Book SummaryGood Inside, by Becky Kennedy

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Good Inside

Good Inside is a parenting manual that aims to help parents effect sustainable behavior changes in their children while building positive relationships with them. Most parenting advice sees children’s behavior as a problem that needs to be controlled through time-outs, chore charts, and stern conversations. However, Becky Kennedy—known simply as “Dr. Becky” by her followers—argues that these strategies jeopardize the positive connection between parents and children and don’t even work in the long term. They might change your child’s behavior in the short term, but they don’t deal with the root causes, so the problematic behaviors will come back.

Kennedy is a clinical psychologist and mother of three who’s amassed a large social media following by teaching young parents how to (and...

Good Inside Summary Section 1: Kennedy’s Parenting Principles

Kennedy’s parenting advice stems from one basic principle: you and your child are good people, even if you’re not doing well right now. This section explains how this principle informs Kennedy’s approach to parenting and the theoretical basis for her approach.

Kennedy’s Approach to Parenting

Kennedy’s key principle is an unshakeable belief that you and your child are good people at your core—you’re “good inside”—even when you’re struggling. If your child’s behavior is challenging or if you don’t like how you’re responding to her behavior, it doesn’t mean your child or you are bad. It means that you’re struggling and need help. (Shortform note: Kennedy’s belief that you and your child are good people even when you’re struggling goes against scarcity culture, which Brené Brown says is the belief that we’re never good enough. In The Power of Vulnerability, Brown’s prescription for overcoming this mindset is embracing vulnerability and accepting that you’re worthy of love and...

Good Inside Summary Section 2: Kennedy’s Essential Toolkit

To help you infuse those insights from theory into day-to-day parenting, Kennedy provides some essential parenting tools: boundaries, validation, empathy, connection, playfulness, and confidence building. These tools are foundational to the concrete strategies we’ll discuss later in this guide. This section will describe these tools, explain why they’re important, and give examples of how to use them.

Tool #1: Connection

Kennedy’s foundational tool is to take time to connect with your child when you’re both calm (not in the middle of a meltdown). Nurturing your connection with your child is important because when your child is behaving in a way you don’t like, it often stems from your child not feeling connected to you or from your child struggling with a feeling without an adult’s support.

Building connection makes it possible to:

• Change behavior. Kids who feel connected to their caregivers feel good about themselves because they feel loved, safe, and confident. Those positive feelings make it easier for them to engage in the behaviors you want them to show.
• Generate goodwill. This will help your child be willing to comply with your rules and...

Good Inside Summary Section 3: Common Parenting Challenges and What to Do About Them

Now that we’ve discussed how Kennedy’s approach to parenting works and what basic tools you need to apply it, we’ll explore 10 common parenting challenges. Kennedy suggests specific approaches for handling each challenge so that you can foster behavioral change without jeopardizing your connection to your child.

We’ve chosen to describe some of Kennedy’s most representative strategies when dealing with each challenge, but many strategies are applicable in more than one situation. For each challenge, we’ve highlighted strategies that apply Kennedy’s key tools: boundaries, empathy, validation, connection, playfulness, and confidence-building.

Challenge #1: Getting Your Child to Listen

Kennedy argues that if you believe your child doesn’t listen to you, the issue isn’t listening, but cooperating—in other words, your child isn’t complying with your requests. When your kid doesn’t cooperate, it’s likely because they’re feeling disconnected from you or because you’re asking them to do something they don’t want to do. The latter is the nature of parenting, but there are ways to make your requests less confrontational and more engaging. Yelling, for example, only makes...

Shortform Exercise: Apply Kennedy’s Strategies

Kennedy’s strategies can help you navigate your child’s challenging behaviors and make positive changes in the long-term.

What’s one of your child’s challenging behaviors you’d like to work on? How do you usually deal with it? For example, maybe your child is often whiny and the way you’ve been dealing with it is by taking screen time away whenever they whine.