Your Kid is Good
Even when their behavior is hard.
Hard behavior can make good kids, and good parents, feel broken. Here is a more compassionate and useful place to begin.
There have been moments in my own parenting when I have looked at my child and thought, What is happening? And, if I’m being fully honest, moments when the next thought was, What am I doing wrong? Or possibly worse, What is wrong with her?
Hard behavior has a way of putting everyone’s character on trial.
Your child screams, hits, refuses, lies, melts down over the wrong color cup, orr somehow holds it together everywhere except with you. It is easy to start collecting evidence: They are aggressive. Manipulative. Disrespectful. And I am too permissive. Too reactive. Not consistent enough.
But labels don’t help us understand what happened. They just tell us who to blame.
The starting point for everything I believe about parenting is this: Your kid is good. And so are you.
That does not mean every behavior is okay. It means behavior is not a reliable verdict on who a person is, especially when that person has a developing brain and is under stress. The skills involved in pausing, shifting attention, remembering a rule and controlling an impulse develop over a long timeline, continuing through adolescence (1).
The same compassion belongs to parents. Parenting is emotionally demanding. Adults are asked to regulate themselves while helping another person regulate, often while tired, rushed, worried or carrying patterns they did not choose (2).
When I stopped asking, “Who is the problem?” I could ask better questions:
What is making this hard right now?
What skill or support is missing?
What is happening inside my child and inside me?
What boundary is still needed?
That shift is not an excuse for hard behavior. It is a doorway we can walk through to explore what else might be going on, and then get creative on what to do about it.
If today went badly, you do not have to begin with a new sticker chart, a stricter consequence or a promise to stay perfectly calm. Begin here:My child is good. I am good. Something was hard. Let’s get curious about what it was.
That is where useful change starts.
What changes when you assume your kid is good, and so are you?
Sources
