Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be by Dr. Becky Kennedy

Most parenting books are about managing behaviour. Good Inside starts somewhere else: with the premise that a child is a good person having a hard time, and that the job is to address the hard time rather than punish the behaviour it produced.

What the book covers

• The two-things-are-true principle — holding a boundary and the child’s feelings at once
• Boundaries as something a parent sets for themselves, not something imposed on a child
• Repair after a rupture, and why it matters more than never losing your temper
• Building emotional regulation, frustration tolerance and resilience
• Specific chapters on tantrums, sibling rivalry, lying, whining, shyness, food refusal and separation anxiety
• Managing your own reactivity, including the parts of parenting that trigger your own childhood

Who it’s for

Parents of toddlers through early adolescence, particularly anyone trying to move away from how they were raised without falling into permissiveness. Practical rather than theoretical — most chapters end with scripts you can use the same day.

Edition details

• Author: Dr. Becky Kennedy
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Format: Paperback
• ISBN: 978-0063159488
• Language: English

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