Great Inside!

How to navigate some very common parenting scenarios.

If any social media algorithm knows you are the parent of a young child, you have likely come across the advice videos by the very celebrated, smart child psychologist Dr. Becky Kennedy. She wrote a bestseller called “Good Inside” that was recommended to me by several Very Together mom friends and she currently has an Instagram following of 379 billion. We defer to her expertise between one and thirty times a day. Here is how I imagine she would handle the following scenarios:

I have a kid who is a typical Victorian ghost. She haunts, she leers, she floats through walls. And that's OKAY. Instead of screaming in terror and hiding under my bed, I let her know it's completely normal to have unfinished business! And it’s my job as her parent to help her finish it.

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I have a “parakeet” child. He has seemingly endless green feathers, a beak, and eats nothing but birdseed. There are times when he flies around the house and I feel like I’m never going to get him back safely on his small wooden perch in his cage. And I’ll be honest: I’ve lost my cool. I’ve yelled. I’ve screamed. I’ve tried to corner him on the ceiling with a broom. But that’s exactly what feeds his flight or flight response. And I find when I talk to him on his level and squawk it out, he actually listens. And that’s when I can gently offer two fingers and LET him climb onto them with his talons. Every time.

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I’ll be honest: When it’s that hour between dinner and bedtime and my kids are running around the house, shouting, and throwing Molotov cocktails, I can lose my cool. Between the noise and the gasoline-soaked rags bursting into flame, it’s easy to lose focus and snap. I’ve been there. But I find that ASKING about the separatist uprising they’re instigating is so much more effective than DEMANDING they disarm. When a child is in the middle of a political revolution, you can’t reason with them, but once they hear THEMSELVES rationalize their own violence against the state, they have that moment of clarity. And you go from there!