode, exchanges escalate quickly—each person thinks they’re arguing about the content of the conversation, when in fact they’re trying to defend that they are a real, worthy person with a real, truthful experience. By contrast, when we’re in “two things are true” mode, we are curious about and accepting of someone else’s experience, and it feels like an opportunity to get to know someone better. We approach others with openness, and so they put down their defenses. Both parties feel seen and heard, and we have an opportunity to deepen connection. (Location 669)
We also do better, as individuals, when we approach our own internal monologue with a “two things are true” perspective. Multiplicity is what allows a person to recognize that I can love my kids and crave alone time; I can be grateful to have a roof over my head and feel jealous of those who have more childcare support; I can be a good parent and yell at my kid sometimes. (Location 687)
“Two Things Are True” While Holding Boundaries in the Face of Protest
But what if two things are true? Now you can do both: I am holding my boundary that my child cannot watch this movie and validating that my child feels upset, disappointed, angry, and left out. (Location 749)
“Two Things Are True” to Cope with Bad Feelings
Perhaps most powerfully, “two things are true” is useful when we start to spin into our “bad parent” thoughts: the guilt, the self-blame, the worry that we’re messing up our kids. When things feel tough, I remind myself of this ultimate “two things are true” statement: I am a good parent having a hard time. It’s so easy to slip into a “one thing is true” mentality here: “I’m a bad parent, I’m messing everything up, I can’t to do this, I’m the worst.” This self-talk fills us with guilt and shame, and when we’re in that mindset, change is impossible. (Location 820)
Chapter 3 Know Your Job
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). Knowing your job is fundamental to this goal. (Location 863)
Helping our kids regulate their feelings is an important—though perhaps underappreciated—part of keeping them safe. Think of it as containing the emotional fires that are blazing inside your child. If there were a fire in your home, your first job would be to contain it. Yes, you need to fireproof your home better, but that can’t happen until the fire is managed and you feel safe again. When parents struggle to set boundaries or regulate their own strong emotions, it’s as if a fire is burning and we’ve opened up all the doors, poured on extra fuel, and spread the fire through the house. Containment first. Boundaries first. (Location 869)
Boundaries are not what we tell kids not to do; boundaries are what we tell kids we will do. Boundaries embody your authority as a parent and don’t require your child to do anything. (Location 888)
In each of these examples, parents are asking their kids to inhibit an urge or desire that, frankly, they are developmentally incapable of inhibiting. We cannot tell a child who is hitting someone to stop hitting, or a child who is running to stop running, or a child who is complaining about wanting more TV to stop complaining. Well, we can (I am someone who says all these things too!), but these pleas won’t be successful. Why? Because we cannot control someone else—we can only control ourselves. And when we ask our child to do our job for us, they are more likely to get further dysregulated, because we are essentially saying, “I see that you’re out of control. I don’t know what to do here, so I’m going to put you in charge and ask you to get yourself back in control.” This is terrifying for a child, because when she is out of control, she needs an adult who can provide a safe, sturdy, firm boundary; this boundary is a form of love. It’s a way of saying, “I know you’re good inside and you’re just having a hard, out-of-control time. I will be the container you need, I will stop you from continuing to act in this way, I will protect you from your own dysregulation taking over.” (Location 903)
Of course, our jobs don’t stop at protecting our children’s physical safety—we are also their emotional caretakers. This is where two other important job duties come in: validation and empathy. (Location 913)
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. Validation sounds like this: “You’re upset, that’s real, I see that.” Invalidation, or the act of dismissing someone else’s experience or truth, would sound like this: “There’s no reason to be so upset, you’re so sensitive, come on!” (Location 915)
Empathy, the second part of a parent’s emotional caretaking job, refers to our ability to understand and relate to the feelings of another person, and our desire to do that comes from the assumption that someone else’s feelings are in fact valid. So, validation comes first (“My child is having a real emotional experience”) and empathy second (“I can try to understand and connect with these feelings in my child, not make them go away”). Empathy comes from our ability to be curious: it allows us to explore our child’s emotional experience from a place of learning, not judgment. When a child receives empathy—in fact, when any of us receives empathy—it makes them feel like someone is on their team, almost as if that person is taking on some of their emotional burden; (Location 922)
While empathy and validation certainly make kids feel good inside, their functions actually go much deeper. One of the primary goals of childhood is to build healthy emotion regulation skills: to develop ways to have feelings and manage them, to learn how to find yourself amid feelings and thoughts and urges, rather than have feelings and thoughts and urges overtake you. Empathy and validation from parents are critical ingredients in helping a child develop regulation skills, which is why we should not think of them as “soft” or “mushy” factors but as qualities that hold weight and seriousness. (Location 936)
Why do boundaries, validation, and empathy help a child build regulation skills? Boundaries show our kids that even the biggest emotions won’t spiral out of control forever. Children need to sense a parent’s boundary—our “I won’t let you” and our stopping them from dangerous action—in order to feel, deep in their bodies, this message: “This feeling might seem as if it will take over and destroy the world, it might seem too much, and yet I am sensing in my parent’s boundary that there is a way to contain it. This feeling feels scary and overwhelming to me, but I can see it’s not scary or overwhelming to my parent.” Over time, children absorb this containment and can access it on their own. (Location 950)
Validation and empathy, on the other hand, are how children find their goodness under their struggles. As we know, we have to feel good inside in order to change. It’s common to think, “I need to change, and once I do I will feel worthy and lovable!” But the directionality is precisely the opposite. Our goodness is what grounds us and allows us to experience difficult emotions without having them take over or become our identity. And when parents get in the habit of validating a child’s experience and empathizing with it, they are essentially saying to that child, “You are real. You are lovable. You are good.” (Location 956)
Once you understand the roles of a family system, you can reframe how you think about your child’s difficult moments. Viewing their struggles as job fulfillment will help you remember that these are good kids doing their jobs, not bad kids doing bad things. (Location 969)
Chapter 4 The Early Years Matter
Parenting matters. And yes, kids will “remember” all of these years, including years zero to one, one to two, and two to three. They won’t, of course, remember in the way we typically think about memory—they won’t be able to produce a story with words that connects to an experience from their past. But even if kids can’t remember with their words, they can—and do—remember with something more powerful: their bodies. Before they can talk, children learn, based on interactions with their parents, what feels acceptable or shameful, manageable or overwhelming. In this way, our “memories” from early childhood are in fact more powerful than the memories we form in our later years; the way parents interact with kids in their early years forms the blueprint they take with them into the world. (Location 988)
It’s important to note, before we go any further, that the human brain is remarkably malleable and can rewire, unlearn, relearn, and change. If your parental guilt is running on overdrive after reading the last few paragraphs, if you’re worried you “messed up” or “missed the boat” and that your kids have aged out of the most important time … take a breath. Say hello to the guilt, and then remind yourself that you are a good parent working on yourself and your relationships, and this is, actually, the best any of us can do. (Location 1006)
Attachment Theory
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. We may think we’re asking our kids to end screen time or saying no to a later bedtime, but children don’t take in these specifics; they take in whether it’s safe, in any given relationship, to have the desires and feelings that lead to difficult moments. (Location 1030)
From their first days of life, our kids learn what leads to closeness and what leads to distance and then adjust their behavior accordingly, all with the goal of establishing a secure attachment. From each of the first parent responses (assuming these were the general patterns of interactions), 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. From each of the second parent responses (again, assuming these were the general patterns of interactions), the child learns that his feelings are real and valid and can be held within close relationships. Now, to be clear, these second parent responses won’t lead to instant resolution. There will be no sudden end to the tears or screams. However, two things will happen: You will notice a short-term benefit, because your child will build regulation skills that may soon lead to an ability to manage disappointment. And you will, without a doubt, notice a longer-term gain, because you are helping your child build self-trust, acceptance, and openness with others, rather than shame, self-loathing, and defensiveness. (Location 1068)
A child who sees a parent as his secure base feels a sense of safety in the world, a sense of “someone will be there for me and comfort me if things go wrong.” As such, he feels capable of exploring, trying new things, taking risks, suffering failures, and being vulnerable. There’s a deep and critical paradox here: The more we can rely on a parent, the more curious and explorative we can be. The more we trust in our secure relationship with our parent, the more secure we are with ourselves. Said another way: dependence and independence are not necessarily opposites, but rather, each force allows for the other—two things are true! The more children feel they can depend on a parent, the more independent they can be. (Location 1086)
Internal Family Systems
Internal family systems (IFS) is a therapeutic model that considers different parts within a person, as opposed to thinking about a person in a singular manner. A basic assumption of IFS is that it’s the nature of the mind to be subdivided into parts or subpersonalities. Consider yourself. Maybe you’re outgoing with people you know well but reserved in new environments. Maybe you stand up for yourself when necessary but can stand back when it’s time for someone else to take the lead. Maybe you’re confident professionally but more reserved in social environments. You have your brave self, your anxious self, your confident self, your deferential self. You are multifaceted, not any one thing. And none of these parts are bad or worse than or superior to another—you are the sum of all of them, and the more comfortable you are when any of these parts “acts up,” the more at home you’ll be with yourself across a variety of situations. Our confidence and sturdiness and sense of self depend on our ability to understand this. When we feel overwhelmed and become reactive, it’s almost always because one part of us has essentially taken over; we lose track of our identity and instead “… (Location 1095)
When we look at IFS and attachment theory in tandem, we start to gain a more sophisticated understanding of our children’s early development. Attachment theory dictates that our children have to learn to attach to parents in order to survive and get their needs met. As a result, kids take in their environment through the lens of “What will maximize my survival?” When we combine this understanding with the teachings of IFS, our lens becomes more nuanced: “Which parts of me get connection, attention, understanding, and acceptance? I should do more of that, because it maximizes attachment and therefore maximizes survival! These parts of me are good and manageable and conducive to being close with others; they are full of connection. And which parts of me are met with disconnection and… (Location 1109)
Chapter 5: It’s Not Too Late
Two things are true: the brain wires early, and it has a remarkable capacity to rewire. (Location 1169)
The Brain’s Capacity to Rewire
In other words, a child’s earliest experiences have a huge influence on how her brain develops. And yet, we know from research that attachment does not have to be destiny—an individual wired for insecure attachment can rewire for secure attachment. Psychologist Louis Cozolino established therapy’s role in the neuroplasticity process: a secure attachment with one’s therapist, he discovered, can lead to a rewiring in the brain that results in improved emotion regulation and increased ability to manage stress. We can apply this principle to the family unit, because we know that parents can work to develop more secure attachments with their kids. 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. (Location 1177)
Research has established that, oftentimes, when kids are struggling, it is not therapy for the child himself but coaching or therapy for the parent that leads to the most significant changes in the child. (Location 1194)
The Power of Repair
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. They might tell themselves, “Wait … my mom didn’t actually say those awful words to me, that couldn’t have happened, no way … Yeah, no, I must have remembered that wrong. After all, my mom hasn’t apologized yet or even said anything to me about it, she definitely would say she’s sorry if she said those words.” Kids use self-doubt to protect themselves from the overwhelming feelings that would arise if they accepted the reality of what really just happened. They do this because being alone in their feelings seems like “too much,” and self-doubt offers a way to escape and self-preserve. And yet, a child is wiring herself to believe, “I don’t perceive things accurately. I overreact. I cannot trust how things feel to me. Other people have a better idea of my reality than I do.” This is a scary circuit to build, because 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. (Location 1224)
Self-blame is another common coping mechanism for kids whose parents don’t attempt reconnection after tough moments. 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. Psychiatrist Ronald Fairbairn may have said it best when he wrote, regarding children and child development, “It is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the Devil.”* If children couldn’t rely on an adult to come help them, to be there, to repair and reconnect in difficult moments … well, then, the world would feel pretty unsafe. It’s more comforting for a child to internalize badness (“I am bad inside”), because at least then he can hold on to the idea that the world around him is safe and good. (Location 1233)
All of this is why “repair” is one of my favorite words in parenting. Sure, we can work on our own “stuff” and try to improve our regulation and learn parenting tricks and scripts and strategies … but still, the goal is never to get it right all the time. That’s not a thing. I often tell parents that the worthiest goal might be to get really good at repair, which acknowledges the reality that parents will continue to act in ways that don’t always feel great, and there will continue to be hard, misaligned moments. But if we develop the skill of going back, nondefensively, to our kids and… (Location 1243)
What Does Repair Look Like?
There’s no one right way to repair. The key element is connection after disconnection—a parent’s calm and compassionate presence after a moment marked by dysregulated reactivity. When we return to a moment that felt bad and add connection and emotional safety, we actually change the memory in the body. The memory no longer has such overwhelming “I’m alone and bad inside” labels. It’s now more nuanced,… (Location 1250)
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. It’s important to take ownership over your role (“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… (Location 1256)
Chapter 6: Resilience > Happiness
Consider this: What actually leads to happiness? Does eradicating our kids’ worry and loneliness and ensuring they feel good at all times enable them to cultivate happiness on their own? What do we really mean when we say, “I just want my kids to be happy”? What are we talking about when we say, “Cheer up!” or “You have so much to be happy about!” or “Why can’t you just be happy?” I, for one, don’t think we’re talking about cultivating happiness as much as we’re talking about avoiding fear and distress. Because when we focus on happiness, we ignore all the other emotions that will inevitably come up throughout our kids’ lives, which means we aren’t teaching them how to cope with those emotions. (Location 1294)
I don’t know a single parent who doesn’t want the best for their kids. Count me in: I want the best for my kids! And yet, I’m not sure that “the best” for them is to “just be happy.” For me, happiness is much less compelling than resilience. After all, cultivating happiness is dependent on regulating distress. We have to feel safe before we can feel happy. (Location 1301)
And it’s not just the difficult feelings themselves that prompt our bodies to feel unsafe. We also feel distress over having distress, or experience fear of fear. In other words (assuming there’s no actual physical threat, but simply the “threat” of uncomfortable, overwhelming emotions), as we start thinking, “Ah! I need to make this feeling go away right now,” the distress grows and grows, not as a reaction to the original experience, but because we believe these negative emotions are wrong, bad, scary, or too much. Ultimately, this is how anxiety takes hold within a person. Anxiety is the intolerance of discomfort. It’s the experience of not wanting to be in your body, the idea that you should be feeling differently in that specific moment. (Location 1311)
Resilience, in many ways, is our ability to experience a wide range of emotions and still feel like ourselves. Resilience helps us bounce back from the stress, failure, mistakes, and adversity in our lives. Resilience allows for the emergence of happiness. (Location 1325)
The Power of Resilience
Adults often think of resilience as the ability to succeed in the face of challenge—to finish the block tower, complete the tricky puzzle, read the hard chapter, or say “No big deal” after being left out. But in reality, resilience has nothing to do with successful outcomes. If we all knew we’d be successful, there’d be no need to flex our “Come on, I can stick with it!” muscles. Building resilience is about developing the capacity to tolerate distress, to stay in and with a tough, challenging moment, to find our footing and our goodness even when we don’t have confirmation of achievement or pending success. (Location 1338)
As a parent, I challenge myself to sit with my child in his feeling of distress so he knows he isn’t alone, as opposed to pulling my child out of this moment, which leaves him alone the next time he finds himself there. For example, when my child says, “Ugh, the block tower keeps falling! Help me!,” instead of saying, “Here, let me build you a sturdy base,” in order to help him out of the hard moment, I might say, “Ugh, how annoying!” Then I’ll take a few audible deep breaths and say, “Hmm … I wonder what we could do to make it sturdier … ,” and model a look of curiosity. All of this is designed to connect to my child within the distress. When my child says, “Everyone in my class lost a tooth, I’m the only one who didn’t!” I don’t say, “Sweetie, you will soon, and you’re one of the kids who can read chapter books!” in order to distract him from his disappointment. Instead, I might say, “Everyone else lost one already, huh? You wish you lost a tooth, I get that. I remember feeling something really similar in kindergarten …” The goal here is to help my child feel less alone in her distress. Reminding ourselves, “Connect! Connect!” encourages us to first be present in our child’s experience instead of leading our child out of his own experience. (Location 1354)
Happiness vs. Resilience
Happiness is not my ultimate goal for my own kids. Unhappiness certainly isn’t my goal for them, but here’s a deep irony in parenting: 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. (Location 1366)
When we tell our kids, “I just want you to be happy,” we are telling them they need to get out of distress and into comfort. When our daughter says, “All the other kids run faster than me,” we remind her that she is excellent at math; when our son seems sad and says, “I wasn’t invited to Anuj’s birthday party,” we convince him that the party had to be small and that Anuj does, in fact, really like him. We think we are helping, but what our child hears is, “I should not feel upset. When I feel uncomfortable, my job is to make my way into comfort as soon as possible.” (Location 1379)
These same ideas are true for large life stressors: deaths in the family, divorce, moves, the pandemic. When we tell kids, “You’re going to be fine,” or “You’re so young, you don’t need to worry about this,” our kids learn that they shouldn’t be feeling the way they do. (Location 1383)
Imagine how amazing it will be if today’s parents become the generation that reframes their dreams for their kids, focusing on healthy emotional development above all else. It would be pretty wonderful if parenting was driven by this one goal: “I want my child to be able to cope with whatever the world throws her way. I want her to feel supported in distress when she’s younger so she can support herself when she’s older.” You are the architect of your child’s resilience, and that is the ultimate gift you can give them. After all, successfully managing life’s many challenges is a person’s most reliable path to happiness. (Location 1403)
Chapter 7: Behavior Is a Window
On the surface we see a behavior and underneath we see a person. Throwing the cereal box wasn’t the main event. It was a window into the main event. Behavior, in all its forms, is a window: into the feelings, thoughts, urges, sensations, perceptions, and unmet needs of a person. Behavior is never “the story,” but rather it’s a clue to the bigger story begging to be addressed. (Location 1421)
The only way I’d be able to change and show up more grounded and less reactive in the future would be to embrace curiosity about what was happening for me underneath the behavior. It may sound counterintuitive, but 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. (Location 1431)
Prioritizing Relationships
But without attending to what’s under the surface, we cannot change the dynamics that motivate a child’s behavior. It’s like putting duct tape on a leak in the ceiling instead of wondering about the source of the leak. 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. (Location 1475)
The other problem with behavioral control methods is right there in the label: control. Prioritizing control over relationship building is a dangerous trade-off. If all you want is to change your child’s behavior, then sure, sticker charts and time-outs may be “successful” when your kids are young. But as they get older and the gold stars lose their power, the result can be downright scary. (Location 1492)
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. (Location 1508)
And here’s another reason we want to focus on connection over behavior modification: 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. I think about the term “connection capital” a lot. It refers to the reserve of positive feelings we hopefully build up with our children, which we can pull from in times of struggle or when the relationship between us gets strained. If we don’t build this up during our children’s earlier years, well, we have nothing to draw on when our kids are adolescents and young adults—years when the behavior modification methods we may have once relied on are no longer at our disposal because our kids are physically bigger, are more independent, and can rebel against our sticker charts, rewards, and punishments. (Location 1513)
Evidence-Based Approaches to Parenting
So how do we do this? How do we look through the action to see the deeper behavior? It certainly sounds like a good idea, but it’s not so easy to execute when our son is talking back to us, or our daughter is throwing food, or both kids are jumping on the furniture. It begins, as I mentioned earlier, with being curious. Here are some questions to get you started, to ask yourself after any tough moment: What is my most generous interpretation (MGI) of my child’s behavior? What was going on for my child in that moment? What was my child feeling right before that behavior emerged? What urge did my child have a hard time regulating? 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? (Location 1558)
Chapter 8: Reduce Shame, Increase Connection
These children are struggling to live in their painful realities—the reality of having stolen a sister’s lovie, the reality of struggling at math, the reality of wanting something for herself and not getting it. In each scenario, the parent described a child who felt guilty or humiliated or bad about something and then reacted in a dysregulated way in an attempt to avoid dealing with the guilt or bad feeling. (Location 1611)
The Danger of Shame
Everyone experiences shame differently, so first things first, let’s get on the same page with a working definition. I define shame as the feeling that “this part of me is not connectable—no one wants to know or be with this part.” It’s a powerful feeling that tells us we should not want to be seen as we are in the moment. Shame encourages us to avoid contact with others—to hide, to distance ourselves, to move away rather than toward others. And shame activates the ultimate fear for a child, the idea “I am bad inside, I am unworthy, I am unlovable, I am unattachable … I will be all alone.” Given that children’s survival is dependent on attachment, their bodies read shame as: “Ultimate danger! Ultimate danger!” There is nothing as dysregulating to a child as a set of emotions or sensations or actions that leads to the threat of abandonment; it truly is an existential danger to survival. (Location 1616)
Shame feels so awful because it awakens our body to a painful but important piece of information: You will not get your needs met if you keep on being who you are right now. Instead, you will be met with rejection—often in the form of judgment, invalidation, ignoring, punishment, scolding, or time-outs—that feels like abandonment. Shame says: you must change course so you can feel safe and secure. (Location 1625)
Understood in that context, you can see why shame is actually a helpful emotion within a child’s (or adult’s) threat-detection system. Shame “freezes” a child in place as a protection mechanism, and that “freeze” might look like an inability to apologize, a reluctance to accept help, or an unwillingness to tell the truth. The problem, though, is that 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. (Location 1628)
Shame Detection and Reduction
So many of our kids’ most difficult moments include shame as a common factor, and shame makes any situation more combustible. (Location 1637)
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. She cannot apologize because to do so she’d have to “see” herself as the person who just did something awful, and she’d have to face the unwanted feeling of being unlovable to others. (“No one would want to love or take care of a kid who is so awful.”) (Location 1644)
Whenever your child seems “stuck,” consider that she might be in a moment of shame, and when you see that shame pop up, when you detect it, the key is to take pause. 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. (Location 1649)
When Shame Goes Unchecked
When we’re not able to detect and reduce shame, when we let it fester in our children, there are likely to be long-term effects. Plenty of modern parents know these effects firsthand, because our parents’ generation was—and this is a generalization—less focused than we are on pinpointing the feelings underneath the behavior. For many of us, shame is wired into our bodies. It essentially attached itself to the parts of ourselves that were not embraced by our parents. Then, when it was suddenly safer (and even encouraged!) to behave in ways that may have been discouraged when we were young—expressing our controversial opinions or delivering a firm NO or sharing our emotions so we can allow other people to connect with us—the shame feeling remained, leading us to feel like we were stuck at age three or eight or whatever age these behaviors developed in the first place. Now, instead of adapting those behaviors in a mature way, we avoid them or feel anxious about them. (Location 1684)
Connection First
Connection first, everything else second. My son says, ‘I hate you!’—I can still connect first to what’s happening inside. My daughter isn’t listening to me—I can connect with her having a hard time listening instead of trying to force her to comply, which of course never works anyway. Even my husband, when he is mad at me about something, I can connect to what he’s saying before defending myself. And with myself! No matter what I’m feeling or thinking, it never becomes bad or overwhelming if I can add my own connection or connection with others to it. ‘Connection first’ has helped me in every area of my family life.” (Location 1716)
Chapter 9: Tell the Truth
If you’re reading this book, you probably condone honesty. You don’t consider yourself someone who tells falsehoods, and you probably teach as much to your kids. But when it comes to addressing complicated, nuanced issues, naming what is true is often uncomfortable. (Location 1733)
Our ability to talk with our kids about important, vulnerable, hard truths is dependent on our ability to tolerate the emotions that come up for us during these moments. Which is only one more reason why working on ourselves, as parents, is more critical than any single parenting intervention; 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. Our parenting is dependent on our willingness to confront our own truths, and from there, we can better connect with our kids. (Location 1741)
Confirming Perceptions
One reason why it’s so necessary to confirm our children’s perceptions is that when we don’t name what’s true, when we assume, “That wasn’t a big deal,” or “He’s so young, I’m sure he didn’t even notice,” our children learn to doubt their perceptions. They might think, “Huh, I guess there wasn’t anything that changed in my environment, I guess I was wrong,” and, over time, that message sticks. It’s as if we’re training our kids to tune out what’s happening around them, and that training will stick with them into adolescence and adulthood. Want your son to stand up to his friends and resist peer pressure? In order to say, “Hey, guys, this doesn’t feel right. I’m not doing this,” a child needs to believe in his perceptions of his environment and in his own feelings. Want your daughter to stand up for herself when she’s uncomfortable in a hookup or dating scenario? If, when she was a child, her parents validated her perceptions and wired her for self-trust, she’ll be more inclined to say, “No, I’m not comfortable with that,” or “Stop. I don’t like that.” (Location 1798)
Honoring Your Child’s Questions
If you’re like most parents, you have the urge to skirt around the truth or think, “My child isn’t ready for this information!” Here’s how I see it: when kids start asking these questions, they are ready for answers. Or at least the start of the answer, with real words and real truths, at which point you can pause and see if more explanation is needed. Despite how it may seem, asking a question doesn’t entirely indicate ignorance—it also indicates awareness and readiness to learn. In order to ask a question, we have to have baseline knowledge and curiosity. (Location 1817)
Labeling What You Don’t Know
The thing is, kids don’t need reassurance about the future. They need to feel supported in the current moment. They don’t need answers, they need to not feel alone in their feelings. It’s what adults need, too, and what we want to wire into our kids’ bodies as early as possible: you won’t always have answers, but you can always work on feeling safe and competent in the present moment. (Location 1832)
Focusing on the How
Parents often get hung up on the what of communicating with honesty: “What should I say to my child to break the news that his grandfather died?” “What phrases should I use to explain homelessness?” “What’s the best way to tell my kid that the reason we don’t see my brother anymore is that he’s toxic and won’t change?” Pause here. There are no perfect words to explain imperfect situations. In fact, the how of our talking—the pace, the tone, the pausing, the checking in with our child, the rub on the back, the “What an important question” or “I’m so glad we are talking about this”—these factors are more impactful than any specific words. (Location 1845)
Chapter 10: Self-Care
In today’s world of intensive parenting, there’s a common misconception that having kids means sacrificing your own identity—that once you’re charged with taking care of young children, you are no longer entitled to take care of yourself. In reality, however, selfless parenting doesn’t help anyone—it doesn’t help the parents, who become depleted and resentful when they give so much of themselves without filling their own cups, and it doesn’t help kids, who absolutely notice their parents’ depletion and resentment and might feel guilty, anxious, or insecure in response. There are plenty of reasons why parents struggle with self-care. They worry they’re being “selfish,” they feel pressure to dedicate every free moment to “bettering” their children or setting them up for “success,” or they simply don’t have the time and energy to do anything for themselves at the end of a long day. And for parents who work multiple jobs or long hours or who don’t have reliable childcare, the concept of self-care may seem out of reach. When parents are able to prioritize themselves, they often experience guilt—guilt that is only made worse when their children protest. (Location 1878)
But despite all these indications to the contrary, 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. Selfless parenting is parenting by a leader without a self, and that idea is terrifying to a child. Kids don’t want to feel that their leader is someone who cannot be located, who is easily overrun by others, who is … lost. (Location 1891)
No one is naturally wired to suppress their own needs in favor of meeting the needs of others. If you tend to sacrifice yourself in service of your family system, these values were likely transmitted to you at an early age, while your body’s circuits were developing. (Location 1895)
1. Breathing
Deep breathing is effective because it regulates a number of important bodily processes, including those involved with lowering stress levels and reducing blood pressure. Diaphragmatic breathing, also known as “belly breathing,” stimulates your vagus nerve, which is the longest and most complex cranial nerve in the body. The vagus nerve is a main component of your parasympathetic nervous system, or your “rest and restore” system (the opposite of your sympathetic or “fight or flight” system), and helps your body access feelings of safety and regulation. That’s just a fancy way of saying that deep belly breathing activates the circuits in our bodies that start the calming-down process. (Location 1919)
2. Acknowledge, Validate, Permit (AVP)
Avoiding your feelings never ends the way you want it to. In fact, the more you avoid distress or will it to go away, the worse it becomes. Our bodies interpret avoidance as confirmation of danger, and it triggers our internal alert system. 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.” (Location 1936)
3. Getting Your Needs Met and Tolerating Distress
Many of us have trouble asserting ourselves and tolerating someone else’s being inconvenienced by those assertions, whether we’re asking for help, taking time for ourselves, or even relegating childcare to our partner. We find it so difficult that we often end up undoing our request, saying, “Never mind, I can just do it myself,” or “I guess I can walk with my friend at a different time,” or “Okay, fine, I’ll get up in the morning with the kids.” These comments often come up at the end of a pattern. First, you want something for yourself. Next, you suggest or ask for it. Then, a partner or friend seems inconvenienced. Finally, you take back your request and don’t get your need met. (Location 1961)
4. One Thing for Myself
Self-care involves making and keeping promises to ourselves, even in the midst of lives that are filled with caring for others. (Location 1985)
5. Repair—with Yourself
You’re going to mess up. You’re going to yell. You’re going to say something and think, “Ugh, why did I say that? I didn’t want to say that!” But that’s okay. 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. Self-care involves getting really good at repair. We have to be generous with ourselves when we make mistakes or behave in ways we don’t feel good about. This book talks a lot about repairing with our kids, but to repair well with others, we must start by repairing ourselves. (Location 2003)
Place a hand on your heart and tell yourself: “It’s okay to struggle. It’s okay to make mistakes. It’s okay to not know. It’s okay to not have it all together. Even as I am having a hard time on the outside … I remain good inside. I am good inside.” (Location 2009)
When parenting moments, specifically, have you feeling mad at yourself or disappointed in your own reactions, tell yourself: “I am not my latest behavior. I am not my latest behavior.” (Location 2011)
Chapter 11: Building Connection Capital
As I explained to my clients, 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. Imagine your child has an emotional bank account. The currency in this bank account is connection, and their behavior at any moment reflects the status of their account, how full or depleted it is. I mentioned earlier the idea of this “connection capital”—when we really connect with a child, see their experience, allow for their feelings, and make an effort to understand what’s going on for them, we build our capital. (Location 2040)
So in order to create positive change, we have to first build connection, which will lead kids to feel better, which will then lead them to behave better. But note, behavior comes last. We cannot start there. We must start with connection. (Location 2047)
Parents spend connection capital when we ask kids to clean their rooms, when we tell them we need a few minutes for an unexpected work call, when we say, “Time to leave, sweetie,” or “Screen time is over.” Parents are big connection capital spenders, because we often have to ask kids to do things they don’t want to do and to respect our rules when they’d rather not. This means that parents need to be even bigger connection-builders. We need a strong reserve to draw from so that we don’t run out of funds. (Location 2050)
The next time your child’s behavior is making you want to run in the opposite direction, try introducing the 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. (Location 2114)
So if the goal is regulating our emotions rather than fixing, changing, or erasing them, how can we help our children with their recurring difficult moments? Here’s one powerful strategy: we prepare for the emotional struggles ahead. With emotional vaccination, we connect with our children before a big-feelings moment, thereby strengthening regulation skills before our child needs to use them. 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. (Location 2143)
I often think that healthy relationships are defined not by a lack of rupture but by how well we repair. All relationships have rough patches, and yet, these moments can be the greatest sources of deepening connection. A rupture moment occurs because both people are in their own experience, and they are unable to temporarily put that experience to the side to understand and connect to the other person. Even if we’re working on understanding our triggers, or trying to become more self-aware so that we recognize our experiences without letting them take over, we still can’t avoid rupture moments in our close relationships—not with our friends or spouses and certainly not with our kids. So we need to get better at repair. (Location 2289)
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. (Location 2299)
Overall, the key is to take ownership and tell your kids that they aren’t responsible for causing your feelings or fixing your reactions. (Location 2321)
What we’re really talking about in situations like Sonia’s is cooperation. We say “My kid won’t listen,” but what we mean is “My kid won’t cooperate when I want him to do something he doesn’t want to do.” (Location 2335)
How do we, as adults, behave when someone asks us to do something we don’t want to do? Well, that usually depends on how close we feel, in the moment, to the person making the request. (Location 2337)
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. If your child ignores you or rarely cooperates with your requests, he’s trying to tell you that your relationship needs some TLC. Now, to be clear, this is not a referendum on your parenting … you are not a bad parent, you don’t have a bad kid, and your relationship with your child isn’t in the gutter. All parent-child relationships need extra love and attention sometimes. (Location 2342)
“Parents are always asking kids to stop doing something fun to do something less fun. That’s why kids don’t listen.” (Location 2352)
If you’re wondering why this strategy actually works, imagine how you’d feel if your boss wanted you to redo a report and then stood over you at your desk versus walking away with a message of trust and encouragement. I’d definitely do better work in the second scenario. We all like to feel trusted rather than controlled. (Location 2414)
One great way to do that is by playing what I call the “I have to listen to you now” game. Introduce this by saying, “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.” (Location 2422)
Tantrums—those moments 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. In the moment of a tantrum, a child is experiencing a feeling, urge, or sensation that overwhelms his capacity to regulate that feeling, urge, or sensation. That’s an important thing to remember: tantrums are biological states of dysregulation, not willful acts of disobedience. (Location 2450)
Is our goal to stop a tantrum in its tracks or stop them from happening entirely? No, it’s not. Here’s why: We want our kids to want for themselves. (Location 2457)
As parents, we want our kids to be able to recognize and assert their desires, to be able to hold on to the idea “I know what I want, even when people around me tell me no.” But we cannot encourage subservience and compliance in our kids when they’re young and expect confidence and assertiveness when they’re older. (Location 2459)
If we want our kids to be able to recognize their wants and needs as adults, then we need to start seeing tantrums as an essential part of their development. (Location 2463)
These strategies all have the same goal: help a child build emotion regulation skills. They are not intended to end a tantrum. 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.” Our kids cannot learn to regulate a feeling that we, the adults, try to avoid or shut down. (Location 2482)
“I won’t let you throw water bottles.” These four words—“I won’t let you”—are critical for every parent’s toolbox. “I won’t let you” communicates that a parent is in charge, that a parent will stop a child from continuing to act in a way that is dysregulated and ultimately feels awful. Because we often forget, kids don’t feel good when they are out of control. They don’t enjoy experiencing their body as unable to make good and safe decisions, just as adults don’t enjoy watching ourselves behave in awful ways. (Location 2585)
Feeling disrespected can be very triggering, so most of us would have an urge to yell or punish—not because that would necessarily give Hunter a newfound respect for us, but because as adults we cannot tolerate the uncomfortable disempowered feelings in our own bodies, and so we assert ourselves through punishment to make ourselves feel better. (Location 2851)
Here’s how I see it: children whine when they feel helpless. I often use the formula whining = strong desire + powerlessness. (Location 2946)
So why are we so triggered by whining? It’s more than just the high pitch of our kids’ voices or the seemingly endless nature of their pleas. If whining represents helplessness, then you might be triggered if you grew up in a family where you had to shut down your vulnerability. If phrases like “Get yourself together!” or “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps!” or “Stop being a baby, come on, you can do this!” were common in your family, then there probably wasn’t much tolerance for your own helplessness. As a result, you may have learned to shut down this part of yourself. Now, when your child whines, it’s as if your body is saying, “Oh, I know what to do here, shut this down shut this down!” It reacts to your child as it learned to react to you. (Location 2949)
Kids also whine when they’re looking for connection, to indicate that they feel alone and unseen in their desires. And while our job as parents is to make decisions that we feel are right for our kids even in the face of protest, we can still practice understanding and connecting. (Location 2959)
This doesn’t mean you have to give in to your kids’ ridiculous demands, but the more you focus on those feelings underneath the surface and give them the connection they need, the less your children will whine. (Location 2962)
There’s one final reason kids whine, and it’s an important one: children are often looking for an emotional release, and whining is a sign that everything feels like too much—often it’s an (Location 2972)
We can look at this in two ways: that a child is “avoiding telling the truth” or that telling the truth feels so hard and scary that she slips into a world of pretend where she has control and can dictate an ending that feels better to her. (Location 3053)
When we start to look at lies in the framework of a child’s wish—her desire to retain control and change the ending—we see the lie not for its impact on us but as a sign of her need to feel safe and good inside. These are, after all, the needs that drive children all the time, and the ones that drive adults as well. When a child thinks her parent doesn’t see her as lovable and worthy, she’ll escape into a fantasy where that goodness is preserved. (Location 3055)
We think that by urging a child to think or feel a more “positive” way, we’re helping them, but children take in a much deeper message—that they’re not supposed to be feeling the way that they are, and that feeling nervous or shy or hesitant is wrong. This wires a child to have anxiety about the anxiety. It’s as if they’re wiring a belief that says, “I shouldn’t be feeling this way!” (Location 3186)
You cannot just “get rid” of anxiety. Anxiety can only be effectively managed by increasing our tolerance for it, allowing it to exist, and understanding its purpose. This makes space for other emotions to emerge, thereby preventing the anxiety from taking over. When we don’t try to fight off a feeling within us but rather acknowledge it while still functioning in our everyday lives, we create the opportunity for more peace within ourselves. A parent’s job, then, is 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. (Location 3189)
If we want our kids to develop frustration tolerance, we have to develop tolerance for their frustration. It’s an inconvenient truth, I know. Sometimes, when my child is really struggling with something, I remind myself that she’s looking at me and absorbing my relationship with her frustration, and this forms the foundation for her own relationship with her frustration. In other words, the more I’m okay with her struggling with a challenge—meaning I let her work it out rather than offering a solution—the more she will be okay with it. (Location 3384)
Beyond any strategy or script I offer in this chapter, the most impactful thing we can do with our kids is to show up in a calm, regulated, non-rushed, non-blaming, non-outcome-focused way—both when they are performing difficult tasks and when they are witnessing us perform difficult tasks. (Location 3389)
When you notice your child getting frustrated, instead of telling them, “Take a deep breath,” model it yourself. (Location 3422)
Remember: 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. (Location 3424)
Once you’ve established your set of values, talk about them often, especially when you’ve made a “mistake” or don’t know something. (Location 3453)
How can we unwind this negative cycle to establish food and mealtime patterns that feel better for the family system? I believe the answer begins with the pioneering work of dietitian, psychotherapist, and author Ellyn Satter, who created what’s known as the “Division of Responsibility” around eating. Here’s a quick summary of Satter’s framework: 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 What’s so powerful about Satter’s framework is that it allows for the development of healthy eating patterns but it also supports self-regulation, self-confidence, consent, and so much more. You may have noticed that Satter’s division of responsibility sounds quite similar to my family jobs principles from chapter 3. Just as I believe family systems work better when everyone knows their job, Satter believes a healthy relationship with food and with one’s body will emerge when there’s clarity in every family member’s role and when each of us “stays in our lane.” (Location 3520)
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. I’d start with, “Oooooh, I have an interesting question … ,” and then share some (but not all!) of the following: “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?” (Location 3700)
For me, confidence is not about feeling “good,” it’s about believing, “I really know what I feel right now. Yes, this feeling is real, and yes, it’s allowed to be there, and yes, I am a good person while I am feeling this way.” Confidence is our ability to feel at home with ourselves in the widest range of feelings possible, and it’s built from the belief that it’s okay to be who you are no matter what you’re feeling. (Location 3800)
Building confidence isn’t only about saying the “right” thing when things go “wrong” for our kids. It’s also about what we say when things go “right.” Because there is one type of commentary we often think will build confidence but actually gets in the way, and that’s praise. (Location 3823)
Plus, confidence cannot be built from external validation or praise. Sure, these comments feel good, but they never stick; rather, they disappear almost as quickly as they land, leaving us desperate for the next bit of praise so that we can feel good about ourselves again. This isn’t confidence … this is emptiness. (Location 3835)
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). In regard to your child’s sports team, for example, inside stuff might be her effort in practice, her attitude when winning and losing, and her willingness to try new things; outside stuff might be her number of goals or home runs, or labels like “most valuable player.” (Location 3861)
To help kids with perfectionistic tendencies, then, we want to show them how to separate what they are doing from who they are. This is what gives kids the freedom to feel good in the gray—to (Location 3918)
One more important note on perfectionism: parents should aim to help their kids see their perfectionism, not get rid of it. So many parents think they have to make their kids “not perfectionists,” but any time we shut down a part of a child (especially when we do so harshly), we’re sending the message that the part of them in question is bad or wrong. Instead, we want to help our kids get into a better relationship with their perfectionism, so that they can recognize it when it comes up rather than have it take over the control tower and dictate how they feel and what they do. After all, there are components of perfectionism—drive and strong-mindedness and conviction—that can feel really good, and we want to help our kids harness these traits without collapsing under the immense pressure perfectionism can add. (Location 3922)
I don’t know one DFK who says to a parent, “I often feel overwhelmed by my emotions and I worry that they overwhelm others—that’s why I enter into these intense fear/attack states. Please bear with me and hold steady so I can learn that I’m lovable and good and will be okay in this world.” No child can truly understand this (and, frankly, it would be hard for any adult to articulate this about themselves, either). And yet … remember these words. This is the core truth about our DFKs. (Location 4280)
