This 'parenting whisperer' is rethinking the way we raise our children

US ‘parenting whisperer’ Dr Becky Kennedy says sticker charts or time-outs do not work with children. Instead, we need to separate the negative behaviour from the child

Dr Becky Kennedy devotes a whole chapter of her book to the concept of ‘good inside’ — the assumption that we’re all (parents and children) good inside, that at our core we are compassionate, loving and generous

It takes just moments scrolling through Dr Becky Kennedy’s Instagram page to realise here is something refreshing, real, and relatable.

A clinical psychologist, author and mother-of-three, Kennedy has been named ‘The Millennial Parenting Whisperer’ by TIME magazine. She hosts Good Inside with Dr Becky, a chart-topping podcast with 13m plus downloads and has garnered over 1.6m followers on Instagram.

The Instagram posts she puts up are about real experiences: ‘I just yelled at my kids…now what?’ or ‘Why does whining trigger me so much? How can I make it stop?’

She talks a parent’s language, very often via videos that she records with her iPhone in her New York City apartment. In a post titled ‘Good parents spend time away from their kids’, she’s walking down a street.

Kennedy takes on tough parenting questions — ‘Why do kids lie?’ ‘How to avoid power struggles at mealtimes’ ‘How to handle sore losing’ – and delivers clear guidance, all in short episodes. This is because she knows parents are busy, strapped for time, so she gives them exact scripts, easily-digestible bite-sized snatches of wisdom.

Here’s an example of a takeaway nugget: your child asks ‘does this [outfit] look good on me?’ Kennedy posts: “Instead of saying ‘yes Sweetie, you look great’, share this: ‘Hmm….how does it feel? How something feels to you matters more than how it looks to others’.”

Kennedy is rethinking the way we raise our children. Her mission is to rewire parents and children and build closer parent-child relationships. Her book — Good Inside, A Practical Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be — is an initiation into a parenting model that’s as much about parental self-development as it is about child development.

She tells parents she won’t be recommending time-outs, sticker charts, punishments, rewards or ignoring as responses to a child’s challenging behaviour. After she became a mother — her children are now aged five, seven and 10 — she increased the parent guidance element of her private practice work. She did a training programme for clinicians that, she says, offered an ‘evidence-based, gold standard’ approach to discipline and troubling behaviour in a child.

But she couldn’t dismiss a “nagging suspicion” that the approaches offered by the programme weren’t the right ones to use with children. While they made logical sense, they focused on eradicating ‘bad’ behaviours and enforcing compliance at the expense of the parent-child relationship.

“Time-outs, for example, were encouraged to change behaviour... but what about the fact that they sent kids away at the exact moments they needed their parents the most? Where was the humanity,” she writes in her book.

Where’s the humanity?

Kennedy realised such approaches were built on principles of behaviourism, a theory of learning that focuses on observable actions rather than non-observable mental states like feelings, thoughts and urges. “Behaviourism sees behaviour as the whole picture rather than an expression of underlying unmet needs. This is why these ‘evidence-based’ approaches felt so bad to me — they confused the signal (what was really going on for a child) with the noise (behaviour).”

So Kennedy debunked the behaviour-first, compliance-as-the-goal model, saying its concepts are basically the same as those behind training animals. She believes this approach does nothing for children, who need to feel supported and connected as they learn to work through difficult feelings and situations. After all, she says, our goal isn’t to shape behaviour — our goal is to raise humans.

I ask Kennedy to give an example – using any typical, challenging parent-child situation — of her approach in action. From her New York base, she invites me to look at both the parent’s and the child’s behaviour. “We can look at the child’s behaviour as a clue to what the child might be struggling with, or what skills they might need. Or maybe what doesn’t feel great in their relationship with the parent.”

Dr Becky Kennedy debunked the behaviour-first, compliance-as-the-goal model, saying its concepts are basically the same as those behind training animals.

And then, she says, we can look at the parent, in terms of what triggers might be activated for them, or what coping skills the parent might need to lead the child through the difficult stage they’re in.

“For example, my child is whining a lot,” says Kennedy. “Maybe as a parent I’m yelling a lot. So I would look at what does the child want? Maybe the child is whining because they feel really helpless, or they really want my attention, or they really feel incapable of doing something for themselves.

“So if they’re always whining about getting water or ‘can you help me get dressed’, I can ask what type of skills would my child need to feel more capable in getting themselves water or in getting themselves dressed.”

The next crucial task, Kennedy says, is for the parent to ask themselves why they’re so triggered by their child’s whining. “Ask: what does helplessness, neediness, evoke in me? Maybe I grew up in a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps family... And I learned to shut down the part of myself that was helpless and needy — and then when I see this part in my child, I can’t see it as ‘oh, they need some skills’, I see it from the point-of-view of the same circuitry developed in my own body.

“So if I work on my triggers around helplessness and if I help my child feel more capable and connected with me, I’m going to be much more effective in working on whining than if I punish my child for whining, or just say ‘use your strong voice’.”

Sturdy communication

What Kennedy wants for parents is to be ‘sturdy’. A sturdy parent, she explains, is able to stay grounded through turbulence. “So if there’s turbulence happening — maybe whining, a tantrum, rudeness — as a parent I still have my feet on the ground, I can stay connected to myself, to what I need, to what’s going on for me and have my own boundaries.

“And I can connect to my child — which doesn’t mean I give my child all they want, but that I see them as a good kid having a hard time, not as a bad kid doing bad things.”

Kennedy devotes a whole chapter of her book to the concept of ‘good inside’ — the assumption that we’re all (parents and children) good inside, that at our core we are compassionate, loving and generous. We’re good inside — even when we call our child ‘a spoiled brat’. Even when our child roars ‘I hate you’, and throws something.

For Kennedy, holding this belief of internal goodness allows her to be curious about the why of ‘bad’ behaviour. It’s fundamental, she says, to her whole approach to parenting and parenting advice. “Because as soon as we tell ourselves ‘I’m good inside... my kid is good inside too’, we intervene differently than if we allowed our frustration and anger to dictate our decisions,” she explains.

Kennedy insists that seeing your child as good inside doesn’t excuse bad behaviour. Instead, she says understanding that we’re all good inside is what lets you distinguish a person (your child) from a behaviour (rudeness, hitting, for example).

“Differentiating who someone is from what they do is key to creating interventions that preserve your relationship, while also leading to impactful change. When you’re confident in your child’s goodness, you believe in their ability to behave ‘well’ and do the right thing. And as long as you believe they’re capable, you can show them the way,” she says.

To help find the ‘good inside’, Kennedy suggests asking ourselves one simple question: ‘What is my most generous interpretation of what just happened?’ Illustrating this on her Instagram page, she says: “When you think about your child hitting her brother, [think also] ‘she must be really angry about something and having a hard time regulating that’.”

She explains: “When we think about a generous interpretation, we intervene based on feeling we’re on the same team as our child – instead of seeing them as an adversary.”

Good Inside, a practical guide to becoming the parent you want to be, by Dr Becky Kennedy, Thorsons, €18.99.