★★★★★ 5
After all, chidren are good inside.
Format: Kindle
Parenting is about how parents treat their kids. One important aspect of what counts for good parenting is how we face the kids’ negative behaviors. When we were children, our parents did not respect our emotional needs. They only scolded us when we were naughty. After we become parents, we treat our kids the way our parents treated us. Dr Becky proposes in this book, contrary to what our parents thought, children are all good inside and thus we should treat children’s bad behaviors as if their misbehaviors are signs that they don’t know how to express their needs. With this assumption, there are three implications for parenting.
First, as children are good inside, what they do outside should not be our focus. Whether it is emotional tantrums, not listening, aggressive tantrums, sibling rivalry, rudeness and defiance, whining, lying, food habits, parents should not pay too much attention to it. Instead, parents should see the cause that contributes to the resulting negative behavior. Take whining as an example. Whining, according to a Cambridge dictionary, means ‘to make a long, high, sad sound’. As parents we are easily annoyed by whining and we quickly think that kids are disrespectful. In Dr Becky’s view, whining=strong desire+powerlessness. Children whine because they feel helpless and ‘indicate they feel alone and unseen in their desires’ (p.188), rather than because they are arrogant. What does this imply? Do we have to give in, knowing that they are desperate for connection and feeling powerful? The answer is no. Dr Becky said ‘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’. While saying no, which they probably know they do need, at the same time we can give them the sympathy they also need. Thinking that kids are bad inside often leads to power struggles or arguments when we request them to request in an appropriate tone again. Kids are good inside, and thus we should focus our attention on how to respond to their helplessness rather than their whines.
Secondly, not only should we not focus on their outside behavior, we should also be aware that what is on the surface often contrasts with what the kid feels inside. One of the most-feared emotions we are afraid to see children have is anger, also known as tantrums. When children are angry, they display undesirably violent behaviors such as hitting others. Dr Becky points out that they hit not because they are angry, but because they are scared. When we adults are afraid, we may also kill people if we are irrational. Children have not yet developed their prefrontal cortex which is responsible for logic and language, and so the most severe reaction they can possibly express is through tantrums. We may wonder why children are afraid: they are “terrified of the sensations, urges, and feelings coursing inside their body” (p.158) such as frustration and anxiety. These feelings which adults are used to feel scary to kids. Naming the right emotion is the first step to solving the problem and helping kids to cope with it.
Only after we identify correctly the emotion the children are experiencing can we as parents exert the right method to deal with the out-of-control behavior. Clearly we know reprimanding our kids is not correct because “they are good inside”. To stop the kid's aggressive tantrums effectively, parents should assert their authority. Parents should show the confidence that they are in charge of the situation. Then, the next critical step is to maintain the kid's safety. Regardless of how the kid feels, the parent should stop the dangerous behavior the kid is engaging in, which Dr Becky calls containment. She says it best: “kids don’t feel good when they are out of control”. That we assert our authority and contain even though kids are not happy on the surface is an act of love, maturity, and responsibility. If we don't, not only will it cause injury, it will make children think we evade responsibility, thus making them feel more overwhelmed.
To conclude, as parents we need to know our roles and our kids’ roles. Our job is to keep our children safe, both physically and psychologically. We need to remember that a gap exists between kids’ abilities to feel and their abilities to regulate their feelings, and the gap manifests as deregulated behavior. While it is children’s job to explore and express their feelings, it is our job to help them regulate them by setting physical boundaries, validating their emotions, and being empathetic to their feelings. We are our kids’ role models. We are demonstrating to our kids the emotion regulation skills. As our kids are allowed to shout and protest because they are doing their jobs, we are also allowed to upset them when we set boundaries. We just need to remember that to do our job well, we must learn to connect with and understand them more because after all, children are good inside.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2025
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