'Your body is eager for re-wiring'

5 questions for psychologist, mother, and parenting expert Dr. Becky Kennedy

I have a small library of parenting books that I ordered in a frenzy when Maya was a toddler and having a particular tantrum-rich couple of weeks. I skimmed some of them and have never even cracked some. The sleep book is creased and marked up and probably has a few 2am tear stains. Since Stella, my youngest, was born, I don’t think I’ve ever even glanced at that pile.

It’s not that I don’t need help or have a lot of questions. (I mostly direct those over the backyard fence to my neighbor, an educational psychologist and author of Momspreading, who actually knows my kids and is funny as hell.) I find outside expertise on parenting underwhelming. Sure there are developmental stages and it’s helpful to know about them, but my lived experience of parenting can basically be summarized as: THIS TOO SHALL PASS. If I try to pin my kids and a strategy for their behavior down, I feel like I’m pinning a live butterfly. Why would I trust this random person more than my own instincts?

Which is all to say, when I cracked open Dr. Becky Kennedy’s new book, Good Inside, I was expecting to roll my eyes. Instead, I looked up from the couch an hour later and realized I was wet-eyed from all the wisdom. First of all, she reminds you that you are only as skillful at anything—parenting in particular—as you are aware of your insides. And even more, the more compassionate you are for your own learning curve, the better parent you will be.

What a relief! It’s not about saying something perfect, or remembering some unintuitive concept; it’s about noticing your own emotions and being compassionate towards yourself as you try to manage those on the journey of being in relationship with a little person. That sounds hard, but actually do-able and right and honest. I was excited to get the chance to ask Dr. Becky, this sneak attack, some questions and share the answers with you…

Courtney Martin: I got to admit, I don't usually read parenting books, but yours sucked me in. I love that the foundational learning is not about shaping our kids in a particular way, but about returning to our own organic shape--fundamentally good, accepting, and present. It's the simplest thing in the world, and of course, the hardest. Can you talk about effort? I feel like this book is, in a way, saying to parents: Stop trying so damn hard and just be. But, of course, the quest to know and heal thyself takes no small amount of effort. 

Dr. Becky: You know, I do think the quest to know and heal thyself takes a lot of effort. We’re talking about a re-wiring process. We start the parenting journey thinking a lot about our kids and their behavior, and what we need to change them. But what happens…is a really big framework shift to: “Of course I need to help my kids, but really I’m seeing how that process begins with myself, the things that I want to work on with my own ability to stay calm in the midst of chaos, building my own sturdy leadership skills.” Without that we won’t be able to use any of the interventions with our own kids unless we start with putting a decent amount of effort towards our own coping skills. As we build our own coping skills that’s what gives us access to the strategies and interventions that we want to work with, with our kids.

I think that journey takes effort, it does, and we start to see the benefits of that as soon as we start doing that work…Your body is eager for that re-wiring.

You write, “Our kids should not dictate our boundaries and we should not dictate their feelings.” That was kind of a revelation for me. Can you say more about this? 

This is the essence of what I call family jobs in any system that we operate in. A workplace is a system. A family is a system. I’m not the first person to say this. In any system, we need to know our jobs. If we don’t know what our job is, we can’t know if we did our job well.

In my chapter on family jobs I describe a parents’ job as setting boundaries, which involves making decisions and keeping kids safe, and validating and empathizing with our kids feelings. Which really involves helping a kid feel real and loved.

What is our kids’ job? To experience and express their feelings so they can experience all the feelings in childhood that they will inevitably feel in adulthood.

If we think about a really day-to-day interaction: we say to our kids, you have one more TV show. My boundary is that decision. I might even get some empathy and validation in ahead of time: I know it might be hard to turn it off when the time is right. I sometimes have trouble turning off TV, too. Now my kid ends the TV show and they start crying. Our boundary is separate from our kids’ feelings. Often as parents we confuse the two. We think: I set a good boundary, my kid should be calm. Or we think, because my kid is crying, the boundary must have been wrong. Then we say, “Okay, you can have another show.” We’re changing our minds. We’re changing our boundaries, because of a kids’ feelings.

Family jobs can help us: I’m allowed to say no more TV and my kid is allowed to cry. I can empathize with my kids’ feelings and still hold my boundary.

One of the biggest take-aways of the book for me was: it only takes 15 mins of 1:1 time with a kid to make them feel connected and seen. Importantly, that's 15 minutes of undivided attention (i.e. put your cell phone in another room) and enter into their world, rather than dictating what the two of you do. What sort of research is out there that confirms this is all it takes? And how do parents with a lot of kids swing this? I only have two and it feels hard to carve out. Is this why we need aunties and uncles and amazing neighbors -- does their 15 minutes count just as much? 

Special time is not something that I invented or created, not my original idea. When you think about it, it’s pretty intuitive. Giving anybody in your life undivided attention, undistracted attention, uninterrupted attention is a way of saying to them, “You matter. You have value and our relationship matters and I like being with you.”

I say this a lot and this is true for my family, too. We have never had so many opportunities to be distracted from our kids. Most of the time our kids see us—and I put myself in this bucket; I’m not above this—there is literally a phone in between us and them, a barrier to our connection.

There is nothing kids want as much as being connected to their parents. They don’t say it, but it’s the basis of attachment. What gets in the way of distraction? Our phones. The list of things we have to do. This is not a guilt trip, but it means as often as possible, have this special time with your kid. Join their world for 10 minutes. Put down your phone. Don’t ask questions. Just enter their world and pay attention.

I write a lot about the ways in which White, privileged parents make choices for their individual kids that hurt the collective pursuit of justice. I am sort of amazed at how anxious White parents can be about their children, who technically are the most structurally set up for success. Why do you think this is? 

This is such an important question and I know I don’t have a full answer. I think we all feel things in the world we live in. We feel things before we think things, independent of logic. So when you’re talking about white privileged parents, there’s a lot of optionality. With wealth and privilege comes options. It’s a principle of anxiety that we have more options we have more anxiety. A different perspective is, “Oh you have so many options, you shouldn’t be anxious.”

Anxiety exists with uncertainty. We don’t have anxiety about problems. We actually have anxiety about worries. We have plenty of other feelings about problems—fear, threatened. Anxiety exists when we have some amount of uncertainty, and with wealth and privilege there is a huge amount of optionality, and with optionality, we have a lot of uncertainty. I wonder if that’s part of this equation?

Sometimes my dad will look over at me and just say, “Court, you're such a good mom.” And I feel like crying immediately. I realize that most of us don't get a lot of feedback no our parenting, even though it's something we spend so much damn time on, agonize over, care about so much. Do you have ideas for how we could change that, culturally speaking? 

There is nothing more powerful than someone seeing our internal goodness, especially people who can see our internal goodness under our less than ideal behavior. This is the ultimate human experience that we are all looking for. Someone who sees, ‘I’m a good parent even though you see me having a hard time. I’m a good partner even though I get frustrated. I’m a good employee even though I had a tough week last week.’

That goes to one of my core ideas which is that when your kids are struggling, they’re not bad kids doing bad things. They are good kids having a hard time.

Parents need community. This was literally what motivated us to found the Good Inside community. We made all these workshops, and I love our workshops. And yet, people said I love this workshop. I watch it. But it’s just me alone in my house watching this video. Watching content, learning and feeling alone, does not lead to collective change. Learning and feeling connected is the formula for change.

Parents need resources and the kind of support people doing other important jobs get. And they need each other, that modern village, that community to make learning and change and growth possible.

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That last answer made me happy because I kind of feel like that’s what we’re up to here, at Examined Family — learning together and staying connected. Whether you’re a parent of a young kid, or an old kid that you will always see as young, or an amazing auntie or just a thoughtful person moving through the world, thanks for being in community with us. And spread the word to others who might find solace here!

And don’t forget to buy your copy of Good Inside through the Examined Family bookshelf at Bookshop.